Donkeys and Horses

🍂 Hello! Happy Friday from New York. Somehow, September is here.

Ben Dhiman of the USA and Blandine L’Hirondel of France were crowned champions of the grueling 100-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc last weekend, finishing in 18 hours 16 minutes and 21 hours 54 minutes, respectively.

“As much as I wanted to win, I don’t necessarily do this to win,” Dhiman told iRunFar after his victory. “I do this because I like the pursuit — the doing.”

📫 Today: the magic of ultramarathoning

As ever, please get in touch with ideas, tips and feedback.

After a stunning performance at ultrarunning’s de facto world championships, Ruth Croft explained her strategy in the simplest of terms: start like a donkey, and finish like a horse.

Croft, a star ultra athlete from New Zealand, finished second at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) in 2024. After a challenging start, she clawed her way through the front of the pack to seal the best performance by a Kiwi in the history of the race. The next year, she won.

On the start line in Chamonix last week, Ferdinand Airault borrowed Croft’s mantra.

UTMB is notoriously brutal: a 170-kilometer slog and 10,000-meter climb through France, Switzerland and Italy around Mont Blanc, one of the tallest mountains in Europe.

Last year Airault, a Frenchman based in New York City, spent the first few hours in the top 30 before his race took a turn. He faded, and finished in 62nd place. “I cooked myself early,” he recalled.

“This year, I did the exact opposite,” he said. Sick with a cold in the days before the race, having spent months grappling with a foot injury, he was “incredibly conservative” in the early stages.

While he passed the first checkpoint in 187th place, more than a dozen followed. Before long Airault had climbed to 75th. “Chasing people down instead of just surviving is a vastly better experience,” he recalled. He continued to chase.

Airault continued to claw his way towards the front, cutting his rest time at checkpoints down from 29 minutes last year to 23 minutes. “But when I was in the checkpoints, I made it count,” he said, describing how he completely changed clothes, reset his gear and tried to reduce his heart rate. “Taking that calm, ‘exogenous time’ to care for myself paradoxically made me much faster on the trail.”

He might not have started like a donkey, but he certainly finished like a horse. Having tackled the early downhills cautiously, saving his quads from fatigue, Airault was able to pick up the pace during flat stretches and slight inclines in the latter stages.

He pulled forward to 25th place, returning to Chamonix to cross the finish line in 21:44:37.

Airault, who performs magic when off the trails, notes that the French term for a magic trick is un tour de magie – not unlike ultra tour du Mont Blanc.

“An ultra really is like a magic trick: it looks entirely impossible from the outside,” he said. “But if you embrace the environment, dial in the steps, and let the energy of the crowd carry you, you prove that anyone who finishes this ‘tour’ is a bit of a magician.”

After so many great dispatches and features from UTMB over the past week, another landed in my inbox this morning: Raziq Rauf interviewed Dhiman about his Indian heritage, and the example his victory sets for South Asian athletes, in what remains a very white sport.

Three pieces worth your time this weekend…

💭 Ultramarathoners train for months, sometimes years. What happens when they don’t finish? • Writing in the Guardian, Jane Davies explores how to handle coming up short – and why not finishing does not mean failing

📸 To photograph UTMB, brace yourself for the Chamonix all-nighter • Publishing a series of glorious shots from last weekend in Trail Runner, Andy Cochrane describes what it takes to photograph the world’s most storied ultramarathon

🤖 A robot beat Usain Bolt’s world record. Should we be impressed? • Yan Zhuang reports for The New York Times on the humanoid that ran faster than Bolt over 100 meters, and slammed full speed into a wall