The Appetiser Runs First: Val d'Aran's PDA 55K Today, UTMB European Major VDA 163K Tomorrow

The shorter race goes first. That is the architecture of the Val d'Aran week, and the logic holds: the PDA 55K runners will be showered and in the village square by the time the VDA 163K field wakes at 4am tomorrow morning.

The PDA — Peades d'Aigua, Footsteps of Water — starts from Salardú, a village in the upper Aran Valley best known for its 12th-century Romanesque church, and follows a 55-kilometre line that takes in 3,300 metres of ascent and 3,700 of descent through the Colomèrs, the largest glacial lake cirque in the Pyrenees. Glacier retreat left more than thirty lakes in that granite bowl above 2,000 metres. The PDA course crosses most of them. It is 55 kilometres in the way the Pyrenees understands the word: nothing is easy, and the compensation is that nothing is dull.

Why the VDA Is the Main Event

The Val d'Aran by UTMB exists, in the minds of the international trail field, because of the race that begins tomorrow morning. The VDA 163K starts and finishes in Vielha — the valley's capital on the Garonne river — and covers 10,000 metres of accumulated ascent across terrain that moves from forested valley floors to granite ridgelines above 2,500 metres. The race requires a night section somewhere in its middle act, which means runners will pass through the high-altitude cirques of the Pyrenean spine in darkness.

In 2026, the VDA is the UTMB World Series European Major for the fifth consecutive year. The title carries meaning. The UTMB World Series runs six Major events across a full calendar — one per region — and the Val d'Aran is Europe's representative slot. A finish in the top 10, men or women, earns a direct entry to UTMB Mont-Blanc 2027. Direct entries are the most scarce commodity on the UTMB circuit: the lottery is long, the golden tickets are few. A top-ten in Vielha solves the problem.

What "European Major" Means on the Ground

The UTMB World Series Majors attract a different kind of international field than the qualifier events that surround them on the calendar. Athletes who have been building their UTMB résumé across the year — through shorter UTMB Index races, through the various regional qualifiers, through the circuit's accumulated structure — often arrange their entire spring and summer around one or two Majors. Val d'Aran is the European one.

That means the start line in Vielha tomorrow morning will include runners from France, the UK, Italy, Switzerland, the US, Australia, Japan, and beyond — most of them here specifically because this event, and not another, is the one that gets them to Chamonix.

The Val d'Aran's geography is a Pyrenean outlier. The valley drains north toward the Garonne river and France, not south toward Spain, which means it shares the Atlantic moisture patterns of the northern Pyrenees while sitting administratively within Catalonia. The local language is Aranese — a variety of Gascon Occitan — and the villages reflect centuries of Occitan-Catalan-Basque cultural overlap. The food and the architecture both carry this mixed character.

For runners, the terrain consequence of that northern drainage is a lush valley floor with dense forest on the lower slopes and a transition to alpine meadow and exposed granite above 1,800 metres. The VDA 163K uses all of it. The lower sections move through beech and pine in conditions that stay cool even in early July; the upper sections climb into the open rock and lake landscape that defines the Pyrenees at altitude.

The course has no particularly technical rock-climbing sections but does include extended talus traversals on the high routes. The accumulated descent — which matches the ascent in character if not in size — compresses into sustained quad-loading descents that are the race's physical signature. Most VDA runners will reach Vielha having descended more than they climbed, and the final valley floor kilometres test legs that have been running for most of a day and a night.

Last Year's Results and the 2026 Field

The 2025 VDA was won by Arthur Joyeux-Bouillon in the men's race and Laura Van Vooren in the women's. Both are established UTMB circuit performers whose results reflect what it takes to compete at the front of a Major field.

The 2026 start list confirmation will be visible at live.utmb.world from the race start tomorrow morning. Results will be posted to the official UTMB live tracker as runners cross timing mats across the course.

For a guide to running, training, and staying in the Aran Valley — including how to structure a trip around the Val d'Aran race week — see our Val d'Aran running destination guide.