Ultra-Trail Shudao by UTMB 2026

In the 8th century, the Chinese poet Li Bai wrote a text that has remained famous throughout China 🇨🇳: The Difficult Roads to Shu, in which he describes the mountain paths of Sichuan as so steep that it would be easier to climb to the sky than to cross them ☁️. Twelve centuries later, someone had the idea of organizing an ultra-trail there. Li Bai would probably have had an opinion about that, but he wasn’t asked—you can imagine...😅.

The Shudao (literally “the road to Shu”) is a network of mountain paths more than 2,000 years old, carved into the side of a cliff during the Qin Dynasty to link central China with the Sichuan Basin 🏯. At the time, it was the only overland connection between these two worlds, geographically separated by vertiginous mountain ranges, and for centuries armies, merchants, diplomats, and entire caravans used these tracks to keep the empire alive 🧑‍🏫. In the Guangyuan area, in northern Sichuan, the network stretches for nearly 300 kilometers and contains more than 130 preserved heritage sites 🏛️. It is on this ground, and nowhere else, that the Ultra-Trail Shudao by UTMB® pinned on its first bibs 🎫. The race is very young, with only one inaugural edition to its name, but it entered the trail world with an identity that was already strongly defined. 3,700 runners on the start line for this first edition, including 98% Chinese, and 37% women, which is far from anecdotal in the global trail-running landscape 👏. Race director Qian Xin had the wisdom not to simply impose a race format onto a landscape: his team spent five months working with archaeologists specializing in the Shu Road to design a course where every aid station and every checkpoint tells something about the land it crosses 😌.

The flagship course, the “DSD 100K,” links Jiange to Zhaohua over 104 km and 3,800 meters of positive elevation gain 📐, starting from the stadium in Jiange to climb to the summit of Mount Daping at 1,073 meters. The rest of the route strings together places whose names resonate in Chinese history like battle names in a school textbook: the Jianmen Pass with its Seventy-Two Peaks, those twin cliffs standing above the pass as if the mountain itself had decided to filter passages for millennia 🦅; the Cuiyun Corridor and its cypress avenue, some of which are more than 2,000 years old; and the Liujiayan cliff, where slogans of the Red Army carved into the rock during the Long March of the 1930s remind us that this road also carried a revolution on its shoulders. Mist-wrapped rice terraces, bamboo forests, and old merchants’ houses lit by lanterns complete a picture that feels as much like a historical film as a mountain race 🎋. The “CSD 70K” covers 70.5 km for 3,100 meters of D+ and uses the most striking sections of this same route in a format that still lets you sleep in a bed the next night—which is no small consolation 😄. The “MSD 50K” lists 42 km for 1,900 meters of elevation gain. The “ESD 20K,” with its 21.5 km and 900 m D+, is the ideal distance for a first taste of the terrain without mortgaging your knees for the rest of the winter 😬.

On the Running Stones side, the “20K” awards 1, the “50K” 2, and the “70K” and “100K” 3 each, to be accumulated from one edition to the next as part of the international circuit 🪨. The race also stood out for its finisher medal made of seed paper: once planted in the ground, it gives birth to flowers 🌸, and for a Leave No Trace initiative that invites runners to pick up litter along the route. On a Shu Road preserved for 2,000 years, you might as well help make sure it stays that way a little longer.

Guangyuan is a city of 3.5 million inhabitants in northern Sichuan, about a two-hour drive from Chengdu, the provincial capital and the region’s natural gateway 🐼. Sichuan is particularly known for its spicy cuisine and its huājiāo, Sichuan peppercorn, which numbs the tongue in a way found nowhere else in the culinary world—and makes for perfectly respectable mental preparation before 104 km of mountains 🌶️. The race takes place in November, with cool temperatures at altitude and that golden autumn light that turns the millennia-old cypresses of the Cuiyun Corridor into something that looks like a silk painting 📸.

What makes the Shudao unique among all the races on the global UTMB World Series circuit is that its terrain wasn’t created for the race—it existed long before, steeped in two millennia of human use—and the race slipped into it to delight the most ambitious and curious trail runners 🏔️.