Spanish trail runner overcomes cow attack for top-five UTMB finish
Talk about a moving result
Photo: Forest and Kim Starr/WC
Five weeks before the biggest race of her season, Spanish ultrarunner Sara Alonso faced an obstacle no training plan could prepare her for. While out for a trail run in Spain’s Montseny Mountains on July 13, the 26-year-old was rammed by a charging cow and left with fractured ribs.
Fast-forward to Aug. 28, when Alonso lined up at the UTMB’s Orsières-Champex-Chamonix (OCC) race, determined not to let this crazy setback derail her. She fought through the 61-kilometre course, which features 3,400 metres of vertical, to finish fifth, in five hours and 50 minutes–just 16 minutes behind Kenya’s Joyline Chepngeno, who became the first East African to win the race.
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“I came out brave, I left everything out there, and I fought to the fullest!” Alonso reflected on Instagram after the race.
Alonso described the encounter as both surreal and terrifying. “It sounds like a joke, but it was one of the most terrifying situations I’ve ever been in. I thought I was going to die,” she recalled. Hospital staff later told her it was the third cow-related injury they had seen in the Montseny area in the past year.
This marks Alonso’s second straight top-five finish at OCC. In 2024, during her OCC debut, she placed fourth. Earlier this year, she became the first Spanish woman in seven years to win the prestigious Zegama-Aizkorri trail race.
It isn’t the first time Alonso has bounced back from injury. In 2023, she returned from a hip stress fracture to win the Experience Trail Courmayeur, a demanding, high-vertical, 15-kilometre race in Courmayeur, France (which is on the UTMB courses). It seems that for Alonso to perform best, she only needs a little bit of adversity.
