One summer, three races, all over 200 miles. For Manu Vilaseca, 2025 will be a year to remember. Across mountains and deserts, through all kinds of weather and every extreme of elevation, she raced the Triple Crown of American 200s, with her final combined time across the Tahoe 200, Bigfoot 200 and Moab 240 coming to 201:02:06. This didn’t just break the old record, it obliterated it by 29 hours.
While 600+ miles of racing is undoubtedly tough, Manu made it even tougher by travelling to the races, mostly on the US west coast, from her home in Spain, crossing eight or nine timezones just to make it to the startline each time. “I consider that flying, it's like a race,” she says. “There are so many things that can go wrong and that's like an added stress to you, right, for you to get there.” As a result, she considered each race to start the moment she left home, staying awake through the long westbound flight, arriving in the evening in the US. “I actually want to get there really tired,” she says, “so that I can sleep the whole night and just wake up in the correct time zone.”
The Triple Crown takes place over 4 months, starting mid-June in Tahoe and ending in October in Moab. Everything about it is daunting. “It's an insane challenge,” says Manu. “You know, just running one 200-mile race is super hard. But you have very little recovery in between, and you're doing three!” Despite the challenges and the intensity of the repeated racing, Manu actually found herself improving over time. “I'm surprised with how I'm able to recover,” she says. “I actually felt better at Bigfoot than I did in Tahoe – I didn't expect that at all. I think there comes a lot of learning in this process.”
Going into the final race in Moab, we asked Manu onto the Mount to Coast podcast where she explained that rather than feeling fatigued, she was more excited than ever to race. Despite the event in Utah being the longest of the three at 240 miles, and despite the weather forecast predicting rain, and possibly even snow, she was ready and brimming with enthusiasm. “I'm more excited now than I was in the beginning, she explains. “I go there because I want to enjoy it. The result, it ends up being a consequence of that... You know, you can only control your part. When I finished Tahoe... someone said to me, 'The first one is done now you have to go to Bigfoot.' And I was like, ah, you know, that feeling of a hangover... But to my surprise when I finished Bigfoot and they said, 'Now you just have Moab,' I was like, wow, you know, I could go there right now. I was super excited."
Manu arrived in Moab to discover rain – unusual in the desert. But that didn’t deter her. She ran her own race and she ran it alone, consciously choosing not to use pacers. “I wanted to go alone, with no pacer,” she says “because just like in life sometimes you have to figure things out yourself.”
A lot can happen in the more than three days it takes to run 240 miles. Manu experienced epic shifts in elevation, weather and mood. At one point she ran through a thunderstorm.
“The lightning was insane,” she says. “So, so crazy. I've never seen something like this in my life. I was in this muddy place and I couldn't even stand up, just falling on my butt. I had like 8km to go (to the aid station) and the storm was coming and I'm like, oh no, oh no, I don't know what to do. It was scary.”
Fear couldn’t stop her though. She crossed the line as second placed woman in 76 hours and 12 minutes. She had finished top 10 overall in all three races, and had broken the women’s Triple Crown record by 29hrs, an absurd amount. “Please don’t wake me up from this dream,” she wrote on instagram after the race, “I could stay on it forever. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
What’s next? A vacation, perhaps? Not for Manu. As a coach who leads in-person training groups back home in Spain, true downtime is a luxury. “I can take a vacation from running,” she says, “but I'm a coach and I do in-person classes like strength yoga. So I definitely take some time off running but I will still be very active.” After that, maybe a backyard ultra in December. Who knows? For this year, Manu is transcendent.
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Technical Note
Manu raced the Triple Crown in the Mount to Coast T1 and a special prototype shoe. I raced Tahoe in the T1s” she says. “I didn't even have a spare – just one pair of shoes and I never questioned changing or whatever. I was very surprised at how it felt throughout the race and until the end, which felt basically like it did in the beginning. And then for Bigfoot, I ran with a prototype. I asked them if I could use them in the race and they said yes. So I thought, you know, what better opportunity to give it a go and see? Then I also have valuable information to share with Mount to Coast after going through 200 miles with the prototype. And I can say a lot about that shoe for them. So that was also kind of like my goal.”
Discover more about Manu Vilaseca by tuning into the full podcast.