330 km, more than 24,000 m of climbing, a 150-hour limit: two Vietnamese runners finish Tor des Géants

For many years covering athletics, I have learned that the most memorable moments rarely happen at the starting line. They happen a few hundred metres before the finish, when the body has spent the reserve the runner once believed was limitless, and when every calculation has already been left behind.

In Courmayeur, the Italian town at the head of the Aosta Valley beneath the southern flank of Mont Blanc, you recognise someone who has just finished Tor des Géants by the way they cross the final step. Not by their running form. By the way they stop.

Lê Thị Hằng, from Vũng Tàu, finished in 138 hours 40 minutes. Lưu Đức Toản finished in 137 hours 50 minutes. The course was 330 km of mountain trail, accumulating more than 24,000 m of climbing, crossing more than 20 passes above 2,000 m. The organiser's time limit is 150 hours.

The men's winner was Jia Ju Zhao in 65:55:22. The women's winner was Katharina Hartmuth in 67:10:09.

Place those two columns side by side and the story emerges in a different shape from the one most domestic reports are telling.

A race with no concept of a stage

Tor des Géants was created in 2026 and takes place in the Aosta Valley, in the mountainous north-west of Italy near the French and Swiss borders. Its format is simple to the point of brutality: a single stage, non-stop, no mandated rest hours, no division into days of competition.

In most endurance sports I have followed, the organiser controls the rhythm. In the Tour de France a rider knows when he will rest, eat, sleep. In a marathon the athlete knows precisely how long the suffering will last, roughly two hours. Tor des Géants removes that entire structure. The organiser issues one number: 150 hours.

Every remaining decision belongs to the runner. When to sleep. How long. When to stop and eat. When to skip a support station to save time. When to accept losing twenty minutes to recover the legs rather than push on and lose two hours later.

On course there are seven large support stations, roughly 50 km apart. Between them lie footpaths, rock fields, slippery slopes, and stretches of complete darkness the runner must solve alone.

A stadium without spectators does not lack a match – it lacks a soul borrowed from the roar. Here, that emptiness is the default condition. No grandstand. No chant. Only wind on the pass and the sound of your own steps.

The speed equation: 2.4 kilometres per hour

I took out paper and did the arithmetic, out of a habit that has become a tic after years of working with data tables.

Lưu Đức Toản covered 330 km in 137 hours 50 minutes, that is 137.83 hours. Average speed: about 2.39 km/h. Lê Thị Hằng, at 138 hours 40 minutes, or 138.67 hours, averaged about 2.38 km/h.

Jia Ju Zhao, the winner, finished in 65 hours 55 minutes, or 65.92 hours. Average speed: about 5.01 km/h. Katharina Hartmuth averaged about 4.91 km/h.

The gap between the two groups is not marginal. It is more than double.

Put another way: 2.39 km/h means that every 42.195 km – the equivalent of a marathon – cost the two Vietnamese runners about 17.6 hours. The winner spent about 8.4 hours on the same distance. On high mountain terrain, both figures are extraordinary in their own way.

To be clear, 2.39 km/h is not slowness in the ordinary sense. On flat ground it is brisk walking. But here, every horizontal kilometre carries an average of 72.7 m of climbing. The full course accumulates more than 24,000 m of ascent – roughly 2.7 times the height of Everest stacked on top of itself.

Numbers only tell half the story; the other half sits in the trembling legs on the grass. At Tor des Géants, that other half is larger than usual.

The eleven-to-twelve-hour cushion

The 150-hour limit is a number worth thinking about. It corresponds to a minimum average speed of 2.2 km/h.

Lưu Đức Toản finished 12 hours 10 minutes inside the limit. Lê Thị Hằng finished 11 hours 20 minutes inside it.

As a percentage, they ran roughly 8 to 9 percent faster than the mandatory minimum. Over a race lasting nearly 138 hours, an 8 percent margin is far thinner than the feeling of eleven or twelve hours suggests.

This is the point I want to sit with, because it is widely misread.

A twelve-hour cushion sounds very safe. But place it in operating terms. If a runner picks up a minor injury at kilometre 280 and must slow for the final 40 km, the time cost can reach six to eight hours. If that runner has to stop at a support station for hypothermia and loses four hours recovering, half the cushion is gone. Add one night-time navigational error on an unmarked slope and the twelve hours can vanish in a single night.

The safety margin in a 138-hour race is measured by the number of mistakes a runner can afford, not by the hours left on the clock. With eleven or twelve hours in hand, the number of allowable mistakes is very small.

A completion rate of about 60 percent

This is the most important figure on the entire course, and the one least mentioned in reports.

Tor des Géants has a completion rate of roughly 60 percent. In other words, about 40 percent of starters fail to finish.

I have covered a lot of endurance sport. At a major marathon, the dropout rate is usually one to three percent, mostly acute injury. In Ironman triathlon it is usually under ten percent. At 100 km ultra trails it can reach 20 to 30 percent depending on terrain and weather.

A 40 percent non-completion rate puts Tor des Géants in a very narrow bracket. Crossing the finish line here, in pure statistical terms, is the outcome of a minority.

Three Vietnamese runners entered this edition. Two finished. One did not – a Vietnamese resident in France, according to the original report.

The detail about the non-finisher matters more than it appears. It is a reminder that living close to the Alps does not mean being better prepared for the Alps. Geographic proximity does not substitute for altitude adaptation and specific training.

The profiles of the two finishers

Lê Thị Hằng arrived at Tor des Géants on a path built over several years: Prenn Trail 250 km, Son La Ultra Trail 100 km, Vietnam Mountain Marathon 100 km.

Lưu Đức Toản has a similar path in distance but a different one geographically: UTMB 100 km, Mantra 116 km, ULJU Trail 9 Peaks 100 km, Mt Fuji 100 km.

What the two profiles share is accumulation. Both moved from 100 km to 250 km before reaching 330 km. There is no leap. No reckless decision appears in the published record.

In ultra trail, this is the standard progression – and the only one considered reasonable. A runner who has never completed 100 km on mountain terrain cannot cope with 330 km and 24,000 m of climbing.

Based on my experience following races over many years, I have noticed that Southeast Asian runners tend to show two distinct patterns. The first group builds a base at short domestic distances and expands gradually. The second jumps straight into a major international race and usually fails to finish. Hằng and Toản belong to the first group, and that explains much of their result.

The account from inside the race

Lưu Đức Toản has completed the UTMB 100 km, one of the best-known ultra trails in Europe. He rates Tor des Géants as many times harder and more challenging than the UTMB.

That is a first-person technical judgement, and it carries weight because the man making it has actually run both.

He also described narrow footpaths hugging cliff walls, with no safety ropes.

That detail matters more than every number in this piece. It moves the race out of the category of pure sport and into the category of life safety.

In track or road athletics, the risk of serious injury is close to zero. People break bones, tear ligaments, but nobody dies from falling into a ravine during a marathon. On an unroped mountain slope, with the ground frozen and the only light coming from a headlamp, the permitted margin of error is measured in centimetres.

In 2026, a Tor des Géants participant died after slipping, falling and striking his head.

I do not raise this to diminish the achievement of the two Vietnamese runners. I raise it because any report describing Tor des Géants while omitting this dimension is telling half the story.

Stations 50 km apart and the sleep equation

Seven large support stations, roughly 50 km apart, are the only structure the organiser imposes on the course. Each provides food, drink and medical support.

In a race with no mandated rest, 50 km becomes the strategic unit. Runners divide the journey into 50 km blocks and allocate resources block by block.

At 2.39 km/h, each 50 km block takes about 21 hours. That means a runner travels from one station to the next across almost a full day, including a whole night.

Imagine that sequence repeated seven times. Seven awakenings in darkness at altitude. Seven arrivals at a support station with swollen feet and a cooling body. Seven decisions about whether to sleep twenty minutes or push on.

In theory, a person could finish 330 km within 150 hours on only a few hours of total sleep. In practice, sleep deprivation at 2,000 m in near-freezing temperatures degrades judgement far faster than it degrades muscle. Most late dropouts in ultra trail do not come from the muscles. They come from bad decisions made in a state of extreme fatigue.

I once built a spreadsheet for the World Cup before learning that the grandstand never appears in the formula. The story at Tor des Géants sits exactly in the gap the spreadsheet cannot measure: the quality of decisions made at three in the morning, when nobody is watching.

What we do not know

This is the section I consider essential in any serious analysis, and it is usually skipped.

We have no split times. We do not know whether the two runners went out fast or slow over the first half. We do not know whether they accelerated or faded over the final 100 km. We do not know how long they spent at each support station.

Without splits, pacing quality cannot be assessed. A 138-hour result achieved with even pacing is a very different achievement from the same result reached through four collapses and recoveries.

We also do not have the athletes' ages. No injury history. No information about whether they did an altitude camp before travelling to Italy. No information about coaching, support crew or funding.

On anti-doping, the original report says nothing. In ultra trail, the testing framework is generally considered less mature than in track athletics or swimming. The absence of information here implies nothing about either athlete. It simply means the data does not exist in the source.

At 42, I have learned that every athlete is a poet who never publishes. But a journalist is not permitted to write poetry on their behalf. Data gaps must be flagged, not filled with enthusiasm.

The counter-intuitive angle: finishing is the competitive act

In most sports, a clear line separates competing from participating. A track athlete who finishes thirtieth in an international marathon is not considered to have competed for a ranking. They participated.

Tor des Géants runs on different logic, and this is the point I want to stress.

When 40 percent of starters cannot finish, the act of finishing becomes a form of competition in itself. The race is not between Lê Thị Hằng and Katharina Hartmuth. The race is between Lê Thị Hằng and the 150-hour limit.

That does not make a 138-hour result equivalent to a 67-hour result. The two belong to different categories. One is ranking competition within the global elite. The other is passing a survival test with a 40 percent failure probability.

Both framings are legitimate, but they cannot substitute for one another. Domestic outlets choosing the second framing is editorially sound. The problem arises only when the second framing is read as the first.

The conquest framing carries a specific risk: it implicitly places the two Vietnamese runners in the same comparison table as the winners. At that point the two-fold time gap becomes an awkward detail rather than an explanatory one.

The correct handling, in my view, is to present both facts at once. Completing a race with a 40 percent dropout rate is a real achievement. And finishing at roughly double the winners' time is a mid-to-back-of-field position among finishers. Both statements are true, and both are needed for the reader to understand what they are reading about.

Vietnam's ultra trail ecosystem is forming

Look at the races both athletes have run and a clearer picture emerges.

Prenn Trail 250 km. Son La Ultra Trail 100 km. Vietnam Mountain Marathon 100 km. Mantra 116 km. ULJU Trail 9 Peaks 100 km. Mt Fuji 100 km.

That list contains at least four events staged on Vietnamese soil or operated by Vietnamese organisers, at distances of 100 km and above.

This information is more valuable than the Italian result itself. A country can only produce Tor des Géants finishers when a domestic race system exists that is long and hard enough for runners to accumulate experience.

In other words, the Courmayeur result is the visible tip of a structure built beforehand. It is not a phenomenon appearing out of nowhere.

What stands out is the individual character of that structure. Nothing suggests the two athletes operate inside a national team, a state training centre or an organised sponsorship programme. Their profiles carry the marks of high-level amateur runners: self-funded, self-planned, finding their own route to the international arena.

That model has clear strengths and weaknesses. The strength is the durability of individual motivation. The weakness is the absence of what only organisations provide: altitude camps, biomedical monitoring, controlled rehabilitation, and a pipeline for the next generation.

One striking detail: the fifty-minute gap

Lê Thị Hằng finished in 138 hours 40 minutes. Lưu Đức Toản finished in 137 hours 50 minutes.

The difference: 50 minutes. Across 138 hours, that is about 0.6 percent.

In endurance sport, a gap under one percent between two athletes after nearly six days of continuous racing is a rare phenomenon.

I do not have enough data to conclude, and I will not conclude. But the gap suggests one possibility: the two may have shared pacing strategy or supported one another for part of the journey. In ultra trail, two runners of the same nationality staying close across an entire course is not unusual, particularly when both compete as individuals without their own support teams.

If true, it adds a dimension the numbers cannot capture. A 138-hour race alone in the mountains is one test. A 138-hour race with a companion who speaks your language is a different test.

I raise this hypothesis at low confidence. There is no confirmation in the source. But it is one of the things worth asking in follow-up interviews.

The Asian context: where the winner came from

One detail in the results that Vietnamese reports have barely mentioned: the men's winner, Jia Ju Zhao, is from China.

This is a notable signal about the map of Asian ultra trail. For decades, the front group at major ultra trails was almost entirely European and North American. The appearance of an Asian runner at the top of a race in the world's hardest bracket shows the level of competition is shifting.

Set that result beside the two Vietnamese performances and a regional picture emerges. Asia is expanding its presence at both ends of the spectrum: at the front and among the finishers.

I do not want to overstate the significance of a single result. One win does not make a trend. But it is a signal worth tracking, and it places the Vietnamese achievement in a wider context than a national-rivalry framing allows.

Why a tropical training environment is a variable

This is an analytical point I have not seen in any report.

Tor des Géants takes place at very significant average altitude, with more than 20 passes above 2,000 m. Daytime temperatures can be relatively kind, but night temperatures at that altitude often fall to or below freezing. The day-night temperature swing is one of the course's harshest features.

An athlete training year-round in tropical conditions such as Vũng Tàu has an excellent heat-adaptation base, but that base does not convert into an advantage at 2,500 m on a cold night.

This does not mean the two Vietnamese runners did not prepare for it. They may have had an adaptation period in Europe before the start, or trained in Vietnam's own highlands. That information is not in the source.

But it is a structural variable, and ignoring it leads to a distorted conclusion: that the time gap reflects purely physical capacity. Altitude adaptation, night-running experience on cold terrain, and the ability to manage body temperature are separate skills, trained separately, and weighted heavily in a 138-hour race.

The economics of the elite amateur

A question rarely asked: who pays for this?

The cost of entering Tor des Géants includes the entry fee, flights from Vietnam to Italy, accommodation, specialist high-mountain equipment, and in many cases a pre-race adaptation period. In total it is a considerable investment in an activity with no significant prize money.

The race sits outside the Olympic system, outside the World Athletics championship system, and outside the broadcast economy. Its prestige comes from difficulty, not from money.

That raises the question of motivation. In sports with large prize funds, motivation is relatively easy to explain. Here it must come from somewhere else.

Every transfer contract is a small migration, carrying expectations and homesickness. In ultra trail there are no transfer contracts at all. There are only individuals deciding that a 330 km race is worth a week of their lives and a sum of money, with no guarantee of any result.

I have spent most of my career analysing transfer decisions in football and financial structures in esports. Both fields operate on the logic of cash flow. Here the logic is different, and it forces the analyst to change tools.

Tactics never die; they are merely misunderstood until someone is brave enough to do it again

There is a parallel between Tor des Géants and the team sports I usually follow, and I want to raise it because it is often overlooked.

In modern football, pressing systems are built on the principle of controlled energy distribution. A high-pressing team does not run more than a low-block team. It runs differently, at different moments, for different purposes.

Tor des Géants operates on the same principle at an individual scale. The person who finishes is not the fastest runner. It is the person who distributes energy most accurately.

There is no coach on the sideline to adjust anything. The runner must simultaneously be athlete, coach, doctor and tactical decision-maker.

That is why I regard results like 138 hours 40 minutes and 137 hours 50 minutes as carrying a different kind of technical value from results on the road. They measure the capacity for self-management under conditions where nobody is managing.

On standardisation and the cost of data

In recent years, athletics has moved in one clear direction: measure more, measure more accurately, measure faster.

In football, offside lines are drawn by semi-automated technology accurate to the centimetre. In road races, every kilometre is recorded and published.

I have been sceptical of part of that trend, and remain so. When everything is measured to the millimetre, attacking instinct narrows out of fear of error. People stop making bold decisions because they know those decisions will be reviewed.

At Tor des Géants, the measurement system barely exists. No camera catching errors. No referee analysing afterwards. No fully published split table.

In that environment, all that remains is the body and its decisions. Those decisions can be right or wrong, can lead to the finish line or to a support station at four in the morning with legs that have refused to go on.

At 42, I have learned to trust the body as the most reliable data set. The body does not exaggerate. It reports its true state, and it reports very clearly after hour 100.

What to track next

A single result does not make a trend. This is the principle I apply to every post-race analysis.

Three signals will show whether the Courmayeur result is a milestone or an isolated event.

The first is repeatability. If Lê Thị Hằng and Lưu Đức Toản keep finishing international ultra distances over the next two or three seasons, the Italian result will be confirmed as a stable level. If it appears only once, it remains an achievement but not a foundation.

The second is the appearance of more Vietnamese names at these distances. A milestone is built by two people. A system is built by twenty.

The third is the development of domestic support infrastructure: altitude training camps, biomedical monitoring programmes, coaches specialised in ultra distances. These do not generate glamorous headlines, but they determine whether the next result arrives.

What to keep

I have followed sport long enough to know that a result can be honoured appropriately and described accurately at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Lê Thị Hằng and Lưu Đức Toản completed 330 km of mountain trail with more than 24,000 m of climbing, in a race where about 40 percent of starters cannot finish, with roughly 11 to 12 hours to spare against a 150-hour limit. That is a real endurance achievement.

They also finished at roughly double the winners' time, in an event whose men's leader came from Asia and women's leader from Europe, and in which another Vietnamese runner could not finish.

Both facts coexist, and presenting both diminishes nobody. It only tells the reader where they are on the map.

What interests me more is the next question. A country can produce two Tor des Géants finishers in the same season while both operate outside every organised support structure. If that base were placed inside a system – altitude camps, medical support, specialised coaching – where does the next limit sit?

I rewatched World Cup footage during the weeks when stadiums around the world were closed. That period taught me that sport does not disappear when spectators are absent. It simply shifts into another form, harder to see, and sometimes more honest.

On the slopes of Aosta, on the fifth night of the race, there was no grandstand at all. There were two Vietnamese runners heading east, and a clock counting down.

They beat the clock. Next time, the question will be by how much.