Legendary races

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.

The UTMB's loop around Mont Blanc remains the absolute benchmark: 170 kilometres and almost 10,000 metres of climbing around the roof of Europe. Western States, in California, invented the 100-miler in 1974 and is still the hardest to qualify for. The Hardrock 100 climbs above 4,000 metres in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, on old miners' trails. The Tor des Géants loops the Aosta Valley in a single 330-kilometre push. The Diagonale des Fous crosses Réunion from the coast to the volcanoes, and the Barkley Marathons, in Tennessee, has counted only around twenty finishers in forty years.

From these lines that few have followed to the end, Plotrek makes a poster: each legendary route becomes a topographic map to frame.