Sophia Laukli is a professional trail runner and cross country skier for Salomon coming from the US. Sophia is only 23 but is already a star of the sport, being the 2023 Golden Trail World Series champion, having won races like the Mont Blanc Marathon and Sierre Zinal and her first cross country skiing world cup race this year. I decided to reach out to Sophia knowing that she’s battling through an injury and wanting to know how she’s dealing with it and how she feels. As elite athletes,...

 Max Keith is a trail runner from Chile and the co-founder of Vert. In this episode we talk about the different types of tests that you can do to monitor your fitness. Tracking progress is not always easy, and tests are a good way to understand how you’re responding to training, if you know what you’re doing and how to interpret the data - something that your coach can definitely help you with. From very simple field tests like a time trial, an uphill test or the max heart rate test, to...

I’m recording this interview live, from the Vert.run headquarters in Boulder and my guest today is Kirsten Kortebein. Kirsten is one of the vert.run co-founders, together with her partner Moises Jimenez and their friend Max Keith. We talk about what she thinks and how she feels about the journey with Vert, what are some of the challenges that she had to face in her working experience, we talk about work and life balance, setting priorities, growing the company, living with an endurance...

Steve Krenn is a trail runner from New York and a Vert.run coach. In this episode, Steve and I give some tips on how to find trails when you're in a new place, for example for a work trip or when you are on vacation, how to build routes, how to discover the most popular trails in a certain area, how to take advantage of some route builder apps and heatmaps, how to use your gps navigation features. ____________________________ Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@vert.run⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on IG Download our app and sign...

Last week Leo and I ran the Lake Sonoma 50 and Lake Sonoma Marathon in California. We both had very good races, with Leo placing 7th overall in the marathon in 4:01:53, and I winning the LS50 with a new course record in 6:30:17. This is our race recap: we talk about our training leading up to the race, strategy, taper, nutrition, gear, approach, what we learned, what the experience meant and felt like for both of us.  ⁠⁠__________________________ Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@vert.run⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on...

Parker Farabee is a trail runner, physiotherapist, exercise physiologist and coach from Portland, Oregon. In this episode we talk about strength training for trail runners. Why is strength training so important, why do we need strength as trail runners? Of course we're not bodybuilders, so how much strenght do we need? What type of strength training do we need in order to get stronger, but not bulkier? We will give some practical examples for the application of strength training in your...

I’m recording this interview live, from the vert run headquarters in boulder aka moi’s house, and my guest today is Seth Ruhling. Seth is a North Face sponsored athlete, a podcast host and a boulder boy fans favorite. He’s originally from Tennessee but he’s moved to Boulder to chase his dream to train and compete at the highest level in the sport of trail and ultrarunninng.  In this episode, we chat about training and life in Boulder, what makes this community unique, what are some pros and...

Yngvild Kaspersen, Toni McCann and Dani Moreno are professional trail athletes for Adidas Terrex and respectively CCC 2023 winner, OCC 2023 winner and third place finisher at OCC 2022. Yngvild, Toni and Dani are currently in Auburn for a short training camp on the Western States trails, so I thought it would be fun to catch up and see how they’re doing, how their training is going, how they support each other, who’s mostly in charge of cooking, who makes the best coffee, and much more. As...

Benjamin Roubiol is our 2023 trail running world champion. Benjamin comes from France (Savoie) won the world title in the long race in Innsbruck, on a 80km course with 6000m of elevation. We catch up with Benjamin to know how he’s doing and how he is structuring his training in this first part of the season, his goals in 2024, some curiosities about his still very young career and world championship race last year, his studies in environmental science and forest management. Follow Benjamin...

Steve Krenn is a trail runner from New York and a Vert.run coach. Running at night can be a beautiful and rewarding experience, if you know how to do it. Some of the most famous ultra trail races often include running through the night. During the wintertime, when the days are short, we’re often running through the dark, before or after school or work. What are some of the best practices that can make your night running experience better and safer? What are some of the things you should pay...

Carlos Ferrer Fernández is a trail runner from Paris and the managing director of the newsletter Mile and Stone. I invited Carlos on the podcast after following his newsletter for a while, and discovering a great project that I feel like is contributing to more knowledge, better information and more professionalization in the trail and ultra running space. In this episode, we chat about the genesis of this newsletter, why it’s particularly interesting and how it’s structured, we talk about...

Kimi Schreiber is a professional trail runner, a journalist and a podcaster from Germany. She runs for Adidas Terrex. In this episode, we chat about running, training and trail running media, but the main topic of our conversation is probably authenticity: the courage to be ourselves and show other people what we really are, not what we pretend to be. In a world where success is so often tied to performance, where the comparison game of social media causes much more mental stress than we’d...

Parker Farabee is a trail runner, physiotherapist, exercise physiologist and coach from Portland, Oregon. In this episode we talk about base training and how to build an aerobic base. What are the benefits of base training? Why is it essential to increase our work capacity and improve fatigue resistance? What happens to our bodies when we're training at an easy intensity? Why is hard, intense training not a substitute for aerobic training? These are just some of the questions we...

Robbie Simpson is a professional trail and road runner from Scotland, sponsored by Adidas Terrex. Robbie is one of the best all around athletes in the world: he's run anything from 5k on the road to ultramarathons. He's been on the podium of Sierre-Zinal FIVE times, he's won a world mountain running championships bronze medal, and he's won a medal in the marathon at the Commonwealth Games. We talk about training, racing, combining roads and trails, turning pro, making a living from the sport,...

Max Keith is a trail runner from Chile and the co-founder of Vert. In this episode we talk about how to monitor your training: what data and metrics should we be paying attention to? Technology, with all kinds of data, has become so easy to access, but what is actually relevant and what should we really care about? What can we learn from the analysis of what we’ve done in the past?  ____________________________ Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@vert.run⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on IG Download our app and sign up to our...

Henriette Albon is a professional runner for Arc'teryx living in Norway. Henriette just set the women’s winter FKT of the Bob Graham Round, one of the most challenging and famous trail routes in the British Lake District, tagging 42 peaks and covering 106 miles with over 8000m of elevation. In this episode we talk about the challenges of her adventure, how she planned it and executed it, we discuss racing and FKTs in trail running, quitting her 9-5 job to become a professional athlete,...

Parker Farabee is a trail runner, physiotherapist, exercise physiologist and coach from Portland, Oregon. In this episode we talk about how to deal with an injury and about cross training and rehab. We will point out and clarify some of the most important things you should do when you get injured, how you can and should maintain consistency in your training, how to cross train, how to establish a recovery protocol, how you should work with your coach and your physio to get healthier and...

Kristin Jensen is a trail runner from Denmark and a Vert.run explore athlete. Kristin is a passionate runner whose goal is, like many other athletes that we coach, to run longer, faster and stronger while having fun in the process. In this episode we talk about being a trail runner in Denmark, probably not the most typical place you would think when it comes to running on trails or in the mountains, about Kristin’s experience with training with Vert, developing community, navigating the ups...

Katie Schide is a professional trail runner for The North Face from the US, living in France. Katie is one of the most well known and established trail runners in the world: she’s just been awarded the second place of the Trail Runner of the Year Award presented by Freetrail, and as well as the second place of the historic Ultra Runner of the Year Award by Ultrarunning Magazine. She’s a 2021 UTMB winner, a 2023 Western States runner up, with a time that would have won every edition but last...

In this episode we talk about some common misconceptions in training for trail and ultras. With the recent increase in participation in trail and ultrarunning and more and more people coming to trail running from the roads or other endurance sports, team sports, or from being sedentary, we felt a need to discuss some common myths and not always accurate ideas about training for trail and ultras, such as that training for trails and ultras will make you slow, that you have to live in the...

Dan Curts is a professional trail runner for Brooks coming from New Hampshire, United States. With PRs of 3:43 in the 1500m, sub 4 min in the mile and 13:38 in the 5000m, Dan is a really fast, really talented runner who’s main focus is on mountain running and the sub ultra distances. This year he won the US mountain running up and down champs and has competed at the world trail and mountain running championships in Innsbruck. In this episode we talk about Dan’s training, how road and track...

Our own Max Keith just ran The Speed Project Atacama, a 500km crossing of the Atacama Desert that is not just a race, it’s an adventure, a deep dive into the unknown, a shared experience with all the participants and crews, an introspective journey across one’s emotions and soul.  The only rule of this event is that there are no rules, and that you need to cover the approximately 500km between start and finish, alone or in a team of six participants. The spirit of the race manifests in the...

James Huw is a trail runner, a science presenter, a geologist, astronomy and climate scientist from Wales, UK. James’ mission is to communicate science, make science cool and accessible to people. With Kilian Jornet he founded the Athlete Climate Academy, a place to give outdoor athletes the background they need to discuss climate change and environmental issues with confidence. In this episode we talk about the language of science and how science should be a leading force of our society....

Emkay Sullivan is a professional trail runner for Craft from Reno, Nevada, United States. After a long and challenging year full of success but also some setbacks, Emkay decided to put off her final goal of 2023 and not run CIM, California International Marathon.  In this episode talk about the challenge of training, the difficulty of redefining goals and adjusting a plan, how toughness sometimes can be just admitting to ourselves how tired we are sometimes, and how we get to decide whether...

Malen Osa is a professional trail runner for Salomon living in Spain, in the Basque Country. Malen is only 20 years old and has had a breakthrough season in 2023, placing fourth overall in the final ranking Golden Trail World Series, and top 5 at Dolomyths Run, Pikes Peak Ascent and Mammoth Trail Fest. She’s definitely one of the most interesting young talents in the sport, someone to keep an eye on over the next few years. In this episode, we chat about her sports background and...