Fast Women: Experience pays off for Ruth Croft at UTMB
Sifan Hassan, Audrey Werro also earn big wins.
Issue 370, sponsored by Bakline
Ruth Croft, Joyline Chepngeno, and Martyna Mlynarczyk are victorious at UTMB
On Saturday in Chamonix, France, New Zealand’s Ruth Croft made history by becoming the first woman to win all three UTMB World Finals. After winning CCC (100K) in 2015 and OCC (55K) in 2018 and 2019, she completed the set by winning UTMB in 22:56:23. This year, the course—about 174K (108 miles) with roughly 10,000m of climbing—was shortened slightly due to the weather.
Croft took second to Katie Schide at UTMB a year ago and felt like she might have finished with too much in the tank. This year, she decided to go for it earlier, and she was hitting her target splits until the weather took a turn overnight. Then her focus became surviving the night.
Back in May, Croft went into Transvulcania, a 73K (45-mile) race in the Canary Islands as the favorite. But racing in heavy wind and rain, she had to drop out due to hypothermia. She learned from that experience. As the runners navigated their way through rain, sleet, and snow on Friday night, Croft took the time to make sure she was staying warm and well fueled. “I didn’t want to DNF because of something that I had control over,” Croft said on The Freetrail Podcast.
Her strategy paid off. The following morning, 15 hours and 15 minutes into the race, Croft passed three-time UTMB champion Courtney Dauwalter and took the lead for good. Croft won by 32 minutes and earned €20,000 (about $23,000). France’s Camille Bruyas took second (23:28:48), and Germany’s Katharina Hartmuth finished third (24:16.39).
Lauren Puretz was the top U.S. finisher, taking eighth in 24:54:57. Dauwalter, who has won almost all the ultras she has finished over the past six years, struggled mightily, but she stayed in the race, and maintained her sense of humor and appreciation for the fans. She gradually slipped back through the field but managed to hang on to a 10th-place finish, in 25:50:38.
OCC was one of my favorite races at UTMB this year. In her ultra debut, Joyline Chepngeno became the first Kenyan to win a UTMB World Final. She had a tight battle with China’s Miao Yao throughout and won by only 70 seconds, 5:34:03 to 5:35:13.
OCC is usually about 55K, but due to heavy rain, the race organizers decided in advance to delay the start by two hours and cut out certain portions of the course for safety reasons. The result was a roughly 61K race (38 miles) with 3,400 meters of climbing—a bit longer than usual, but also a slightly less challenging route.
The changes contributed to several mishaps on the course. Less than two hours into the race, Chepngeno and Yao had opened a bit of a gap over the rest of the field when Switzerland’s Judith Wyder and Spain’s Sara Alonso, then in third and fourth, got stuck at a train crossing that wouldn’t have been part of the original course. It’s hard to say if that affected the outcome of the race, but it certainly put the top two at an advantage. Around the same time, when the lead runners arrived at an aid station, there was no water available, which is one of the worst mistakes an endurance event can make.
Wyder ended up third (5:38:22), Switzerland’s Maude Mathys moved up to fourth (5:45:43), and Alonso finished fifth (5:50:26).
Chepngeno earned €13,000 for the win (roughly $15,000) and this could be an important turning point for ultrarunning. Until recently, there has been little prize money in the sport. Trail runners make the bulk of their income through sponsorship deals, with brands making the decisions about who to support. And some within the ultrarunning community have intentionally excluded Kenyan runners in particular.
It’s been clear that Kenya and Ethiopia, who tend to have the top endurance runners in the world at shorter distances, could be a major factor in ultrarunning with the right support. And while that support still is not widespread, Chepngeno’s win could be the start of something. At the end of her post-race interview on The Freetrail Podcast, Chepngeno said that in the future, she wants to be a professional runner, and it made me wonder how much support she’s getting from her Salomon-sponsored team now.
I loved this footage of Chepngeno briefly running alongside Dauwalter during UTMB. The two have a Salomon connection and Chepngeno told Freetrail that it was Dauwalter who encouraged her to run OCC.
CCC, a 100K race with 6,100m of climbing, took place in better conditions, and the women’s race was a thriller. After 11 hours of racing, at the last aid station, with 7.1K to go, only 45 seconds separated the top three runners. Poland’s Martyna Mlynarczyk won the race in 11:41:55, the second-fastest time ever run on this course, and Norway’s Sylvia Nordskar took second, only 18 seconds back. Spain’s Anna Tarasova took third in 11:44:18. Americans Lotti Brinks (sixth), Robyn Lesh (seventh), and Allison Baca (10th) finished inside the top 10. (Edit: Apparently Brinks represents Germany, but UTMB had her listed as representing the U.S.)
Romania’s Madalina Florea won ETC, a 15K race with 1,200m of climbing, in 1:30:55. And Careth Arnold of the U.S. won TDS, a 148K (92-mile) race with 9,300m of climbing, in 22:58:52.
UTMB and trail running in general continues to grow in popularity. There’s still more money in road and track racing, but the sport is doing a lot of things right. First, despite the logistical challenges, UTMB’s coverage is really good. And if I want to learn more about any of the top finishers in the races, there are multiple places I can go to listen to interviews. I also appreciate that there’s more emphasis on the accomplishment of finishing in the top 10, compared to what we see at road marathons.
I also think that trail running benefits from having fewer rules. Almost anyone can run alongside a UTMB champion for a while, there’s far less crowd control, and no one cares how many logos an ultrarunner has on their body. Most trail races can accommodate only a limited number of runners, so it’s going to be tough for the sport to grow in certain ways, but from a distance, it looks like they’re doing a lot of things well. (UTMB recap video | OCC recap video | CCC recap video | Results)
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Audrey Werro comes up big, and a strange mix-up at the Diamond League Final
Switzerland’s Audrey Werro, 21, is on a roll. On Thursday, she ran one of the best races of her career, holding off Great Britain’s Georgia Hunter Bell to win the 800m at the Diamond League final, 1:55.91 to 1:55.96. Both broke 1:56 for the first time.
Werro ran up front throughout the race. Meanwhile, Hunter Bell was in fifth place, boxed in, with 200m to go. But once she got out, she ran half a second faster than anyone else over the final 100m. Hunter Bell caught Werro with about 20 meters to go, but to Werro’s credit, she responded well enough to narrowly hang on to the win in front of the home crowd.
Eight days earlier, Werro finished second to Great Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson at the Lausanne Diamond League Meet. Four days after that, she front-ran her way to a national record at the Swiss Championships, lowering her record and personal best from 1:57.25 to 1:56.29. And on Thursday, she lowered it by another 0.38 seconds. She’s a strong medal contender heading into the world championships.
Had this race played out slightly differently, Hunter Bell could have won it. She’ll go into Tokyo as a medal contender as well. France’s Anaïs Bourgoin took third (1:56.97) and St. Vincent’s Shafiqua Maloney finished fourth in a national record of 1:57.29. Addy Wiley, the lone American in the field, finished eighth of eight in 1:59.14.
The most bizarre race of the meet was the 3,000m, which Ethiopia’s Fantaye Belayneh won in 8:40.56, but fellow Ethiopian Aleshign Baweke got all the credit in the moment, because the pair accidentally swapped bibs (LetsRun link) in advance of the race. Even the results were initially wrong.
Josette Andrews led going into the homestretch for the final time, but Belayneh caught her soon after. Andrews ran a strong race, holding on well to take second in 8:40.95. Because Belayneh wasn’t already on Ethiopia’s world championship team, she earned herself a spot in the 5,000m at worlds. This was a Diamond+ event, so Belayneh earned $50,000 for her win, compared to $30,000 in most events. Even with the great prize money, it’s interesting how many of the top athletes chose to skip this race.
The 1500m looked like it was going to be pretty straightforward, with Australia’s Jessica Hull following the rabbit to a fast time. By the 1000m mark, she and Kenya’s Nelly Chepchirchir had separated themselves from the rest of the field. And on the final lap, Hull began to pull away from Chepchirchir.
But with a little less than 200 meters to go, things got interesting. The first sign was that the pace lights started to get away from Hull. But she was still moving well and looked like she had enough of a lead that she would be okay. But with about 50 meters to go, she really started tying up. Chepchirchir, who was also struggling due to the fast early pace, was hardly flying. She ran her last 200m in 33.6, but that was enough to nip Hull at the line, 3:56.99 to 3:57.02. Hull said afterward that she thinks she will feel a lot better once she backs off training a bit, but leading into this race, the focus was on worlds.
The front duo slowed enough that the chase pack almost caught them. Australia’s Linden Hall finished third in 3:57.44, Sinclaire Johnson was fourth (3:57.80), and Heather MacLean was fifth (3:59.43).
The steeplechase was one of the least dramatic races of the day. Kenya’s Faith Cherotich was the only athlete to follow the pacer. She was never challenged, winning in 8:57.24. Only one of the nine finishers ran a season’s best, and Courtney Wayment was the top American, finishing fourth in 9:14.91. (800m replay | 3,000m replay | 1500m replay | Steeplechase replay | Results)
Sifan Hassan earns her third World Marathon Major title
I originally planned to make the Sydney Marathon the top story this week, given that this was the race’s first year as a World Marathon Major. But the coverage was so poor that there’s not much to say about the race itself. From afar, Sydney looked like a great event. But I still think that in order to be a World Marathon Major, races need to commit to a certain level of TV coverage, and that should include attempting to give equal air time to the women’s race.
Usually when the TV coverage is bad, I rely on the live results, but those were pretty terrible, too. This may have just been a FloTrack error, but in the U.S., the broadcast did not have commentary until 76 minutes into the race. I usually love watching major marathons, but this one had me finding other projects to focus on to pass the time.
It can’t have been cheap to bring Sifan Hassan in for this race, so it’s wild to me that the broadcast didn’t treat the women’s race like a sporting event. Near the end of the race, we saw the lead women around 31K, and then not again until 30 minutes later. Hassan, of the Netherlands, had already broken away and was less than five minutes from the finish at that point. A lot of big marathons stagger the men’s and women’s starts, and that often allows for more coverage of both races. In Sydney, everyone started together. The broadcaster had the ability to split the screen, but they didn’t use it much.
Hassan hit halfway in 1:10:01, and ran the second half in 1:08:21. Her winning time, 2:18:22, is the fastest ever in Australia. And Kenya’s Brigid Kosgei finished only 34 seconds back, in second. There was a larger gap back to last year’s winner, Workenesh Edesa of Ethiopia, who was third in 2:22:15.
Hassan now has wins at three of the seven World Marathon Majors, having also won both London and Chicago in 2023.
Running her second marathon, Leanne Pompeani finished seventh in 2:24:47 to win the Australian championship. She nearly went down at the finish as an error with the finish tape meant that she had to hurdle it. Last year, things got ugly when Lisa Weightman was left off of Australia’s Olympic marathon squad, but it was nice to see the top Australians put that behind them on Sunday. Weightman, and Jessica Stenson, who did make the team, hugged at the finish line.
Susannah Scaroni won the wheelchair race in 1:44:52. She now has six World Marathon Major wins in four different cities: Chicago (2022), New York City (2022, 2024), Boston (2023, 2025), and Sydney (2025). Deena Kastor, 52, returned to the city where she ran her first Olympic Games and negative-split a 3:40:20 marathon. (Results)
Other News
Things already weren’t looking good for Grand Slam Track, but the reporting Adam Crofton did for The Athletic last week could be the nail in the coffin for the league. According to the piece, when Grand Slam Track announced in June 2024 that it had secured more than $30 million in financial commitments, they had received only $13 million at that point, with Winners Alliance having an option, but no obligation, to invest an additional $19 million. They also had a preliminary non-binding term sheet with Eldridge, an asset management company, that could have been worth $40 million, but after attending the Kingston slam, Eldridge decided not to invest in the league. Johnson told people the change in Grand Slam Track’s finances was related to the global economic landscape, but according to the article, Eldridge had concerns about Grand Slam’s business model. The details included in the article are quite damning, and reveal that the league’s founder, Michael Johnson, repeatedly misled people, while claiming he was being transparent. Grand Slam Track succeeding would have been a major win for the sport, but instead, they’ve made things worse for the athletes. I am having an increasingly difficult time seeing how they could come back from this. And I can’t imagine who would want to invest in a league that is already $14 million in debt.
I learned about Stephanie Reents’ new novel, We Loved to Run, via The Sweat Lookbook last week. The book came out on Tuesday, and by that evening, I had listened to the whole thing. Fiction about running always makes me nervous, because it’s easy to get the details of the sport wrong, which I find to be distracting. But it was obvious right away that like the women in the book, Reents had run cross country at a small New England college in the 1990s. (And I’d say about 95 percent of the details were accurate or plausible.) The book takes place at Frost College, and though it’s a fictional place, I grew up two miles away from a place that resembles it an awful lot, to the point that I recognized some of the running routes and the landmarks around town, which was fun. Everyone will get different things out of this book. I probably spent too much time focusing on what I did and didn’t recognize. But the book also made me think about my own collegiate running experience, as well as the lessons college coaches and institutions have learned since the 1990s, and the areas where there’s still room to grow.
This didn’t take long. Following the announcement that the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships were ending after 45 years, Brooks and Fleet Feet announced that they have partnered to create a very similar sounding meet. The planning is still in the early stages, but Ken Stone has more details on how this quickly came together. Two past Foot Locker champions, Julia Stamps Mallon and Jorge Torres, are involved in the effort, as is Sound Running.
Taylor Dutch caught up with Molly Seidel for Runner’s World. Seidel, who remains unsponsored, told Dutch that she has some good momentum at the moment, and she’s not necessarily planning to go “balls to the wall” at the New York City Marathon, but rather get back in the swing of things. “I would love to prove to myself that I can be a better athlete when I’m healthy, happy, and doing things in a way that respects your body. I want to show people that it’s possible,” Seidel said. “And it might not be, like this is all a fun experiment but at the end of the day, I have a fucking Olympic medal, so I have nothing to prove.”
Two anonymous Canadian athletes spoke to Doug Harrison about the trouble they have encountered while attempting to meet today’s sex testing deadline, which has been imposed by World Athletics. “As an athlete, it feels manipulative,” one of them said. “World Athletics is taking advantage of the passion we have for this sport, knowing we're going to do whatever they say to be eligible.”
FloTrack captured an impressive workout from Lexy Halladay-Lowry. At the end, she ran 1600m at altitude in 4:27.
Former NC State runner Sam Bush has signed with Adidas.
The Atlanta Track Club announced a new strategic plan last week and one of the organization’s goals is to build a world class indoor facility (scroll to the last two pages) in Atlanta.
Additional Results
Ethiopia’s Tsige Teshome won the Millicent Fawcett Mile at Scotland’s Monument Mile Classic, running 4:26.79. Great Britain’s Megan Keith finished a close second in 4:26.85. Taryn Rawlings was the top American in the field, finishing fourth in 4:28.34. (Results)
The Monmouth Mile didn’t actually include an elite women’s mile, but there was an 800m, which Olivia Baker won in 2:00.14. I was surprised to see a 2:12 next to Ajee’ Wilson’s name and wondered if she fell, but watching the replay, the pack caught her around 500m in and she faded from there. This race aside, she has had a really solid season. (Results)
After breaking her arm in a freak accident earlier this season, Kayley DeLay mostly focused on flat races this year. But she opted to end her season with her first steeplechase of the year, and she ran 9:28.39 in windy and rainy conditions for the win at England’s Manchester International meet. (Results)
Paige Wood won Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley Run, a 10-mile race, in 52:56. (Results)
Podcast Highlights
Nikki Hiltz is always a good interview and they were on both the Citius Mag and Podium Athletics podcasts last week. On Citius, which had the most recent update, Hiltz said that they need to reach out to Elle St. Pierre before Kick comes out, because the film really hypes up their rivalry. The Podium interview was more of a zoomed out look at Hiltz’s career. Hiltz said it would be great to get the American record in the 1500m, but “I’m looking past it. I’m looking for low 3:50s because that’s what it takes to be really competitive in the 1500m right now.” And it made me laugh when host Hannah England said that when she used to race people who were clearly better than her, she would tell herself, “But they might have food poisoning.”
Emily Venters was good on the Ali on the Run Show. I appreciated her opening up about her experience with OCD and sharing that when she signed her pro contract, she cried, because she wasn’t sure that going all-in on running was the right decision for her. Both within this episode and elsewhere, I’ve always appreciated her openness.
All three members of the U.S.’s world championships marathon squad, Susanna Sullivan, Erika Kemp, and Jess McClain, were on I’ll Have Another together. It was interesting to hear them discuss the fact that collectively, they do not run nearly as much as some top marathoners. But also relevant, two of the three are also balancing other jobs.
I enjoyed learning more about Anne Flower, who recently broke the 31-year-old course record at the Leadville 100 on The Trail Network Podcast. She’s an ER doctor who took up running when she was in medical school, and she didn’t even know what the Leadville course record was for most of the race. She was also on Trail Society last week, where she entered at the 10:30 mark.
It was fun to hear from 1987 Foot Locker champion Kira Jorgensen Abercromby and 1994 champ Julia Stamps Mallon on the Mr. Rubio Used to Run podcast from Running Warehouse. (There’s also a YouTube version.) They reflected on their running careers, talked a bit about what they’re up to now, and I appreciated their thoughts on raising kids who run, using the lessons they’ve learned from their own experiences.
Val Constien and her partner, Kyle Lewis, now have a podcast called Spiked and Psyched. It’s not available on a lot of podcast players at the moment, but it is on Spotify. Constien talked about her season, which wasn’t what she wanted, and said that she dropped out of the Lausanne Diamond League steeplechase—the one that was run in a downpour—because she had some sort of asthma attack.
Additional Episodes: Annie Frisbie on For the Long Run (It was interesting to hear her say the first race where she tried bicarb was this year’s Boston Marathon, and fortunately it worked out well.) | Colleen Quigley answered runners’ questions on The Runna Podcast | On Unexpected Curves, filmmaker Jac’leen Smith discussed the project she is crowdfunding, which is inspired by her experience as a track athlete | Maggi Congdon on The Running Effect
The USATF 20K Championships take place this morning in New Haven, Connecticut. The race has attracted a solid field, it starts at 8:30 a.m. ET, and it will stream live on USATF TV (subscription required). And it looks like the results will be here.
A massive thanks to Bakline for sponsoring Fast Women this month. If you find yourself in Brooklyn, make sure to check out their flagship store.
I hope you all have the best week possible.
Alison
Just ordered a copy of the book you mentioned, thanks!