Tor des Géants: Lê Thị Hằng and Lưu Đức Toản Finish 330 km in More Than 137 Hours in the Alps

I remember the evening I sat in front of the screen, following the live timing board from the Aosta Valley. The clock jumped from hour 130 to hour 138 and then stopped. A Vietnamese name sat in the "finished" column: Lê Thị Hằng, 138 hours 40 minutes. No one clapped in my room. Only the ceiling fan turned steadily, and I copied that line into my notebook.

In Boston, where I live and write about women's sports, people talk a lot about 90-minute matches and buzzer-beating three-pointers. Here, people talk about 138 hours. More than 24,000 meters of accumulated elevation. More than 20 passes above 2,000 meters. No fixed stages. No mandatory sleep hours. Just one single course, and a 150-hour time limit.

Lê Thị Hằng comes from Vũng Tàu. Lưu Đức Toản was the second Vietnamese finisher, at 137 hours 50 minutes. The third Vietnamese entrant, an overseas Vietnamese living in France, dropped out mid-race. Three in, two out. That is the first thing I want readers to note, before I tell them about the Alps.

I write athlete biographies, and I write about female athletes. I am used to sitting for hours while someone describes injuries that never make it onto a broadcast. With a race like Tor des Géants, I did the same thing: I re-read all the data, placed the numbers side by side, and only then began to write.

Tor des Géants, the "Tower of the Giants", is a single-stage, non-stop mountain ultra-trail in the Aosta Valley. It was first held in 2026. The main course is 330 km. Within the world of mountain ultrarunning, it belongs to no Olympic or Diamond League structure. It stands outside the framework of the world athletics federation. Its prestige comes from difficulty, not from medals or prize money.

That is why I am careful with headlines like "conquering the world's most brutal race". Conquering is a beautiful word. But it hides the most important thing: finishing a race where roughly 60% of entrants drop out is itself an outcome outside the majority. The value of Lê Thị Hằng and Lưu Đức Toản lies in belonging to the 60% still standing at the finish line, while 40% left the course long before.

This year's edition ran from September 13 to September 19. The men's winner was Jia Ju Zhao of China, in 65 hours 55 minutes 22 seconds. The women's winner was Katharina Hartmuth of Germany, in 67 hours 10 minutes 09 seconds. I record these two marks not to compare, but to place them beside the Vietnamese result.

The winner covered 330 km in just under 66 hours. The two Vietnamese finished in around 138 hours. The gap to the leading group is roughly double. In other words, the winner needed less than three days; the two Vietnamese needed almost six consecutive days in the mountains.

If I stopped there, I would be telling the wrong story. What decides performance at Tor des Géants is not flat-ground speed but altitude and terrain. More than 24,000 meters of cumulative gain, equivalent to climbing from sea level to the summit of Everest nearly three times. More than 20 passes above 2,000 meters. Daytime sun in the mountains and nighttime cold at altitude are two entirely different worlds.

Over those days of watching the race move through each checkpoint, I noticed something the leaderboard cannot say. Based on my experience following mountain ultra races, finishing times here are shaped by terrain far more than by raw fitness. A 2:20 marathoner can finish behind a 3:30 marathoner, if the latter knows how to climb and knows when to sleep.

Lê Thị Hằng did not arrive as a newcomer. Before Tor des Géants, she had completed Prenn Trail 250 km, Son La Ultra Trail 100 km and Vietnam Mountain Marathon 100 km. That is a deliberately built progression: from 100 km, to 250 km, then touching 330 km. No one wakes up one morning and decides to run 330 km of mountain trail.

The same is true of Lưu Đức Toản. He had completed UTMB, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, one of Europe's most prestigious ultras, along with Mantra 116 km, ULJU Trail 9 Peaks 100 km and Mt Fuji 100 km. It was Toản himself who said Tor des Géants is "many times harder" than UTMB. That statement is a technical assessment from an insider, not an applause line.

Here, I want to pause on a detail many reports skip. Tor des Géants has no fixed stages and no mandatory sleep hours. Runners must manage their own running time, sleep time, eating time, and even the time they stop to escape the cold. The race has only 7 large support stations, roughly 50 km apart. Between two stations, a runner is almost alone with their backpack.

The 50 km gap between aid stations sounds simple, but it shapes the entire strategy. Runners must calculate water, food, layers, when to change headlamp batteries, and when to sleep without tipping into hypothermia. One mistake on one segment can cost hours on the next. Above 2,000 meters, at night, a sweat-soaked shirt can become a verdict.

The 150-hour limit looks dry, but it shapes how runners distribute effort from the first kilometer. The two Vietnamese finished with roughly 11 to 12 hours of margin before the cutoff. That sounds comfortable. But over a race lasting nearly six days, 11 hours of margin is not much. A minor injury, one wrong turn, a sudden storm, any one of those could consume the surplus.

One thing I always check when reading ultra results is split data. In this case, splits were not fully published. So I cannot assess how Lê Thị Hằng and Lưu Đức Toản distributed their effort. Did they move evenly across 330 km, or did they collapse and recover at some point? Without data, I do not infer. This is an information gap I have to state clearly.

I have written before about female athletes who never make it onto a results table. I write to recover the names history edited out of the lineup. Lê Thị Hằng is such a name, but in a different way: she was not erased from history, she was simply placed against a standard she never claimed to chase.

There is one small detail I want readers to pause on. Lê Thị Hằng finished in 138 hours 40 minutes. Lưu Đức Toản finished in 137 hours 50 minutes. The gap between them is roughly 50 minutes over the full 330 km. Set against the fact that men and women ran the same course under the same time limit, this raises an interesting question about the relative depth of the women's field. But I must also be honest: I have no data on how many women entered, so this is an observation, not a conclusion.

Now comes the part I want to call the counter-current view. When a headline reads "two Vietnamese conquer the world's most brutal race", readers are quietly led toward an inaccurate expectation. They may assume Lê Thị Hằng and Lưu Đức Toản were near the front. In truth, they were in the middle and back of the finishing cohort.

The original report does not give specific placings. That may be a deliberate choice, to foreground completion over performance. I understand that choice. But I think we can tell a fuller story: acknowledging that they are in the 60% who finished, while also noting the roughly double gap to the leaders.

This does not diminish their value. If anything, it makes their achievement more concrete. A strong amateur, self-funded, self-managing nutrition and sleep, finishing a race with a 40% dropout rate, is a good enough story without embellishment.

And there is one dimension I consider the most important yet the least mentioned: safety. In 2026, a runner named Yang Yuan died at Tor des Géants after slipping, falling and hitting his head. I recall this fact not to add drama, but to set it as the baseline for every judgment that follows.

Lưu Đức Toản described narrow cliffside trails with no safety ropes. In a mountain race that prizes self-responsibility, the absence of ropes on certain sections means runners must decide their own speed, decide for themselves whether to go on. That is an entirely different responsibility from running on asphalt.

The roughly 60% completion rate is the most objective data point about the race's difficulty. In other words, for every 10 starters, about 4 never make it back. Among the three Vietnamese, one belonged to that 40%. This reminds us that the two finishes were not a given.

On entry mechanics, Tor des Géants does not select runners by qualifying standard. Entrants get in through a points system from prior ultras, or through a lottery. In other words, the race does not filter at the gate; it filters at the finish line. The gate is wide, the exit is narrow. That mechanism is exactly what turns finishing into a kind of self-issued certificate.

At a broader view, Jia Ju Zhao's men's win is a notable signal. A Chinese runner winning a top-tier European mountain race shows that Asia's ultra class is moving closer to global standards.

In Vietnam, an ultra ecosystem is taking shape through the very resumes of these two athletes. Prenn Trail 250 km, Son La Ultra Trail, Vietnam Mountain Marathon, ULJU Trail, these domestic races have produced a generation willing to sign up for 330 km in Italy. A young mountain-running ecosystem, but already deep enough that someone feels confident enough to step out to another continent.

I have no data on whether Lê Thị Hằng and Lưu Đức Toản are sponsored, whether they have coaches, whether they trained at altitude. Those are information gaps I must state rather than infer. But those gaps also tell a story: these may be high-level amateurs, building their own paths, funding themselves, carrying their own responsibility.

What stands out is that a Vietnamese woman and a Vietnamese man ran the same course and finished in nearly equivalent times. In many sports, the performance gap between men and women is far larger. Here, on the most brutal terrain, that gap narrows. It is an intriguing hint about the nature of mountain ultrarunning, where endurance, tolerance and sleep management matter no less than speed.

Between the whistle and the weeping, I hear the pulse of an ecosystem waiting to be named. Here, the whistle is the signal at an aid station, and the weeping is the sound of those who dropped out. Between those two sounds, there is a steady pulse: the pulse of Vietnamese runners walking a road none of them had walked before.

There are races whose score is never recorded, because people choose to forget. In races like this, the score is not in the placing. It is in the hundreds of kilometers of mountain trail that passed underfoot, and in a body still standing when the lights of the valley appear.

To this day, I keep the line "138 hours 40 minutes" in a notebook. Not because it is pretty. But because it reminds me that some achievements sit on no medal table, and on no transfer board either. They sit in the silence between two sidelines of what we usually call a limit.

So the question I leave is not what the two Vietnamese conquered. It is this: how will we tell the story of mid-pack finishers, when the sports world still measures by medals and rankings? And can Vietnam's young mountain-running ecosystem turn finishes like these into a launchpad for the next generation?