Vietnam Highlands Trail by UTMB

Held in Da Lat, the highland city of Lam Dong province, Vietnam Highlands Trail by UTMB is the first UTMB World Series event ever staged in Vietnam. Four courses radiate from the city: LangBiang 100K over 104.2 km, Elephant 50K over 56.4 km, Pinhatt 20K over 24.1 km and Tuyen Lam 10K over 11.3 km. Each one is built around a signature summit, and together they connect four peaks that dominate the skyline of the Central Highlands: Langbiang, Bidoup, Elephant Mountain and Pinhatt.

The terrain changes with almost every hour of running. Courses leave the water at Tuyen Lam lake, rise through the open pine forest that gives Da Lat its scent and its light, then push into the dense evergreen woodland of Bidoup Nui Ba National Park, where Bidoup stands at 2,287 metres as the roof of the region. The longest race crosses that primeval forest before the final climb to the summit of Langbiang at 2,167 metres, the mountain that gives the plateau its name and that carries the legend of the K'Ho people who have lived on its slopes for generations. Pinhatt delivers the ridgelines above Tuyen Lam, while Elephant Mountain adds the most technical ground of the weekend.

January in the Central Highlands means dry days and cool nights at around 1,500 metres, a rare climate in Southeast Asia and the reason French settlers built Da Lat as a hill station a century ago. That layered identity, indigenous, Vietnamese and colonial, runs through the whole event, from the start line on Lam Vien Square to the villages the courses pass along the way. For a trail running community that already counts tens of thousands of ranked runners, this first edition is a landmark.