Colorado Runner Becomes First American to Win Brutal European Endurance Race

On the last Monday of August, at just before midnight in the Italian Alps, Colorado resident Careth Arnold was on her mark, preparing to take off through a series of ascents and descents that would take her into France.

The 35-year-old was taking part in a 95-mile endurance running course for the next 23 hours. Her first six and a half hours running was in pitch-black darkness, with “a lot of climbing dirt” and “chunky sections,” she recalls.

The trail race across the Alps, with eight steep climbs and descents adding up to 29,527 feet of elevation gain, is the Sur les Traces des Ducs de Savoie, or TDS, and is part of the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc series of endurance races. TDS was born in 2009, and had never been won by an American. Until last week.

“A little after the 50K point, the sun started coming up,” Arnold tells Westword. “It was just this big 6,000-foot climb; very long climbs and very steep descents for extended periods.”

A former artist and horticulturist, Arnold lives in Paonia, where she and her husband raise two daughters, ages two and five. The small town sits at nearly 5,700 feet above sea level, so she felt prepared for the thin air.

“I run a lot in the high mountains, and I feel like that helped me,” she adds. Not that her victory came without challenges.

Arnold was packing energy gels in the race, and had a drop bag for hydration at the 100-kilometer mark of the 153k race, but says she calculated her fueling wrong for the last fifty kilometers.

“My speed dropped, I just started feeling very tired,” she says. “I tried taking caffeine and it didn’t do much for me. But I was just stubborn enough. I think that’s where my talent comes in, in regard to trail running. I’m just a very stubborn person.”

Arnold knew she was leading the race, but thought the next runner was just twenty minutes or so behind her. With the last thirty kilometers left to run, she found out the second-place runner had dropped out. “I didn’t realize the lead I had until the last aid station,” she says. “I was really happy, I had to kind of just crawl out of that climb.”

This wasn’t Arnold’s first big win racing in Europe; it was her first race in Europe, period. Though she’s now a phenomenon in endurance racing after the big win at TDS, Arnold didn’t begin running competitively until 2021. By 2022, she signed a sponsorship deal with Altra Running.

“I’m such an amateur at this sport that I’m still trying to figure out fueling,” Arnold says, laughing.

The newly crowned champ is excited to go back overseas, but first she has more races to run on American soil. Arnold is planning on running the Hurricane 100K Trail Race in West Virginia this Saturday, and is looking to the Javelina Jundred in Fountain Hills, Arizona in late October.

Arnold also co-hosts a podcast with her teammate, Amanda Basham, called Return to Run, which tells the stories of postpartum mothers returning to athleticism.