Hello, everyone. Welcome to Pillars. Always great to have you here. Of course, I'm Dylan

Bowman, and today it is my honor to share a

conversation with Katrine Poletti, the chairwoman and co-founder of the Ultra Trail de Montblanc,

of course, the most important race in all of Trail and Ultra Running, and some would argue

the default world championship of our

amazing sport. I have known Katrine and her husband Michelle for several years now, and have been an

interested and impressed observer of all the great things they've done for our sport. In addition to the UTMB,

they've really been at the forefront of a lot of things, pioneering live tracking and race

coverage that we're now seeing being adopted by other events around the world. They started

the Ultra Trail World Tour. They started the International Trail Running Association,

aka Itra, among many, many other things. But this conversation is very UTMB-centric. We discuss

the earliest days of the UTMB, how it grew from very humble beginnings to the event that it is today,

the challenges of that growth while adhering to the values of the event and the sport as a whole.

We talk about the expansion of the UTMB brand into different international markets, the 2021 outlook for these races, and much, much more.

I really enjoyed this one.

As always, if you enjoy the show, the best way you can support it is by subscribing to our app,

which can be found in both the iOS and Android app stores.

This week we're starting a new feature for subscribers that we're calling office hours.

This is going to be a series where all answer training questions and occasionally have interesting guests on to join in an effort to help enhance our understanding,

confidence and competence as trail runners.

And this week I'll talk a little bit about the Joshua Tree Traverse FKT that I did this past weekend.

If any of you are interested, subscription is only $10 a month, and we have been so surprised

...