VIETNAM MOUNTAIN MARATHON HISTORY: FROM ONE FINISHER TO A FULL PODIUM
Vietnam had no ultramarathon until 2013. That year Topas, a Sapa-based operator, put on a race in the mountains of Lao Cai province with the backing of the Danish Embassy, and the longest distance offered was 65 kilometers. One Vietnamese runner finished it.
Thirteen years later the event draws more than 4,000 runners from around 50 countries, and the 100-kilometer race is won by Vietnamese runners more often than not. The 13th edition runs September 17 to 20, 2026, and it sold out.
What Topas built
The organizers have been direct about the origin: a liking for trail running and for the hills around Sapa, plus a view that the race should pay something back to the area it runs through. Since 2013 the event has raised more than 544,000 US dollars for local projects and education.
That framing matters because of where the course goes. It runs through the villages of the Hmong, Dao and other ethnic minority communities of the Muong Hoa valley, over paths those communities use, past the rice terraces cut into the hillsides above Sapa.
The finish is at Topas Ecolodge, on a hilltop above the valley. It is the same finish the race has used since the start.
Why Sapa
Sapa sits at about 1,500 meters in the Hoang Lien Son range, below Fansipan, the highest peak in mainland Southeast Asia. The French built a hill station there in the 1920s to escape the heat of the delta, and the town has been a tourist destination on and off ever since.
That history is why the infrastructure existed. A race needing 4,000 beds, road access and a finish venue could not have been staged in most of the Vietnamese highlands in 2013. Sapa already had hotels, a road up from Lao Cai and an operator with local knowledge.
The terrain did the rest. The Muong Hoa valley runs southeast from the town in a long trough with villages along the floor and terraces climbing both walls, which produces exactly the profile a trail race needs: sustained climbs, runnable valley sections and a finish that can be reached by vehicle.
The course
The 100-kilometer race starts and finishes in Sapa and climbs about 4,500 meters across the loop, with a 28-hour cutoff.
The terrain changes constantly. Bamboo forest, terrace walls that function as staircases, river crossings, and long sections of clay track that become unrunnable in rain. September in northern Vietnam sits at the end of the wet season, and the race has been run in conditions ranging from dry heat to continuous rain.
Humidity is the other factor. Runners arriving from temperate climates lose more to heat and salt than the elevation profile would suggest, which shows in the results.
The event now offers six distances: 10, 21, 50, 70 and 100 kilometers, plus a 100-mile race with 8,800 meters of climbing.
The 2013 starting point
It is worth being specific about how small this started. The first edition offered 65 kilometers as its longest race. One Vietnamese athlete finished that distance. The rest of the field was expatriates and visitors.
Vietnam had no domestic trail scene, no club structure for the sport and no history of distance running outside the track and road programs. The race was, in effect, an imported event staged in a place that happened to suit it.
The change since then has been faster than in most countries that have gone through the same process. Within four years a Vietnamese runner was winning the longest distance. Within 10 the podium was routinely domestic. Within 12 a runner from a village club held the course record.
That progression is the most interesting thing about the race and the reason it is worth following beyond the region.
Quang Tran
Quang Tran won the 100-kilometer race five times, in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2021. Nobody else has won it more than twice.
He was the first Vietnamese winner of the race, beating fields that included runners from the Philippines and Denmark to finish in 13:17:35 in 2017. His 13:01:11 in 2020 stood as the fastest time run on the course for five years.
The significance was local before it was competitive. In 2013 a single Vietnamese runner completed the longest distance on offer. By 2017 a Vietnamese runner was winning it outright against an international field, and the pipeline that produced him had not existed four years earlier.
Nguyen Tien Hung and the handover
Nguyen Tien Hung won in 2018 in 14:45:44 and again in 2019 in 14:33:45, running against more than 200 competitors in what had by then become the largest mountain race in the country.
The pattern through those years was consistent. Vietnamese runners took the men's title in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Gaetan Morizur of France broke the run in 2022.
The women's race went the other way for longer. Magdalena Boulet of the United States won the first edition covered in the modern records, in 2015 in 16:12:07, the same year she won Western States 100. Caroline Brouchot of France won in 2016 and Kim Matthews of Australia in 2017.
Thanh Vu won in 2018 in 16:08:45 and again in 2021. She was already known in Vietnam for completing the 4 Deserts series, and her wins here were the first by a Vietnamese woman at the distance.
Ha Thi Hau won in 2022 and 2024, running 15:08:33 the second time. She came up through the local running community around Sapa rather than from an athletics background, which by then was the normal route into the front of this race.
The Sa Pa Ethnic Running Club
The most consequential development at this race has nothing to do with international entries.
Running clubs formed in the villages around Sapa in the years after the race started, drawing from communities where the terrain the course uses is simply where people live and work. Those clubs now supply most of the front of the men's field.
In 2025 Ngo Van Chinh of the Sa Pa Ethnic Running Club won the 100-kilometer race in 13:00:10, a course record that took just over a minute off Quang Tran's 2020 mark. Nguyen Si Hieu and Nguyen Trong Nhon finished second and third, giving Vietnam the full podium.
Nhon had won the race himself in 2024 in 13:22:47. The depth behind the winner is now Vietnamese in a way it was not a decade ago.
Wenfei Xie of China won the women's race in 2025, leading from the start, with Nguyen Thi Tra Giang second on her first attempt at the distance and Daphne Linderme of France third.
Adding the 100 miles
The 161-kilometer race with 8,800 meters of climbing is the newest addition and the one that changed the event's ceiling. It put a distance on the Southeast Asian calendar that previously required travelling to Europe, Japan or the United States to find.
It also gave the domestic field somewhere to go after the 100. Several of the runners now contesting the shorter distances came up through the series rather than into it, which is the pattern a healthy race calendar produces.
World Trail Majors
The race joined World Trail Majors in 2025, in its 12th year. The alliance is a group of independent trail races that have chosen to organize outside the UTMB World Series structure, and membership put Sapa alongside the other races in that group on the international calendar.
The practical effect is entries. The 2026 edition sold out, and the field is capped near 4,000 across all distances.
For a race that began as a 65-kilometer event with a handful of local finishers, the position is a considerable distance travelled in 13 years. It also creates a tension the organizers will have to manage, between an international entry list that funds the event and a local running community that has come to define its results.
The wider series
The race is the anchor of a set of events Topas now runs across Vietnam, which took the same model to other parts of the country's uplands. The Sapa race remains the largest and the one that carries the international profile, and it is the one that added the 100-mile distance.
That expansion is part of why the domestic depth arrived so quickly. A runner in Vietnam can now build a season without leaving the country, which was not possible in 2013 and is still not possible in much of Southeast Asia.
The counterweight is that Sapa itself has changed. The town has grown, the terraces have more visitors, and the villages the course passes through host a race weekend that is now a substantial part of the local September economy.
What 2026 looks like
Ngo Van Chinh's 13:00:10 is the mark. It has stood for a year and it broke a record that had stood for five, which suggests the men's times are moving again after a flat period.
The women's course record is less clear in the public record, and the winning times have ranged from just over 15 hours to more than 19 across the last decade, a spread that reflects weather as much as the field.
The 2026 race runs from September 17 to 20 with the 100-kilometer event as the centerpiece. Entries are already closed, which says more about the World Trail Majors listing than about anything that changed on the course. The 100-mile race, with its 8,800 meters of climbing, is among the longest events on the Southeast Asian calendar.