Katharina Hartmuth Finishes Third Overall, Breaking Her Own Course Record, at the Tor des Géants

Katharina Hartmuth finished third overall at the Tor des Géants early Wednesday, covering 330K and 24,000 meters of climbing through the Italian Alps in 67:10:09. She took 12 hours off the women’s course record she set in 2024, and in the 15 runnings before this one no woman had finished on the overall podium.

The race left Courmayeur on Sunday morning, and Hartmuth spent most of it inside the fight for the win. Jiaju Zhao of China took it in 65:55:22, a men’s course record, with Jonathan Schindler of Switzerland arriving 59 minutes and 44 seconds later. Hartmuth came through the finish 15 minutes and three seconds after Schindler, on roughly 15 minutes of sleep across three days.

“Yesterday I realized I was under 75 hours, then under 72, then under 70. I couldn’t believe it,” she said in post-race comments reported in Italian and translated here. She had been fine on day one, she said, and sore and blistered on day two, but her legs never stopped answering.

Hartmuth already owned the women’s record, and she had taken it by an ordinary sort of margin. Sabrina Verjee ran 80:19:38 in 2022, about five hours quicker than the mark before it. Hartmuth’s 79:10:40 two years later improved on Verjee by just under 69 minutes and made her the first woman under 80 hours at the race. Noor van der Veen became the second last September, winning in 79:34. On Wednesday Hartmuth cut 12 hours and 31 seconds off her own time.

The men’s record has not moved like that in years. Franco Collé ran 66:39:16 in 2023, Victor Richard trimmed it to 66:08:22 last September, and Zhao found another 13 minutes this week, just under 44 minutes of improvement across three years. Going into the weekend the two standing course records were 13 hours and two minutes apart. They are now 1 hour, 14 minutes and 47 seconds apart.

Her 67:10:09 is the sixth-fastest run anyone has managed at the Tor des Géants, and it would have won 12 of the 15 previous races. Only four men have ever gone quicker: Collé in 2021 and 2023, Richard in 2025, and Zhao and Schindler on Wednesday. She also finished close to two hours inside the time François D’Haene needed to win in 2024, the year she took the women’s record for the first time.

She skipped the race in 2025 and spent that year and this one elsewhere. She was third at UTMB in Chamonix last August, more than an hour and a half ahead of Courtney Dauwalter in 10th, won the Madeira Island Ultra-Trail in April, and in July ran the Bob Graham Round in 14:11:58 for the women’s record, paced over part of the route by Beth Pascall, whose mark she was breaking.

That women hold up better than men as races get very long is not a new observation, though a margin this small is. In a lab study of performance-matched trail runners, women lost 1.1 percent of their uphill speed over a three-hour treadmill run while men lost 9.9 percent, though the sample was only 11 runners of each sex. The Tor des Géants runs for the better part of three days.

Zhao is the first Chinese winner of the race and the first from outside Europe. He arrived in Courmayeur off a win at the Chongli 168 in July and a 10th place at UTMB last year. His sponsor, Kailas, says he was delivering food in eastern China in 2014, turned professional three years later, spent 50 minutes in aid stations across the whole race, and did not stop at all until he had been running for 35 hours and 42 minutes.

Most of the field is still out on the course. Runners get 150 hours to get around, and the finish in Courmayeur closes Saturday at 6 p.m.