Iconic trails of the world

Some races do more than exist: they wrote the rules of modern ultra-trail running. Born between the 1970s and the 2000s, driven by visionaries rather than federations, they set the distance, the climbing and the demands that the rest of the calendar has copied ever since. You run them once in a lifetime, or you watch them from the streets of Chamonix or Olympic Valley — and that is enough to understand what a legendary race is.

Here, a race is no longer measured in hours but in days. Great traverses set their own pace: you sleep little, you sometimes navigate alone, and the terrain — pass, ridge, bog — dictates your speed far more than the watch. Adventure and self-reliance come before the clock, and simply reaching the finish is already a victory.

A volcano shapes a landscape of its own: regular cones, collapsed calderas, lava flows frozen in matt black. Running volcano trails means moving across ground that is young on the geological scale, often bare and mineral, where the slope suddenly steepens near the summit and the surface changes texture with every band of altitude. Here the relief tells a short story — barely a few tens of thousands of years, when the neighbouring ranges count in millions.

The desert strips away everything that is not essential: shade, water, familiar landmarks. Desert trails are often run self-supported, with a pack weighing several kilos, under a sun that leaves no margin for error. What remains is an open 360-degree horizon, a mineral silence and a kind of purity few other terrains offer — every dune, every canyon becomes a landmark in its own right.

The Alps remain the historic heart of trail running: this is where the sport took its modern shape, between hanging glaciers, 2,500-metre passes and climbs that sometimes exceed 10,000 metres in a single race. Alpine trails cross four countries and a variety of relief — Mont Blanc granite, Italian dolomite, Valais schist — rarely matched anywhere else.

Lower than the Alps, the Pyrenees make up for it with the wild, cross-border character of their trails. From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, Pyrenean trails cross valleys that still see few visitors, between France, Spain and Andorra, on steep relief where the ridges change name at every border and the mountain huts can still be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Away from the high mountains, French relief reinvents itself in every region. French trails cross landscapes with no obvious common ground — windswept Breton moors, the limestone causses of the Massif Central, the ridges of the Vosges, Corsican maquis, the blind valleys of the Jura — and it is this very diversity, more than altitude, that defines French trail running.

The whole continent is a playground for trail running, from rain-soaked Britain to the fjords of Scandinavia, from the still little-documented Balkans to sun-drenched southern Italy. European trails share one thing: a density of relief and cultures that changes every few hundred kilometres, with hardly any climate repeating itself from one range to the next.

North America shaped modern ultra-trail running as much as the Alps did: the first 100-milers were born in the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. North American trails also cover the Appalachians, older and more densely wooded, and the forests of Quebec, where winter sometimes arrives as early as autumn.

Asia alone holds the extremes of trail running: the highest summits on earth in the Himalayas, the aesthetic rigour of Japan, the immensity of China, the humidity of Southeast Asia. Asian trails often impose altitude, heat or both, on paths shaped over centuries by local people, long before the word "trail" arrived.

Oceania sets two faces of trail running side by side: the southern alpine ranges of New Zealand, carved by glaciers, and the wild coasts of Australia, where eucalyptus replaces fir. Oceania's trails are often run far from everything, in a nature that has evolved in isolation for millions of years, away from the great migrations that shaped the relief of other continents.

Africa offers trail running contrasting relief: the Twelve Apostles above Cape Town, the highlands of Madagascar, the snow-capped summits of Morocco's Atlas. African trails often combine spectacular nature with local cultures very present along the course, far from Alpine trail standards, on ranges still little documented by Western guidebooks.

The climbs and stages that write cycling history — Tourmalet, Galibier, Alpe d'Huez, Ventoux. The Tour de France stage by stage, and the roads amateur riders take on all summer. Profiles everyone recognises at first glance: exactly what makes a good topographic poster.

The great city marathons, from the official course to the title block: New York, Chicago, London, Valencia, Rome, Tokyo. Each poster is drawn with a pen, line by line, with your name and time, in A4, A3 or A2.

The half marathons that fill whole cities: Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Valencia, Cardiff, Gothenburg. The same pen-drawn poster as for a marathon, your name and time at the foot, in A4, A3 or A2.

The great trails walked over several days, from hut to hut: GR20, Tour du Mont Blanc, Kungsleden, Laugavegur, West Highland Way. No race bib here — the whole relief, drawn with a pen, line by line, with your dates at the foot, in A4, A3 or A2.