The Ultra-Trail Australia weekend opens on Thursday 14 May with the longest race of the programme, the UTA Miler, taking 160 kilometres of Blue Mountains singletrack out of Katoomba at 06:00 local time. Hoka has signed on as the title sponsor for the third year of UTA's tenure inside the UTMB World Series, and the Miler is the qualifying race of the weekend, offering automatic UTMB Finals stones into the 2026 lottery for the top three men and top three women. The 1500-strong runner village at Scenic World was open from 13:00 on Wednesday for kit-check and bib pick-up, with the start corral filling under floodlight in the hour before the gun.
The men's race carries a thinner-than-usual elite field after two late withdrawals last week, but local UTMB regular Andy DuBois returns to defend the title he won by twenty minutes last year, with Australian mountain-runner Vlad Shatrov, Hong Kong's John Ellis and New Zealand's Sam Harvey filling out the favourite bracket. On the women's side, two-time UTA podium finisher Lucy Bartholomew lines up against Japan's Ruriko Kubo, with French ultrarunner Mathilde Heaton making her UTMB World Series debut after a top-five finish at the Lavaredo Ultra Trail last summer. Race organisers have published the cut-off at the 100-kilometre Queen Victoria Hospital aid station at 22:00 Thursday evening, with the overall finish cut-off at the same point twenty-eight hours after the gun.
Weather across the Blue Mountains is forecast for a cool early-autumn start with overnight lows of three to five degrees Celsius in the Megalong Valley and clear skies pushing the daytime maximum towards twenty-one degrees on Friday afternoon. Race operations have flagged a wet section through the Six Foot Track and the second pass at Nellies Glen as the technical pressure points of the course, with chains and ropes installed on the steeper Furber Steps descent in the second half. The 160-kilometre Miler shares its mid-section with the UTA100 course, which starts at 06:30 on Saturday morning, so leading Milers will reach the same passing points an hour or so ahead of the UTA100 leaders.
The UTA Miler also acts as the second qualifying event of the 2026 UTMB World Series after the Mt Fuji 100, and the World Trail Majors series points table will move significantly across the weekend with both the UTA100 and the 160-kilometre Miler awarding scoring places. Hoka has installed the brand's now-familiar finish-line arch beside the Echo Point cliff edge, and the 50-kilometre and 22-kilometre races on Friday and Saturday share the same gantry, giving the Miler finishers a finish-line tunnel that has stayed lit through Thursday night for the lead pack.
The UTA Miler will run live on the UTMB TV stream from 06:00 Thursday Australian Eastern Standard Time, which is 20:00 GMT on Wednesday evening and 16:00 ET. Live tracking on the UTMB Live platform will follow individual bibs through ten on-course checkpoints, with provisional results posted at each timing mat. Running Lookout will carry rolling updates from the Echo Point finish as the first Milers cross late Thursday night and into Friday morning.