Before the sun was fully above the Pyrenean ridgeline this morning, 7,500 runners crossed the start line in Vielha. The Garonne river runs through the town's centre and was still silver-grey when the gun went. By the time the river catches the first full light of the day, the front of the field will be climbing out of the valley, moving through the beech forests toward the high country, ascending into the terrain that makes the Val d'Aran by UTMB what it is: the largest trail running event in Spain, and one of the most prestigious mountain ultras on the European calendar.
The VDA 163K — the European Major of the UTMB World Series — is covering 163 kilometres and roughly 10,000 metres of accumulated ascent right now. The leaders will not reach Vielha again until tomorrow morning. Behind them, runners will arrive through the night and into the afternoon of July 4th, each completing a loop that encompasses some of the most varied and demanding mountain terrain in the Pyrenees.
What's Happening on the Course
The VDA 163K leaves Vielha heading west and north, climbing immediately out of the valley floor into the forested hillsides above town. The early kilometres carry a false sense of accessibility — the trails are well-maintained, the gradient manageable, and at dawn in the Pyrenees in early July the air is genuinely cold. Runners are layered; they will shed layers progressively through the morning.
Above the forest zone, the course moves into the open alpine meadows and then the high rock. The Colomèrs glacial cirque — a horseshoe of Pyrenean granite enclosing a series of mountain lakes at altitudes above 2,000 metres — is the course's most visually spectacular section and among its most demanding. The terrain here is a combination of rocky trail and boulder-hopping, and the views of the Pyrenean spine that open up from the cirque rim are the kind that make runners slow down involuntarily, even in the early stages of a race where pacing is everything.
The race route this year includes the CDH 110K's course in its later sections, meaning runners who started first in the CDH yesterday are sharing terrain with the VDA 163K front-runners. The logistics of managing two race fields simultaneously across shared trail systems is one of the Val d'Aran by UTMB organisation's most impressive operational achievements.
The Defending Champion and Who's Chasing Him
Arthur Joyeux-Bouillon won the 2025 VDA 163K in 16:25:48, becoming the race's third-ever champion and doing so with a front-of-race strategy that the trackside commentary described as "immediately dominant" — he took the lead early and held it with measured authority across a course that punishes overconfidence in its early stages. The Frenchman's record time in the 2025 edition stands as the course's benchmark.
Joyeux-Bouillon is among the favourites again in 2026. The narrative of back-to-back VDA titles is compelling, and his 2025 performance demonstrated that his body handles the specific demands of this course — the extended technical climbing, the night section, the final 40 kilometres on legs that have been running for over 12 hours — with a consistency that some world-class runners never achieve on routes of this character.
But the 2026 field carries challengers that didn't exist in 2025. The UTMB World Series European Major status draws athletes who are specifically targeting UTMB Mont-Blanc 2027 entry — the top 10 men and women in the VDA 163K earn direct race entry, eliminating the lottery and qualification complexity. A race with those stakes attracts a different quality of competition than the same distance with standard qualification points.
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Join ZealZagFollow us on InstagramLaura Van Vooren and the Women's Race
Belgium's Laura Van Vooren defended the women's title with a time of 20:26:37 in 2025, a performance that she has described in interviews as one of the cleanest executions of a long race she's managed. Her approach to pacing in the Pyrenean terrain — neither overly conservative in the early mountain sections nor depleting in the canyon transitions — is a template that other women's field competitors have studied.
The 2026 women's field includes China's Yuanyuan Wu, who finished second in 2025 in 20:38:22 and will have prepared specifically for another attempt at the top step. The Pyrenees in early July suit runners from altitude training environments, and Wu's preparation at altitude in China gives her a physiological baseline suited to the high cirque sections.
Why the Val d'Aran
The Val d'Aran is, geographically, an anomaly. The only Atlantic-facing valley on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, it drains not south to the Ebro but north to the Garonne and the Atlantic — a hydrological accident of mountain geography that gives the valley a distinctly different character from the dry, Mediterranean-influenced slopes to its south. The result is greener, wetter, more forested lower slopes than you would expect in a Spanish valley, with a cultural identity — Aranese, a Gascon dialect spoken here and almost nowhere else — that reflects centuries of isolation between the two major Pyrenean powers.
The trail running community arrived here because the mountains are good. They stayed because the infrastructure followed. Val d'Aran now hosts one of the few trail running events that has genuine claim to a cultural relationship with its host valley rather than being imposed on it from outside. The town of Vielha turns toward the race weekend rather than away from it. Volunteers are local. The start and finish in the town centre feel integrated rather than parachuted in.
What Happens Next
The front runners in the VDA 163K are expected to finish in the 16–18-hour window for men, 20–22 hours for women — which means the elite men's race finishes in the early morning of July 4th, and the elite women in the mid-morning. The longer-field finishers will arrive through the day and into the afternoon.
Results and live tracking are available through the official UTMB app and the race's own tracking system at valdaran.utmb.world.
For runners who want to experience the Val d'Aran terrain independently — the trails that the VDA 163K uses, the high cirques, and the cultural context of the valley — see our Aran Valley trail running guide. For yesterday's PDA 55K coverage and context on the full event weekend, see our Val d'Aran PDA 55K field report.