Jeff Browning Suffered a Heart Attack on UTMB’s TDS Course, His Family Says

Jeff Browning, one of the most accomplished 100-mile racers in American ultrarunning, is in the hospital after a heart attack during UTMB Mont-Blanc‘s TDS race, his family said in a statement posted to his Instagram account on Wednesday.

The statement is brief. “He received immediate medical treatment from the race and emergency medical teams before being airlifted to the hospital, where he remains under medical care,” it reads, before thanking the crews involved and the people who have sent messages since. It names no hospital, gives no prognosis, and does not say at what point in the race he was taken ill. UTMB has published nothing about the incident.

The TDS left Courmayeur, in Italy, at 11:50 p.m. on Monday, one of seven races on this week’s UTMB Mont-Blanc program. UTMB’s live tracking put the course at 150.5K (about 94 miles) with 9,305 m of climbing before the finish in Chamonix, and runners were given 44 hours 55 minutes to cover it. Eight checkpoints break up the route, the last of them at Bellevue with 13.7K left to run, and UTMB lists a medical post among the services at them. The organizers had warned before the start that temperatures at the passes could fall close to 0 C in rain. Rémy Brassac won in 19:28:43, and Sarah Vieuille was the first woman home and ninth overall in 22:08:16.

Where cardiac emergencies in racing have been counted, survival has improved sharply. A team led by Jonathan Kim, writing in JAMA, reviewed more than 29 million marathon and half-marathon finishes in the United States between 2010 and 2023 and identified 176 cardiac arrests. 117 of those runners lived, a survival rate of 66 percent against 29 percent in the decade before. How often arrests happened barely shifted, at 0.6 per 100,000 participants. What changed was bystander CPR and the spread of defibrillators along road courses. Coronary artery disease accounted for 40 percent of the cases, concentrated among older runners.

Nothing comparable has been counted for mountain ultras. A city marathon can post a defibrillator every mile or two on a closed course with an ambulance behind it. The TDS crosses passes where the nearest trained help is whoever is staffing the next checkpoint, and anything more has to be flown in. That is the setting in which, on his family’s account, Browning was treated and then airlifted.

Browning had been racing well this year. He finished Western States in 18:03:38 in June for 38th place, and completed the Cocodona 250 in May in 70:56:04 for 15th. His own biography counts more than 200 ultramarathon finishes across 25 years, more than 40 wins, more than 30 of those at 100 miles, and seven Hardrock 100 finishes including a win. It puts him third on UltraRunning Magazine‘s list of North American ultrarunners for the decade to 2019, and the only man over 50 to have made its annual top 10. UTMB lists him in the men’s 55 to 59 category.

“Thank you for keeping Jeff in your thoughts,” his family wrote. Racing continues in Chamonix, with the 174K UTMB starting at 5:45 p.m. on Friday.