Romania's Raul Butaci held off Spain's Julen Calvo by just 42 seconds after 10 hours and 41 minutes of racing to win the 106-kilometre CSP course at the Asics Penyagolosa Trails on Saturday 18 April, opening the 2026 Mountain Running World Cup season in the Castellon hills. Both athletes finished inside 10:41 — Butaci in 10:41:14 and Calvo in 10:41:56 — and each was well clear of Ben Dhiman's 2023 course record of 10:35:32, confirming early-season form across a field that has largely bypassed Chianti and Istria in favour of a shorter taper into a loaded Pyrenean summer.
Butaci, a 32-year-old mountain rescue instructor from Brasov who finished sixth at UTMB in 2025, led through four of the race's six timed sectors and was only ever within touching distance of Calvo from the 70-kilometre descent off Penyagolosa itself. Calvo, racing on home terrain, closed from 90 seconds down over the final 18km, catching and passing Butaci briefly at Vistabella del Maestrazgo before the Romanian retook the lead on the uphill grind out of the last feed station and drove through the finish arch in the Plaza de la Villa. The winner collected 3,000 euros for the CSP title, the second consecutive victory for Romania at the event after Bogdan Ionut Dumitrescu's 2025 win.
Behind the lead pair the race played out over a compressed pack rather than the typical attritional Penyagolosa war of attrition. Third-placed Alex Ayats of Andorra, a former Mont-Blanc 90K winner, crossed in 10:58:04, around 17 minutes behind Butaci but more than nine minutes clear of fourth. The women's CSP went to Spanish national team selection Gemma Arenas, who retook the course record with a 12:46 run that beat Azara Garcia's 2022 mark by six minutes and earned her the full 1,000 Mountain Running World Cup points on offer. Sara-Rebekka Faero Linde of Norway won the shorter-distance MiM in 6:23, another course record.
For the World Cup series the Penyagolosa result has knock-on effects across the rest of the season. Butaci's decision to open here rather than at Istria by UTMB earlier this month means Romania enters the next leg at Marathon du Mont-Blanc on 28 June level on points with the Spanish federation, whose Calvo and Manuel Merillas had been expected to take an early lead. For Spain the mild disappointment of a runner-up finish on home ground is offset by Arenas' women's victory and by the strength of their second- and third-placed men's finishers, who between them have secured the nation the maximum team allocation on the early leaderboard.
Penyagolosa Trails directors said on Monday that the event had attracted a record 4,800 entries across the CSP, MiM and MiMet distances, up from 4,200 last year, with a quarter of those runners coming from outside Spain — the highest international share in the race's 27-year history. Title sponsor Asics used the weekend to showcase its new Fujispeed 4 and the revamped Metaspeed Trail, while the event's carbon footprint reporting, first introduced in 2024, recorded a 19 per cent per-entrant reduction compared with 2023 following the organisers' switch to a centralised shuttle service between Castellon de la Plana and the mountain communities along the course. The Mountain Running World Cup now moves to the Zegama-Aizkorri Marathon on 17 May, the next points-scoring event in a 10-race series that finishes at Limone Extreme in October.