Frédéric Splendore Takes the Via Alpina Record on His Way to Ukraine

Frédéric Splendore has crossed the Alps on foot faster than anyone on record, covering the 2,000-kilometer (1,240 miles) Via Alpina in 23 days, 11 hours and 42 minutes. The Swiss runner reached the Adriatic at Muggia, outside Trieste, Italy, on Aug. 16, according to the Fastest Known Time website. The Alps were the first 2,000 km of a 4,200 km run that ends in Ukraine.

The record he replaced was just a few weeks old. Sophie Woods of New Zealand, running east to west, finished on Aug. 1 in 28 days, 17 hours and 59 minutes. Splendore took 5 days, 6 hours and 17 minutes off it. The FKT website keeps men’s, women’s, and overall supported records as separate categories, which is why Woods’ name stays on the women’s list even though Splendore is now faster over the same ground.

Splendore and Woods had been in touch before either started. He told iRunFar that he checked the FKT website ahead of his own departure, found that Woods had posted her plans two days earlier, and wrote to her before she set out to warn that part of the official route was closed in Valais, Switzerland. He told her he was aiming for 25 days; she was targeting 30.

The route’s record book is short because the route is new. The Via Alpina Committee redrew the trail in 2024, folding four separate color-coded routes into one 2,000 km line that starts at the Mediterranean in Monaco and ends on the Adriatic at Muggia, crossing eight Alpine countries in between. Four runners have logged supported times on it. Jake Catterall’s 35 days, 21 hours and 4 minutes in August 2024 was the first, and the mark has come down by 12 days, 9 hours and 22 minutes in the two years since. Karel Sabbe‘s 30 days, 8 hours and 40 minutes from 2021 still appears on the same FKT page, but Sabbe ran the trail’s original Red Trail variation, which the site lists at 2,496 km.

That works out to 85 km and about 4,400 meters of climbing every day for more than three weeks. The FKT website lists the route’s total climbing at 103,600 meters (340,000 feet), while Splendore’s own project pages give 110,000 m for the Alpine section. He had budgeted 25 days at 80 km and 4,500 m a day, so he arrived roughly 36 hours ahead of his own schedule.

Splendore, 33, is a professional firefighter in Lausanne, and he came to the Alps with road credentials. He ran 2:23:04 at the Berlin Marathon in September 2025, according to World Athletics, and has a half-marathon best of 1:09:08. He won the Swiss 100K championship in 2023 in 7:14, his first race at the distance. In 2018 he thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, roughly 4,300 km from Mexico to Canada, in 116 days carrying his own supplies.

The Alpine section began in Monaco on July 24. The full project, which Splendore has named Beyond Borders, runs 4,200 km through 13 countries and ends in Ukraine, and it doubles as a fundraiser for the relief work of Swiss Solidarity, or Chaîne du Bonheur. His pledge sets the total by his climbing: one euro for every meter of ascent, or about 140,000 euros across the whole route. “I’m continuing to run, with a goal that means far more to me than any time on a clock,” he wrote on his Instagram account after the finish.

He stopped at Muggia for two days and three nights when he finished. He wrote that he slept about 30 hours across the three nights, that he had lost the feeling in both big toes, and that the stop was where his FKT was submitted for validation. The final day had run 14 hours in heat, with no water on the route between his support team’s refills, and a late meal left him nauseated enough to walk much of the last stretch.

About 2,200 km remain, most of it across Eastern Europe with roughly 30,000 m of climbing, a section his project plan sets at an average of 88 km a day. Those pages give the arrival date in Ukraine as Sept. 21, the International Day of Peace.