While North America fixes its attention on California, the European trail season reaches its own summit in the Dolomites this weekend, where the La Sportiva Lavaredo Ultra Trail by UTMB stages its queen race. The Lavaredo 120K sets off from Cortina d'Ampezzo at 23:00 CET on Friday, a deliberately theatrical late start that sends the field straight into the night and rewards the survivors with sunrise beneath the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, the three jagged towers that give the event its name.
The numbers are imposing. The 120-kilometre loop carries around 5,800 metres of climbing and an absolute cut-off of 30 hours, threading through some of the most dramatic terrain in the Alps. The route runs almost entirely within the UNESCO World Heritage Dolomites and passes the same valleys around Cortina that hosted events at the 2026 Winter Olympics earlier in the year, giving this edition an added sense of occasion for the host town.
As a UTMB World Series event, Lavaredo functions as both a destination race in its own right and a marker on the road to Chamonix in late August. Strong finishes here deliver Running Stones and the kind of confidence that carries deep into the late-summer calendar, which is why the start list each year mixes established mountain specialists with ambitious runners using the Dolomites as a measuring stick against the best.
The midnight start is more than spectacle. Racing through the dark hours forces athletes to manage navigation, footing and fuelling when the body is least inclined to cooperate, and the long descents that follow the high cols punish anyone whose pacing has been even slightly too keen in the opening climbs. The classic Lavaredo race unfolds as a slow tightening rather than an early break, with the decisive moves often coming in daylight once the field has thinned.
Alongside the 120K, the festival weekend spreads its shorter distances across several days, drawing thousands of runners and spectators into Cortina and turning the town into a hub of the international trail community. For the leaders, though, the task is simple to state and brutal to execute: hold something back through the night, find rhythm at first light, and arrive in the valley with enough left to race the Dolomites on the way home.