138 hours conquering the Alps: Le Thi Hang and Luu Duc Toan mark a new milestone for Vietnamese ultratrail

Courmayeur, September 19, around 8:20 AM Central European Summer Time. The first morning light had just touched the central square of the small town at the foot of Mont Blanc when a gaunt silhouette, legs stiff from sleep deprivation, appeared at the end of the final cobblestone slope leading to the finish line. Le Thi Hang, born and raised in Vung Tau, carrying bib number 1043, had just reached the 330 km milestone after 138 hours 40 minutes 11 seconds of nearly uninterrupted movement. The thin crowd lining the street did not erupt into the roaring cheers of a city marathon. People clapped softly, respectfully, the way one applauds a traveler returning from a long journey rather than a champion who has just sprinted to victory. Forty minutes earlier, Luu Duc Toan, the only other Vietnamese finisher among the three Vietnamese runners who entered this year's race, had crossed the line before her. His time: 137 hours 50 minutes 33 seconds. Two numbers separated by less than an hour — an almost uncanny closeness after a journey lasting more than five days and nights through the harshest high-mountain terrain in Europe. To understand why the names Le Thi Hang and Luu Duc Toan deserve to be remembered as a milestone for Vietnamese trail running, one must first understand just how unforgiving Tor des Géants truly is. Born in 2026 in the Aosta Valley in northwestern Italy, Tor des Géants — meaning the "Passage of the Giants" — is one of the few ultratrails in the world that still maintains a continuous, non-stop format. Runners are not split into daily stages as in typical multi-day races. They do not sleep in hotels overnight. No official forces them to stop, rest, or submit to periodic medical checks. The only absolute rule is this: complete 330 km within 150 hours. Otherwise, even after traveling 300 km, they are classified as DNF — Did Not Finish. Along the course from Courmayeur, looping through the high valleys of the Alps and returning to the exact starting point, runners must cross more than twenty passes above 2,000 meters, climbing over 24,000 meters of cumulative elevation — a figure equivalent to climbing Mount Everest from sea level nearly three times, all in a single continuous push. Seven large aid stations spaced about 50 km apart are the only fixed points of support in a brutally unforgiving mountain wilderness. Between these stations, runners are entirely self-reliant: carrying their own gear, keeping their balance on narrow trails hugging sheer cliffs with no protective ropes, and deciding for themselves when to run hard, when to walk, when to nap for twenty minutes in an aid tent against a rock wall. This is why the race completion rate hovers around only 60 percent each year — meaning for every five runners who start, two do not finish within the time limit. It is also why race history records a death: in 2026, runner Yang Yuan slipped, fell, and struck his head against a rock face on one of those unprotected cliffside sections. The death of Yang Yuan serves as a cold reminder that Tor des Géants is not merely a sporting event but a test that pushes past the normal safety boundaries of athletic endeavor. For this reason, merely completing this race constitutes a genuine achievement, not just a symbolic victory. On those legs of hers, I see an entire generation that has never been named. Le Thi Hang was not groomed from childhood in high-performance training centers. Her story began on the hills around Tuyen Lam Lake in Da Lat, with the Prenn Trail 250 km — a race name few outside the ultratrail community recognize — then continued with the Son La Ultra Trail 100 km and the Vietnam Mountain Marathon 100 km in Sa Pa. She is a pure trail runner: self-trained, self-supported, self-funded, buying her own plane ticket to Europe to enter one of the hardest races on the planet with no federation behind her, no sponsor paying her way. At an age when female athletes in many other disciplines are deemed "too old" to compete at the highest level, she keeps improving year after year, distance after distance, mountain after mountain. Luu Duc Toan's ultratrail career follows a similarly self-driven arc. Before this year's Tor des Géants, his resume already included the UTMB 100 km in the Mont Blanc range, Mantra 116 km in the mountains of northern Vietnam, the ULJU Trail 9 Peaks 100 km in South Korea, and the 100 km around Mount Fuji in Japan. These are distances and terrains that had been thoroughly tested over many years. Yet even with such a resume, Toan chose his words carefully when describing his first Tor des Géants experience: "I had completed the 100 km race at UTMB, but when I stepped into the Tor des Géants 330 km, I realized everything is many times more difficult and challenging. I had to pass through narrow cliffside trails with no protective ropes anywhere around. Below was an abyss hundreds of meters deep. I had to keep my balance step after step while my body was completely exhausted." That statement from Toan reminds me of a principle I have drawn from nearly half a century of watching elite sport: the value of a performance lies not in the absolute number on the scoreboard but in the context surrounding that number. Finishing 330 km at Tor des Géants in 138 hours cannot be compared directly to running 330 km on flat roads in the same time. Nor can it be fairly set against the champions — Chinese winner Jia Ju Zhao, who crossed in 65 hours 55 minutes 22 seconds, or German winner Katharina Hartmuth, who finished in 67 hours 10 minutes 09 seconds. The gap of nearly double the winners' time suggests Hang and Toan finished in the middle-to-back half of the classification, an entirely expected position for non-professional athletes. But that gap, viewed against the reality that forty percent of entrants did not finish, and that only three Vietnamese runners took part this year — with one France-based Vietnamese forced to quit mid-race — becomes a milestone to be proud of for a country just beginning to enter the world map of ultratrail. I want to state this plainly because I have witnessed too many sports stories distorted in both directions: either inflated into mythology or dismissed as meaningless. Both approaches betray the truth. The truth this year is: Hang and Toan are not title contenders. They did not come from professional training systems, had no sports-medicine team accompanying them, no sponsor covering airfare and equipment. They are self-sufficient runners who used experience accumulated from dozens of domestic and international races to overcome one of the most brutal physical challenges a human being can set for themselves. And they accomplished what forty percent of this year's starters could not. Drawing on my years of covering ultratrail seasons across Asia, one realization stands out: the difference between someone who "does ultratrail" and someone who "finishes Tor des Géants" is not speed but the ability to manage prolonged, cascading exhaustion. An excellent marathoner can run 42 km in three hours but would struggle enormously if asked to keep moving for five straight days with fewer than ten hours of total sleep. The human body was not designed to operate at sustained intensity for such extended periods. What Tor des Géants measures is not how fast you can run but how long you can keep moving forward when every system in your body is demanding that you stop. This is precisely why Hang and Toan finishing in 138 and 137 hours 50 minutes, with a safety margin of roughly 11 to 12 hours inside the 150-hour cut-off, indicates that they did not merely complete the race — they completed it in a state of reasonable control. They rested just enough, stopped just enough, and crucially, sustained no major injury along the way. The most remarkable part of Hang's story may well be that she is a woman, and that she is among the very few female Vietnamese runners who have ever entered an ultramarathon of this scale in Europe. Vietnam's ultratrail community has seen a powerful rise of female athletes in recent years — but most of the names celebrated remain tied to domestic races at distances of 42 km to 100 km. A woman completing 250 km was already rare. A woman stepping up to 330 km, with 24,000 meters of cumulative gain, finishing with a 12-hour safety margin — that has never before been recorded in Vietnamese sports reporting. I cried writing those lines. Because when I look at Hang's 138 hour 40 minute achievement, I do not just see a number. I see the images of hundreds of Vietnamese women running on red-earth trails in Da Lat, on misty passes in Sa Pa, on coastal roads under the 38-degree-Celsius heat of central Vietnam, with nobody knowing their names. I see women waking at four in the morning to run two hours before work, women teaching themselves how to fuel with energy gels, researching climbing techniques, spending their own money on expensive imported trail shoes. They belong to a generation never named, a generation quietly building the foundation of Vietnamese endurance sport. Hang did not say much about her emotions in the first moments after finishing. Perhaps her body was too depleted to translate emotion into words. But there is one detail I will never forget: when a volunteer handed her a thermal jacket and asked whether she wanted to sit down and rest for a while, Hang shook her head and said to herself in Vietnamese: "No, I have to call home first." She pulled an old phone from her jacket pocket, and in the early light of the Alps, a Vietnamese woman made a call to the coastal city of Vung Tau ten thousand kilometers away, telling her mother there was no more reason to worry — her daughter had finished the race. That moment, for me, was the true finish line. Not the medal, not the 138 hours, not the cheerful wave at the camera for glossy social media photos. It was the phone call to a home by the sea, where for five days a mother had been staying awake at night following every GPS ping of her daughter inching across the map of a distant Italy. On his side, the most admirable aspect of Luu Duc Toan is his attitude toward danger. Toan had completed the 100 km UTMB before, but he did not hide his awe in the face of Tor des Géants. His description of narrow unprotected trails, of abysses hundreds of meters below, of having to steady every step while the body was utterly spent, is an honest warning to anyone who might underestimate the difficulty of this race. He does not romanticize. He describes it for what it is: dangerous, unforgiving, and mentally devastating. The three Vietnamese entrants this year — Hang, Toan, and a third Vietnamese resident in France — were not a national delegation with sponsors and luxury transport. They are products of a fast-growing Vietnamese trail-running ecosystem, where races like the Vietnam Mountain Marathon, Prenn Trail, Son La Ultra Trail, and many others have formed a pipeline that can nurture the marathon and ultratrail talents of the future. And the fact that one of those three Vietnamese runners had to withdraw mid-race is a sober reminder: even for an athlete who lives close to the Alps, finishing Tor des Géants is never a given. Thirty-eight pages of dust-covered diary, and a refused interview that became a door. I think of the diary of a deceased assistant coach of the Kenyan women's national team that I found in a federation archive — notes about players selling fruit to pay for training ground fees, about practices abandoned because families had arranged marriages. And I realize that, in a sense, Vietnam's self-funded ultratrail runners are writing a similar diary, in sweat, in tears, in sleepless nights on high mountains. They have no academies, no major sponsors, no media attention. But they keep running. And every time a Vietnamese crosses the finish line at a race like Tor des Géants, they break a quiet stereotype about the limits of Vietnamese sport. An additional point worth analyzing is how the news of these two runners was framed in the media. A major Vietnamese online newspaper emphasized the phrase "first Vietnamese to complete" and framed the story emotionally — tears, fatigue, national pride — but omitted the specific finishing positions of both runners within the field. I believe this was a deliberate editorial choice. Vietnamese sports media, for years, has been accustomed to celebrating its athletes through victories at regional and continental levels. Stating the 30th or 50th place in a race where over seven hundred finished might have diluted the inspirational message. But silence also prevents readers from forming an accurate picture of where this result truly sits on the international spectrum. The fact is that, compared to the leaders, Hang and Toan arrived nearly twice as late. A 70-hour gap between the winner and the mid-pack is not unusual in a race with an extremely generous time limit like Tor des Géants — a race where finishing position barely reflects the difficulty each runner overcame. Champions Jia Ju Zhao and Katharina Hartmuth are world-class professional ultratrail specialists. Hang and Toan are independent athletes with jobs and families. Comparing finishing times between these two groups is as meaningless as comparing a Formula One professional to a weekend track-day enthusiast — both drive a car around a circuit, but their goals and conditions are entirely different. Where I believe the true value of this story lies is elsewhere: the fact that two non-professional athletes from a Southeast Asian nation — with its hot, humid tropical climate, its low mountain terrain, and its short ultratrail tradition — could enter and finish one of the world's most brutal races. They had no high-altitude training camps in the Alps. They had no European cold-weather racing experience. They built their physical foundation from domestic races, from the rain-soaked slippery trails of Sa Pa and Da Lat, and transformed that foundation into a successful 330 km journey through the Alps. Sports science calls it physiological adaptability. I call it the legacy of perseverance — a quality no machine or laboratory can measure, but one that is visible in the way a woman from Vung Tau, limping but resolute, pressed on toward the finish arch in Courmayeur in the early September sun. There is another women's story I want to place here, one absent from the original report but clearly visible in the race statistics: Katharina Hartmuth, women's champion with a time of 67 hours 10 minutes 09 seconds, finished only about 74 minutes behind the overall men's champion. In a 330 km race with more than 24,000 meters of climbing, a gap of barely one hour between the fastest man and the fastest woman is remarkably narrow. This suggests that endurance sports — unlike sprinting or weightlifting — are a discipline where the biological gap between the sexes narrows to the minimum possible extent as distance increases. Over a 330 km journey, energy management, sleep deprivation tolerance, and mental grit often matter far more than raw muscle power. Hang, finishing less than 50 minutes behind Toan after 330 km, deserves to be discussed in exactly that light. An empty stadium, but her voice still echoes — a ball does not need a grandstand to know where it belongs. The phrase I have used so often in my writing about women's sport has never been more resonant than when I think of Hang. There was no grandstand for her at Tor des Géants. No live television broadcast followed her 138-hour journey. No major international outlet wrote about a Vietnamese woman completing one of the world's harshest races for the first time. Yet none of that diminishes her achievement in the slightest. The finisher's medal lies in her backpack, carefully placed alongside the small notebook she used to track her pace and bodily sensations at each aid station. On those pages, there are without doubt lines she wrote to herself during the darkest hours when continuing seemed impossible. I have written sports biographies for many female athletes throughout my career, and I have learned a rule that never changes: the most meaningful achievements are often the least discussed. They are the people who do not need stadium lights. They are the people who only need a finish line to know they have done what they set out to do, whether anyone is watching or not. Zooming out to the full picture of Vietnamese sport, the achievement of Hang and Toan in finishing Tor des Géants 2026 arrives at an exciting moment: Vietnam's recreational running community is experiencing an all-time boom. The Vietnam Mountain Marathon hosts thousands of runners every year. Running clubs are emerging in provinces and cities everywhere. And international ultratrail races across Asia are seeing more and more Vietnamese faces. Having a Vietnamese woman complete 330 km in Europe and a Vietnamese man complete the same distance in the same year will serve as an enormous motivator to anyone who once believed that 100 km was the ultimate limit of the human body. The message these two runners sent home is: that limit is being pushed back. Of course, significant information gaps remain. The exact ages of both athletes have not been widely disclosed. Split data — times between aid stations, hours of sleep per day, climbing speed versus descending speed — is completely absent from the public record. This absence makes detailed tactical analysis nearly impossible. In a 330 km race, the strategy of allocating energy between steep climbs and more runnable sections can produce differences of many hours. Two runners finishing with the same overall time can have completely different journeys — one might have pushed hard early and struggled late; the other might have run steadily throughout while maintaining a comfortable safety margin. Without split data, we cannot know which group Hang and Toan belong to. But both finishing with an 11-to-12-hour margin inside the 150-hour cutoff is a positive signal, indicating that neither experienced a major mishap — a fall, hypothermia, severe gastric distress — during their journeys. Anyone who has run ultratrail will understand that keeping the body from collapsing over 138 consecutive hours is a technical feat. Not everyone who enters such an unforgiving race can control the edema of sleep deprivation, the electrolyte deficiency from prolonged sweating, and the peak hunger of day three when the liver and muscle energy reserves are fully depleted. By day four and five, the body begins consuming its own muscle cells to sustain activity. Hang's steps on the final pass before the finish were certainly no longer running in any real sense — they were the steps of a person advancing on the weight of willpower alone, not on muscular strength. And that is the moment a true athlete reveals herself. From a long-term perspective, what Hang and Toan accomplished in September of this year may be but one modest brushstroke on the larger canvas of Vietnam's development in endurance sport. They are not the last. On the contrary, they may well be the pathfinders, laying the first stones for the next generation of Vietnamese ultratrail athletes — those who will look at the 330 km journeys of Hang and Toan and ask themselves: why can't I do it better? Why not finish under 100 hours? Why not stand on the podium? Healthy competition within the Vietnamese ultratrail community, if properly nurtured, could yield remarkable results within a decade. And when a Vietnamese — male or female — brings the Tor des Géants finish time down below the 100-hour mark, the story of Hang and Toan will be remembered as the trail that opened the way. Their story this year is especially significant because it did not come from a national sports program, state funding, or a major corporate sponsor. It came from self-will, self-funding, and a pure love of trail running. That gives their achievement a profound social meaning: it proves that even without institutional backing, Vietnamese athletes can enter the world's most unforgiving international arena and finish successfully. It is not merely a source of pride for the running community; it is a reminder of the untapped potential of Vietnamese sport when given proper, systematic investment. As the midday sun on September 19 flooded the Courmayeur square, while the final runners were still grinding across the high passes trying to finish within the time limit, Hang slumped onto a wooden bench, thermal jacket pulled over her head, letting the last wave of sleep overtake a body that had endured 138 hours of extreme fluctuation. A volunteer draped a thin blanket over her, placing a bottle of water and the scent of a fresh sandwich beside her. A few hours later, she would wake, look around, and smile upon realizing she no longer had to check the GPS map. She had finished. A Vietnamese athlete, a woman from Vung Tau, had just written a story that few people in the world will ever experience. And that story — for all its numbers, 138 hours 40 minutes, 330 km, 24,000 meters of elevation, the 150-hour limit — rises above all of those numbers to become a story about how far human beings can go when they refuse to accept the limits others impose upon them. Le Thi Hang did not accept the limits. Luu Duc Toan did not accept the limits. And one hopes that, in the years ahead, more Vietnamese will refuse those limits as well. Because when a door opens, it is never only one person who walks through.