It’s the first time Ben Dhiman (U.S.) has been to La Palma, Spain, but he has high hopes for the 2026 Transvulcania Ultramarathon. In the following interview, Ben talks about life after placing second at UTMB last year, becoming the father to twins, and how he hopes his winter training will lead to a strong performance on the Transvulcania course.
For more on who’s racing, check out our in-depth preview and follow our live coverage here on the website and on Twitter/X on Saturday.
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Ben Dhiman Pre-Transvulcania Ultramarathon Interview Transcript
iRunFar: Eszter here with iRunFar. We are starting this interview for the third time. We are here at the 2026 Transvulcania Ultramarathon, here with Ben Dhiman. How are you?
Dhiman: Great. Good to be here.
iRunFar: Yeah. Is this your first time on La Palma?
Dhiman: It is. Flew in. We are on Wednesday. I flew in on Monday to test a bit the track. And it just felt like showing up not last minute, last minute, but it’s always nice to discover a bit, the race feel.
iRunFar: The last time we talked to you on camera, it was after your second place at UTMB last September. After that, you left there and you had twins.
Dhiman: Yeah.
iRunFar: You just gotten second at arguably the biggest trail race in the world. What was that like, the next couple of months after UTMB?
Dhiman: Well, it was well-placed, the birth of the twins, because I had to recover for sure. I had to absorb the … well, there’s a lot of downstream effects that happens after a big result. And I didn’t realize just how much I’d put this race on a pedestal. So after it happened, there’s a bit of a come down period. That fell at the same moment that the twins were born. I was interested to race the end of last year, but I saw it’s not going to happen, newborns and stuff. Yeah, you’re not in real good training form. And so it felt right to just leave it there and pick up here in the spring.
iRunFar: Yeah. Two newborns, not just one.
Dhiman: Yeah.
iRunFar: That had to be a pretty big life change.
Dhiman: Yeah, it’s amazing though.
iRunFar: I feel like just like watching you race every year, you’ve just been building momentum. From an outside perspective, your results are coming from bigger and bigger races and better and better results. What does that look like from an internal perspective, from you? Is that the same experience?
Dhiman: Yeah, I still keep the same fighting spirit I think, year-in, year-out. And I just keep training hard and showing up with very high expectations and standards for my performance. And I’m always falling short. So it’s like I have more of a reason to get better the next year because I didn’t win UTMB. And I felt like I flopped at the end of that race. So I would like, again, just have the fire to work with. And I think that’s important, to find energy sources that link in with the motivation. And for me, it’s very natural to just, “Okay, that was good, but we can do better, surely.” And that feeds then into the training regime and system. So my goal is to just progress things during parts of the year, but then also, like at this point as well, in order to increase the level of performance, there’s a lot of details as well.
But the nice thing is I’ve now built up some experience. I know how, for example, to treat myself during a race week. Some of the basic athlete stuff a bit and learning my body and understanding how much training I can do. And then when it’s time to finally start after three, four months of training, it’s like, finally, I’m free.
iRunFar: Now you get to race.
Dhiman: Yeah.
iRunFar: Do you feel like you have a multi-year plan going, or is it really just a year-by-year, see where you end up in the fall?
Dhiman: I wouldn’t say that there’s an architecture that’s year-to-year, but there’s certainly a theme that I rinse and repeat. And that is the desire to chase wins and fast times and to sort of push myself a bit where I see I need to push. I mean, like every winter, I use the winter as the place to anchor my performances in the summer.
That means that I’ve never been content to do the same winter that I’d done the year before. I have to up the ante a little bit. And that’s been a lot. I feel like that’s been a huge source for where my performances wind up coming is just like, “Okay, I’ve doubled down again and then again and I just did more.” This year was more actually toned down slightly the intensity in winter, but ramp up the hours. That left me feeling pretty good.
Sometimes you never know what’s going to happen with small increments in training and there’s definitely weeks where I was toast, but I think it’s good. It’s built some strong legs.
iRunFar: What did your winter look like? You’ve described a bunch of it on your Substack.
Dhiman: Winter looks for me a lot like skiing and then multi-surface running. So some track, some treadmill, some trail. For me, one of the important metrics before a race is looking at how much distance and elevation I’m doing on the trails. Or on terrain as specific as I can to the race that’s approaching. In the winter, however, I just throw out the specificity. So it’s just, you build more or less this big platform without incorporating the specific components for what you need to race. And then as the race is coming, you get in that funnel towards the specific point. So I was just training a lot of aerobic volume around 24-plus hours a week and just using a lot of different tools at my disposal.
iRunFar: Were you skiing a bunch? I know you’re a big skier.
Dhiman: Yeah, doing quite a bit of skiing, but that’s a conditions sport. So if this snow’s good, I’ll be out for lots of long tours. And when the snow’s not so good, then I have to find other things to do. So I’d bike or do more running. But yeah, the hours surely, they come from the ski side of things.
iRunFar: I feel like you’ve chosen an early spring race every year that you’ve historically done pretty well at, or really well at. Why Transvulcania this year?
Dhiman: That one, well, this is a classic. This is just for sure one of the races that you want on your resume. And it’s been on my radar for a moment. I’m also really interested to do a shorter event to see the fitness, to push a little harder. We get great competition here. The track is fantastic. It’s an aesthetic line. It’s a challenging line. There’s been amazing winners here in the past on both the male and the female side. So I just want to get my name on that list.
iRunFar: What sort of specific training did you do, given the nature of this course?
Dhiman: Well, it’s really an up-down course. At least when you look at the GPX, you’d say, “Okay, you just climb and then you descend, and you climb.” So I’d say most of my training was oriented in that direction, whether the specific action was an uphill training day or downhill training day. The first climb, I think everybody’s going to be pretty strong for the first moment because that’s a simple thing to train is to run uphill for an hour and a half or two hours. Yeah, we do about two hours of uphill running before it starts undulating a bit more. So I think that one is a simpler task to train your body for. But the downhill impact is quite difficult because we have rocky type terrain, which you’re not necessarily going to find in other parts.
But at the same time, the same principles are there. You need to shock the legs enough, give them enough stimulus to be resilient to the downhill effort. So I’ve been mixing it up with some uphill intensity and some downhill sessions and volume over the past. I’ve been training for this race for the past five weeks.
iRunFar: And do you view this race as a building block to UTMB later this year or is it a standalone?
Dhiman: Yeah, I think it’s more standalone. I think all my races, because I’ll race three races this year and then whatever comes after UTMB is a bonus. And I think it’s hard to say that you can use it as a stepping … It’s just a very different type of effort. So it’s more, for me, a fitness test and a way to see … Because we still have question marks around, “Okay, is he just talking about getting better? Is he actually getting better?” So we can find out. Maybe I’m not. Maybe I muff it this week and I have to go back to the drawing board, “What did I do wrong?” But I’m open to that as well, though I have confidence, I think I’ll be fine. But it’s also good to just rip the band-aid off, I think of it after a long winter, long training block.
iRunFar: Do you feel like you’re stronger than in past years?
Dhiman: I do. I do feel strong. Yeah. The legs, I don’t know if it’s just, like I’ve said, this accumulated amount of work. But from an actual sensation, I feel like I’m hitting similar numbers with little less effort. Yeah.
iRunFar: Going into this weekend, do you have a specific race plan of splits you want to hit, or do you more play off of what other people are doing?
Dhiman: Well, you have to do both.
iRunFar: Yeah.
Dhiman: I have definitely in my brain, the splits that I took off [Jon] Albon’s victory. I’ve chucked it all into the AI engines out there to give me the best possible chances. But at the end of the day, we know that each edition can be a little different, and so you have to be ready to play the game as it presents itself. So my feeling is that there might be some runners here that maybe can burn a bit brighter, and to let them do so, and then attack when the legs start getting a little tired.
iRunFar: When do you think that’s going to happen?
Dhiman: I think that’ll happen around Pico de la Nieve, which is about an hour from the high point, a little less than an hour because up there it’s challenging to run. It’s a lot of sharp up, down, up, down. And if you’ve been pushing too hard, you can definitely suffer.
iRunFar: And then once you’re at the top, it’s …
Dhiman: Once you’re at the top, you got to just, as they say in French, “serrer les dents.” You’ve got to bite, you’ve got to mash the teeth together, and just get it done because it’s going to hurt for sure. The end of that race is notoriously painful.
iRunFar: We are excited to see you out there, and good luck.
Dhiman: Thanks.
