In a town, Flagstaff, with many successful elite runners – road, trail and track – perhaps none have garnered more worldwide notoriety as ultrarunner Jim Walmsley.
Starting Friday at Mont Blanc in Chamonix, France, Walmsey will attempt to be the first male runner in 13 years to win both the Western States Endurance 100 Mile Run and Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in one season.
Last year, of course, Walmsley finally broke through after several failed attempts and won UTMB, a 109-mile loop with 32,700 feet of elevation gain that passes through France, Italy and Spain. Not only that, but he did it in course record time.
In order to at last conquer UTMB, Walmsley and his wife moved fulltime to France to train in late 2022. He skipped Western States last year to focus fully on mastering the Alps. It paid off.
This year, though, he’ll try for the WS-UTMB double. The only other man to do it was, in 2011, Killian Jornet perhaps the only ultrarunner more celebrated than Walmsley. (Two women have done the double, the last being the indefatigable Courtney Dauwalter, who pulled off an unprecedented triple — Western States, the Hardrock 100, and UTMB in a 10-week span.)
Walmsley mostly trained in Flagstaff for Western States, which he won for the fourth time in late June. Afterward, he trained some in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado before returning to France for a month before the UTMB.
Click here to read our interview with Walmsley in mid-July, in which speaks in depth about going for the “double.”
Jornet is not racing UTMB this year, but that won’t necessarily make Walmsley’s task any easier. Three Frenchmen (Mathieu Blanchard, Ludovic Pommeret and Germain Grangier and a Brit (Tom Evans) figure to be the top contenders.
Pommeret, arguable, is the most dangerous, but he’s coming off a recent win (and course record) at the Hardrock 100 in Colorado and might be running on tired legs. Blanchard almost beat Jornet in the 2022 UTMB before settling for second. Grangier finished third at UTMB last year behind Walmsley and American Zach Miller. Evans was third at UTMB in 2022 but had to drop out last year.
For those who would like to follow along on Walmsley’s progress at UTMB, the website irunfar.com routinely covers the race with live updates on X (formerly Twitter).
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