The world’s best mountain ultra-runner — Kilian Jornet — is returning to Colorado. He’s not coming for a holiday though.
The 37-year-old Spaniard next week will scramble up Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park and then run to Mount Blue Sky to launch an audacious mission that will see him racing up some 67 of the continental U.S. 14ers in Colorado, California and Washington in the shortest time possible. And that first-of-its-kind mission — he’s calling it “States of Elevation” — includes pedaling a bike between peaks and states.
Jornet said the 14er project is “kind of an excuse” to explore the West and “and find nice lines.”
“It’s also a physical exploration,” he said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “It’s big enough that I know I will reach my limit in many different ways, both physically and psychologically and cognitively.”
If he matches the paces set by record-setting climbers in Colorado and California — and can bike around 150 to 200 miles a day when he pedals from Colorado to California and then Washington — it’s safe to assume Jornet will spend more than a month in major-league motion for his American 14ers mission.
Jornet has raced in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains before, but this is an opportunity to more deeply explore the state’s high peaks. He’s particularly looking forward to racing through the technical Elks Range above Aspen. He also has never run the daunting L.A. Freeway route between Longs Peak and Mount Blue Sky.
“All my friends say it is so cool,” he said of the ride-top L.A. Freeway route, the 38-mile, 19-summit, 20,000-vertical-foot scramble that connects Rocky Mountain National Park with South Arapaho Peak en route to the trailhead leading up Mount Blue Sky.
He’s also looking forward to the chossy Sangre de Cristos, another range in Colorado he has not visited.
“I’m very excited to discover that because it’s a bit more technical,” he said.
When told that many watchers are wondering what made him decide to ride his bike from Colorado to California, he said he too was still coming to grips with that decision. He’s going to log long days in the saddle pedaling from southern Colorado to California’s Sierra Nevadas and then another 500-or-so miles from northern California’s Mount Shasta north to Washington’s Mount Rainier, one of the country’s most daunting 14ers, with a lengthy ascent of crevasse-choked glacial terrain.
“It’s just to be on a pace that is human. You discover many more things,” he said, expressing interest in the slower interactions he might share with people along the way as he pedals versus traveling by car, train or plane. “Like if you are traversing a desert that is windy, you suffer and appreciate that much more than if you are just driving. It’s to have a pace that I can get a sense of the landscapes that I’m traversing.”
He hasn’t started setting out a specific route for Colorado just yet. He expects to adjust on the fly as the project unfolds, with tweaks for weather and unexpected challenges as he moves south from Longs Peak.
“The routes will adapt on the go but I have kind of this main idea,” he said.
55 years of haste on Colorado 14ers
Haste on Colorado’s highest peaks was born in 1960 when Boulder’s late Cleveland “Cleve” McCarty hiked Colorado’s then 52 14ers in 52 days, setting a speed record that had simply never occurred to most mountaineers.
In 1974, George Smith, 46, and his sons Flint, Quade, Cody and Tyle — ages 15 to 22 — climbed 54 Colorado 14ers in 33 days and then went to California and Washington to complete 68 14ers in the Lower 48 in 48 days.
“We did it by what I call normal means,” said Cody Smith, whose family’s book, “Bark of the Cony,” outlines the life philosophy of the late George Smith — whose right arm was mangled in an accident when he was 3 — and how high-altitude lessons guided his brood. “We did not start any climbs after dark. We tried to get normal sleep. We had rest days. We did not use any cooks or gear-fixers or route finders. We were unsupported. Just a family on a climbing trip.”
Smith is quick to dismiss any comparison to what his dad and brothers did and what Jornet is attempting.
“He is just in a different league altogether,” Smith said. “I can’t wait to watch this. It’s fascinating to see the evolution of approaches and different ways we access the mountains.”
The U.S. 14er record set by the climbing Smiths stands today. Jornet will likely set a new record for a human-powered, crew-supported scaling of the country’s highest summits. He could even beat the Smith family’s record they set with their station wagon.
The climbing Smith clan’s Colorado ascent record did not last long. A long list of thick-thighed human mountain goats have repeatedly set new bars for speed on Colorado’s highest peaks, including Andrew Hamilton, who in 2015 scaled all 58 of the state’s 14ers in nine days. In 2021 Hamilton climbed the state’s 100 highest peaks — all of them over 13,800 feet — in 22 days. In 2023 Boulder adventurer Erin Ton climbed 57 of the 58 peaks in 14 days.
Jornet’s human-powered link-up of Colorado 14ers — pedaling a bike from peak to peak — has been done a few times before, most notably by Hamilton in 2003 and endurance legend Justin Simoni in 2014. Boulder County’s Joe Grant did a human-powered ascent of all the 14ers in 2016 in 31 days. Athletes also have linked up all California 14ers as well, hiking and pedaling between the peaks in the Sierra Nevada range before the long haul north to Mount Shasta. The record for that — set in 2022 by Jason Hardrath, a teacher from Oregon with more than 100 Fastest Known Time records to his name — is just shy of seven days.
Knowledge and experience in mountain sports
In addition to winning all the hardest races in mountain ultrarunning in the world — most of them several times — Jornet has set records for routes very few have done. In 2023 he ran up 177 peaks over 9,000 feet in the Pyrenees in eight days. Last summer he linked 82 12,000-foot peaks in the Alps in 19 days, beating the previous record by 43 days. For that project in the Alps — he called it Alpine Connections — Jornet ran, climbed and biked from Switzerland to France, traversing 750 miles, climbing nearly 250,000 vertical feet and averaging a little more than five hours of sleep a day.
Jornet, who has three young daughters, said that the Alpine Connections project involved spending 15 to 20 hours a day racing through no-fall zones, calling it among the most challenging projects in his career, with ”every day very mentally demanding.”
His team collected a lot of physiological data during his rare moments of rest, including taking blood samples and conducting cognitive tests. He was frazzled at the end of each stage of that 19-day push but tests showed his brain was completely recovered after only a couple hours of sleep.
“That was very interesting to see,” he said.
There’s something about ultra-running, especially in mountain terrain, that allows older athletes to excel. A lot of the world’s top endurance athletes are rarely spring chickens coasting on youthful energy and strength. Instead, they tend to be in their 40s or 50s.
Jornet said he is running faster in the mountains at 37 than he was at 20. He credits his ever-expanding fluency with the language of mountains.
“When it comes to mountain sports, knowledge is a big thing. There is an advantage for people who have been out there for a long time. Knowledge of how to navigate, how to deal with problems and also muscle knowledge,” he said, describing how he can conserve energy on long runs because he knows how to protect himself for a long haul. “When I would run an ultra when I was 20 I needed two weeks to recover but today, the day after I am OK. I think it’s because the body keeps this memory and it’s able to recover faster because it’s used to that.”
“The best that ever was”
Trailrunning legend Buzz Burrell co-founded the Fastest Known Time website in 2018, tapping into the growing phenomenon of athletes pursuing speed records for alpine ascents and descents. Today, fastestknowntime.com lists top speeds for nearly 7,000 trails across the globe. (Jornet has 20 of those, including roundtrips on Denali in Alaska, the Matterhorn in Switzerland , Mont Blanc in France, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the Grand Teton and, with a time of 14 minutes, 12 seconds, the fastest ascent of Mount Sanitas in Boulder.)
Burrell spoke a bit with Jornet earlier this year as the endurance icon pondered a human-powered traverse of 14ers in the continental U.S. It makes sense, Burrell said, that Jornet would want to set a high-profile record in North America, where the running market is the largest in the world. That’s part of the growing professionalization of trail running, he said.
For the last 10 years or so, contracts with professional trail runners have included fastest-known-time records, or FKTs, as performance metrics. Maybe a running shoe company’s deal with an athlete includes a bonus for a podium at the Leadville 100 or an FKT on, say, Nolan’s 14, the famed stretch of 14 14ers spanning 100 miles across the Sawatch Range that is a trophy for endurance mountain athletes.
But this is not just about Jornet thrilling his sponsors.
“Kilian has to be talked about in a different sense. He is the best there ever was. The person who is coming to Colorado is commonly acknowledged as the best athlete in the history of the sport,” Burrell said.
There are very few sports where a single athlete is indisputably accepted as the GOAT. (Whitewater kayaking is one, with 32-year-old Dane Jackson is universally heralded as the greatest paddler in the history of the sport.)
Burrell said Jornet’s technical abilities in complex alpine terrain are unrivaled. His endurance is equally unparalleled. With every step he advocates for better understanding of the impact of a warming climate and women’s equality in trail running. (Scientists with his Kilian Jornet Foundation followed his Alpine Connections route, collecting data and samples from glaciers, permafrost and mountain-top air to build an interactive map to help better understand the impacts of climate change on wildlife and habitat in Central Europe’s mountain range.)
Jornet said he won’t deploy scientists on his Lower 48 14er mission but he’s eager to talk with residents along the way and “hear about the issues they are facing.” He’s contacted a host of different environmental and conservation groups along the way to learn more about work around biodiversity, water and “the solutions they are proposing.”
Jornet said his aesthetics and speed “align pretty much” toward the fastest route. Typically the fastest way to a summit is along an alpine ridge, which is where his technical talents shine brightest with a gazelle-like gallop across jagged rocks.
“I want to just have a blast and do a nice ridge line. I also want to go faster,” he said, pointing to his decision to pedal between the peaks as an example of him opting for aesthetics over speed. “It’s not the fastest way, but it’s a much nicer way. So I would say I put the line first, the aesthetics of it. Then on those aesthetics, I try to go as fast as I can. But not the other way around. The line, it goes before the speed.”
Burrell said Jornet’s one-of-a-kind minimalist, environmental ethic and his fun-and-speedy aesthetic anchor his legacy as the best-ever.
“He’s very creative,” said Burrell, pointing to Jornet’s plan to traverse the L.A. Freeway route even though that daunting ridgeline scramble, which Burrell pioneered and named, does not include any 14ers “but it’s cool,” Burrell said.
“And he’s doing it because it’s cooler. Style is really important to Kilian. It’s not just about chasing a number,” he said. “He’s not just going to see how fast he can do it. He’s going to style it a little bit.”