Kilian Jornet Is Busier—and Better—than Ever

Kilian Jornet is many things: greatest ultra-trail runner of all-time. Greatest sub-ultra trail runner of all time. Father. Husband. Founder of an environmental nonprofit. Founder of an outdoor footwear and apparel company.

He’s also an enigma.

Jornet eschews the commercialization of a sport that he’s helped to grow. He loves the freedom of exploration but also the rigor of science. He’s intensely introverted yet is the most popular and public trail runner ever.

These incongruences are perhaps no better exemplified than through his current quest. While most of the top ultra-trail runners from around the world have descended upon Chamonix, France, for the UTMB World Series Finals this week, Jornet, too, is in the area. On August 24, he essentially ran a handful of miles along the backside of the UTMB course in Switzerland. He came even closer—much closer—shortly thereafter.

But, and I’m sorry to disappoint you, Jornet is not here to race UTMB. He’s two weeks into an even bigger vision quest: link all 82 4,000-meter peaks in the Alps. He’s calling it the Alpine Connections project.

Of course, he hasn’t officially stated he’s trying to link all 82. He’s simply trying to “explore his physical, technical, and mental limits while connecting 4,000-meter peaks in the Alps.” But if you know Jornet, one of the most anti-spray runners in this spray era, you know he wants to tag them all—in record time.

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Ueli Steck, the legendary “Swiss Machine,” currently holds that record of 62 days. While most who have attempted this mind-blowing feat drove from one mountain to the next, Steck linked them via bike.

That’s the style Jornet chose, too. For environmental reasons. For the aesthetic of self-powered adventure. But like so many of the defining moments of his career, he has a camera crew following, in cars. (Since some of his outings on foot are point-to-point, it’s also not clear if his crew is transporting his bike from the start to the finish for him.) And he’s posting his progress on Strava and Instagram, along with updates on the NNormal blog.

With just 30 peaks to go, the most imposing mountain left on his list is none other than Mont Blanc, the tallest peak in Western Europe at 15,766 feet. It happens to be the massif around which UTMB circumvents.

What inspired Jornet—who lives on a farm in Åndalsnes, Norway, with his Swedish wife and elite runner Emelie Tina Forsberg and their two young daughters—to test himself so close yet so far from UTMB? We spoke with him earlier this summer to find out.

But First, What the Heck Is the Alpine Connections Project?

On August 10, Jornet outsprinted Kenya’s Philemon Kiriago down the finishing chute to win Sierre-Zinal by one and a half seconds. His time of two hours, 25 minutes, and 34.8 seconds bested his own course record by just one second. It was Jornet’s 10th win at what many consider the most prestigious and competitive mountain running race in the world.

At just 19.3 miles with more than 7,200 feet of climbing, most of which is packed into the first 6 miles, it’s a test of VO2max more than anything. Jornet averaged 7:21 minute per mile pace—no, not grade adjusted pace—on the net-uphill alpine trail route with pitches up to 33 percent grade.

Apparently, it was just the tune-up he needed for weeks of 15 to 20 hour days climbing technical alpine routes and stringing them all together by foot and two wheels. He departed from Pontresina, Switzerland, to commence the Alpine Connections project just three days later on August 13. It’s the logical continuation of his (Re)discovering the Pyrenees project from last October, when Jornet linked all 177 peaks over 3,000-meters in the Pyrenees in eight days.

Alpine Connections is the Pyrenees project with the dial turned all the way up and then some. Over the first week of technical alpine climbing, running, and biking, he logged more than 91 hours with 330 miles and nearly 108,000 feet of gain.

How is he fitting in such big days, you may be wondering? Why, by hardly sleeping. Over the first three days he slept an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes a night. He bumped it up slightly to an average of 4 hours and 49 minutes on days four through seven.

In case that doesn’t sound challenging enough, the weather hasn’t made it any easier.

“As it had been raining (and snowing on the summits) the entire afternoon and night before, I left solo at 6:15 in the morning and had another relatively ‘short’ (8:40) day of climbing to make the most out of the conditions,” Jornet wrote on Strava on August 18, five days into the project. “Still, I am used to this ‘Norwegian’ weather that feels just like home, so I managed to summit Dürrenhorn (4034m), Hohberghorn (4218m), Stecknadelhorn (4239m) and Nadelhorn (4327m).”

Jornet was greeted by snow, rain, and copious amounts of fog while traversing glaciated peaks for much of that first week. Nonetheless, over the first week he had already submitted 51 of the 4,000-meter peaks over 825K (512 miles) of running, climbing, and biking and more than 52,000 meters (170,600 feet) of gain.

In his most recent update, Jornet shared that he took a full day off due to the weather. He used the time to try and refuel, rehydrate, and to heal the skin on his hands and feet.

Exclusive Kilian Jornet Interview 

Jornet, 36, has long been able to subvert the processes and platforms on which he’s made his name. After building up his cachet by traveling to—and usually winning—the most prestigious trail races and mountain projects around the world, he announced several years ago that he would minimize airplane travel to a couple of times a year. A Salomon athlete for over a decade, he left the brand to take what he’d learned and start his own. And after winning UTMB four times, he along with 2023 runner-up Zach Miller proposed a boycott of the race last year until the organization cleans up some of its business doings, including rampant global growth and its partnership with the car company Dacia.

We sat down with Jornet in person to unpack his relationship with the sport and himself.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

RUN: You say you’re in the best shape of your life. How did you get here?

Kilian Jornet: Training has been good and especially it’s been consistent. We had amazing weather this winter on the west coast of Norway with super good ice climbing and mountain climbing conditions. Blue sky, super cold for like two months, so we could climb a lot. This spring it was warmer here, which is surprising. We had some good dry trails.

I’m also doing less. When I go to races, there’s a lot of stuff you need to do. I’m an introvert, so being with people takes a lot of energy. After a race, I need to recover physically but also mentally because it takes a lot of energy. So I’m embracing less, which means I can train better.

And I’m doing things I like, like spending my time on NNormal or science projects and that’s giving me positive vibes and making me feel energized.

I think having stability in life, having a routine, makes training easier than racing. I can train better for a longer time. And then I can be more focused when I come to races.

Do you think “dad strength” is real?

No, it takes a lot of energy. But you also feel like you can get into a routine. I can train while the kids are at kindergarten, and then take the weekends easy. So maybe it helps to organize things. Normally I was training when I wanted to and now I can’t. But you get into a routine and that might help. I’m more efficient and I train better.

Before it was like, ‘Oh I have all the days, so I just go out for many, many hours. And I do what I want to. I go to that summit, or that other.’ Now it’s like, ‘Oh no, I have these hours, I have this goal, I want to train this way.’ I still have days where I say, ‘OK, today is a mountain day, and so I go do whatever I want to do.’ But there are some other days where I know, ‘OK, I have this time to train, so I do this session.’

You love the science behind training, and you love just playing in the mountains. How do you strike that balance?

I studied sports science in school, so I probably was already nerdy when I was young. When I was like 16 or 17 years old, I was already doing tests. So it’s always been there in an observatory way. Like ‘I want to try this, and see what it implies. How can I analyze that from a science point of view?’ Not taking science and then applying it to me. It’s always been there in more of an exploratory way than a prescriptive way.

So you view science similarly to how you view the mountains: as an avenue for exploration?

Yeah, it’s a bit the same. When you go to a race, like I have gone to Zegama 12 times. That’s not a lot of exploration. But going to the mountains and doing projects there, it’s much more about exploring things and then seeing what’s happening.

Now that you’re launched NNormal, do you feel additional pressure to go and perform at key races to boost brand visibility? 

I would say the opposite. Because now, with NNormal I’m part of it. I decide what I want to do. Now it’s really like, ‘Yeah, I want to do the race because I’m training well and I’m in shape and I want to do a nice race that I feel connected to somehow.’ Or I want to do this project in the mountains because it’s what I feel I want to do, and I don’t feel any kind of pressure. I know that it helps NNormal, of course, if I’m showing up. But not even racing, like we saw it last year with the project in the Pyrenees.

It was a last-minute thing, like I decided literally two weeks before that. Now that they analyze the press and social media and all that, that project had more exposure than when I did UTMB. So, it’s not only about racing and showing up and things. It’s more like, if you want to do something deeply, you will probably do it better. And if you do something in a good state of mind, probably you will get more inspired and do things that push me further than to set up a calendar and say, ‘OK, I’ll do that, that, that, that.’

Because I know that it’s somehow comfortable. But to break this routine into things like even if it’s races that I want to push the effort or to do big projects that require a lot of energy, I think that needs to be in this space where I have the tranquility of knowing that I don’t have any pressure to do one thing or another.

Your versatility is mindblowing. Do you consciously sacrifice optimal performance at any particular race or objective to prioritize being able to do it all?

Yeah. Last year, for example, I was injured but the plan was to do a project at Everest, a link up there, and then to try and do some short and long races, and then to do a project in the mountains and a ski project.

Long term, I want this versatility. And then I know that if I want to perform on this project, well, I need to have specificity. So the specificity is in the short term. Like I say I know that to get in very good shape for a specific race or project,  specific adaptations don’t take more than six to eight weeks. So the last six to eight weeks before a race or a project, if my training is specific I know that I can perform the best.

But yeah, I can do specificity multiple times in a year and do different kinds of projects. And at the end, I think that’s what keeps me so motivated. Because if I was only racing, I wouldn’t like it. And if  I was doing just things in the mountains, probably then I would get slower and my capacities in the mountains will decrease, too.

Have your athletic goals shifted over time?

I used to be much more competition-centered at the beginning because then I was doing ski mountaineering season in the winter and dry running season in the summer. That was very structured for many years. And I think that also gave me all the base and fundamentals and the knowledge and all that to be able to do other things. It was many years just focused on training.

Then I started to put some projects on steeper skiing or mountaineering,  but around this calendar. Like two racing seasons. And then at some point, they became more like separate things.

Where do you see your career going?

I don’t know actually, because I feel that I’m still in good shape. I’m still performing and I’m still improving things. So yeah, I still really like racing and like pushing myself in  training. So I don’t know how long that will last, but as far as I see that I am happy pushing and racing, I will keep doing it.

And then I will stop doing international races, but I will still do local races because that’s fun. And then projects in the mountains, I will do that hopefully all the time I can. But of course professionally, there will be a moment that it will not be able to sustain my life. Then I think I will still do running and mountaineering for all my life as a pleasure.

You famously were a disciple of a fat adaptation nutrition strategy. Has that evolved at all?

I have shifted my nutrition in the day-to-day a lot over the years. When I was young, I couldn’t afford much, so I was just buying pasta or a big package of rice and tomato sauce. My nutrition was not very varied. As the years have gone on, I’ve taken more care of that. We have a big garden so we get a lot of veggies from there. We try to eat a lot more foods that are fermented and this kind of thing. And I feel like performance-wise that has helped a lot.

In competitions, I’m eating much, much more now. But in training I’m not eating anything during training. Only if I do a very specific session, where I’ll take gels or something like that. But will only happen about one time every month. If it’s a four hour session, I can take a gel every 30 minutes. If I’m doing two uphill thresholds and then maybe some flat, I’ll take a gel between the uphill and the flat on the recovery. That’s very targeted for specific sessions.

In winter, I have a half a liter bottle and it doesn’t matter how long, if it’s eight hours, I take that. In summer, I don’t take anything. And I think that’s helping me in a way because I am developing  some metabolic adaptations. If you have a better metabolism, it’s much more open, so then you don’t really need to train your gut for having much more intake because your metabolism is more flexible on switching from fat to carbs. So you don’t need to train the gut.

Someone who has a worse metabolism and let’s say wants to take 120 grams of carbs an hour in a race, they probably need a long gut training to be able to do that, even if he’s eating and I’m not eating during training. And then it’s just because the logistics are hard. If you’re in the mountains, you don’t want to have to carry a bunch of stuff.

The point is supplements and gels are great for racing, but for daily consumption the chemicals are not good.

Given the state of affairs with UTMB, do you think you’ll ever go back?

Yeah, it’s a race I like. I like the volunteers, I have lived in Chamonix for many years. I love many things about the race. I don’t like many things, but I’ve talked with the race organizers and I have a good relationship with them. Many times we agree that we just disagree. I’m not doing it this year because I have another project. But I think it’s good to disagree on things to build together, and I hope in the future there is change on some things that I don’t agree, like some things on the corporation side, like in the race acquisition or some vision with the impact of their entity when it comes to sponsorships, or their impact on the land.

So it’s things like that that we’re not on the same page. But we can discuss, and it’s good. But it’s a race I might go back to in the future, and I would love to do in the future.

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