Watch: Rachel Entrekin on No Workouts, No Regrets

Rachel Enkrekin broke the UTMB system. Quite literally—when she won the Cocodona 250 outright this spring, UTMB officials didn’t know how to score her performance on the UTMB Index, its internal athlete ranking system. That’s because women’s performances are graded against the men.

So despite being by all accounts a pre-race favorite at least for the top 10 at the 2026 UTMB, she wasn’t invited to any of the pre-race interviews or the elite athlete presentation. (Although she snuck into the pre-race press conference anyway.)

In the end, it didn’t matter. Maybe it even helped. Entrekin dug deep into her suitcase of courage to take second behind ultrarunning now-legend Blandine L’Hirondel, proving (at the very least) that it’s time to rework that system.

It was her first UTMB, but that didn’t stop Entrekin from going out hot. Coming through an electric Notre Dame de la Gorge three hours into the race, she sat in third, less than two minutes off the leader Lucy Bartholomew.

“I remember thinking that was insane,” she said. “I actually had a mini panic attack to Lucy Bartholomew, where I was like ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ and she was like ‘Yes you do!’ and I was like ‘You’re right!’ So I just decided to stick my nose in it and see what happened.”

That didn’t stop her from taking the lead in the wee hours of the night. Blandine L’Hirondel passed her en route to Courmayeur at around the 50-mile mark, but that was the one place she would give up. Emily Schmitz, an American who lives in the Chamonix valley, knocked on her door a few times, but Entrekin stayed calm as the sun traced the sky and she made her way through Switzerland and back into France.

She crossed the line in 21:15:54, 20 minutes behind L’Hirondel and less than two minutes ahead of Schmitz.

You may be wondering if Entrekin mixed up her training at all after Cocodona:

“I just ran the course,” she said about her training. “That was the only thing I did. Actually I did one workout once and I hated it, so I never did it again. I think it worked.”

“Maybe if I had done some workouts I would have got first,” she continued. “But I’m not gonna do that. I’ll just get second.”