The commercialization of trail running is on. This once-sleepy sport now has mega-race series that look more Ironman than Hardrock. Podcasters, influencers, and YouTubers “grow” the sport by dissecting the minutiae, and then serve you a big helping of AG1 advertising (with a promo code!). Hey, everyone’s gotta eat.
Except, it seems, for one person.
Kilian Jornet is responsible for the commercialization of trail running just as much as anyone. His prodigious talents created a marketing machine that major outdoor companies leveraged and sold to us; his iconic red Salomon S/Lab Sense shoes could inspire someone to take up trail running the way a kid would beg his parents for a pair of Air Jordans so he could “Be like Mike.”
But sometime around the release of his autobiography, “Above the Clouds: How I Carved My Own Path to the Top of the World,” a more self-conscious Jornet began to emerge. He was becoming more critical of the racing scene that made him famous and far more vocal about climate change.
Just 5 days after maybe the closest win of his career (Sierre Zinal, the most competitive mountain race in the world, by mere seconds), Jornet took his first steps on “Alpine Connections” — a route that proposes to connect all 82 4,000m peaks in the Alps.
Though the route has an FKT — by Ueli Steck in 2016 — not once in Alpine Connection’s announcement are the words “speed record” or “FKT attempt” mentioned. Steck, the “Swiss Machine,” was a formidable endurance athlete in his own right, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to predict Jornet would and could pounce on Steck’s 62-day record.
Alpine Connections
According to ALPSInsight, one of the major running, hiking, and climbing guide companies in Switzerland, most of the Alps’ 4,000ers are stand-alone objectives; think Monte Rosa, Mont Blanc, and the Matterhorn while “there are several opportunities for enchainments” — it’s the enchainment that Jornet, a well-known obsessive for route planning, is attempting with Alpine Connections.
Jornet is already several days into Alpine Connections; at the time of writing he has covered over 460 km, summited 12 peaks with over 23,000 m of vertical gain over 75 hours while averaging only 3 hours of sleep per day. This early pace is on track with the project’s initial stated itinerary, which predicted an average of almost 20 hours of concentrated movement over technical terrain for the duration.
For context, Jornet ran the Hardrock 100 in 21 hours in 2022. Though it might be “technical” from a trail running standpoint alone, the Hardrock doesn’t require rock climbing or glacier travel.
A growing disdain for the annual circus around Chamonix, trips to Everest (marred by some controversy) and, at the end of 2021, a split with longtime sponsor Salomon (oh, and having kids!) signaled a departure from the expectations and trappings of being a sport’s best athlete.
When the company Nnormal launched, Jornet wrapped his mission there in an environmental one. The timing came not long after Salomon and Suunto’s (another career-long sponsor) parent company Amer was acquired by Chinese sporting goods company Anta.
Fast forward to today, and Jornet is still GOAT’ing a selection of classic European trail races — rootsier ones like Zegama-Aizkorri, with its feverous Basque fans, and, just last week, Sierre Zinal, which he won for a 10th time, followed by an emergent force of Kenyan trail runners taking second, third, and fourth behind him.
Climate Action
Imagine that range for a moment. Jornet went from basically the Olympics of trail running (Sierre Zinal) over the weekend to perhaps the grandest technical mountain adventure in all of Europe, requiring an altogether different skill set than just putting one foot in front of the other.
Now take the equivalent of a day-after-day Hardrock run combined with periods of rope-solo rock climbing (Jornet’s pre-project gear photo shows him bringing exactly three cams and a couple of ice screws), technical scrambling, and only a few hours of sleep, and you have a human performance subject unlike physiology has maybe ever seen.
The fully self-propelled project also puts nature front and center. Travelers to the Alps over the past 2 decades and armchair environmentalists are not surprised about the degradation happening there due to climate change.
Traveling by human power alone, Jornet has collaborated with Protect Our Winters to report on and help promote the urgency with which we must consider our impact on the planet. This project will put Jornet in places and at a scale few others will have been able to experience climate impact in the Alps so intimately.
Human Power
In collaboration with his sponsor Coros and Dr. Jesús Álvarez, PhD in biology, Jornet will measure the effects of metabolic strain. He intends to share the findings with the scientific community. According to information on the Nnormal Blog, metabolic strain occurs when the body must redistribute energy to organs under high stress during physical activity.
Álvarez, who has worked with Jornet previously, has concluded that neither sleep deprivation, caloric restriction, nor cognitive decline have caused Jornet to fail from a metabolic perspective. Alpine Connections, Álvarez notes, will put unprecedented strain on Jornet.
“The demands on Kilian will be so extreme that we cannot predict the physiological or even genetic changes that may occur,” Álvarez said.
Looking Ahead
When you look at Jornet’s career evolution, Alpine Connections is an act of rebellion. A rebellion from organized competition with its anti-environmental corporate sponsors and from the zero-sum game that is racing.
Jornet’s project puts nature and physiology research front and center as its mission, not a fastest known time.
This project is perhaps a response to a growing cynicism that exists today toward trail running and its culture. Stripping back the experience to one of his own making (and backing), Jornet is using his stature in the sport to help communicate a different message.
You can get status updates on Alpine Connections on the Nnormal blog and Instagram.
