Coming from a mostly skyrunning background, Hillary Gerardi of France arrives at the 2025 Trail World Championships Long Trail excited for the year’s technical terrain. In our first interview with her, Hillary talks about growing up in America and finding trail racing once she moved to France, her love of skyrunning, her thoughts on how the course has something for every runner, and what it’s like to make a world championships team after more than a decade of racing.
For more on who’s racing, check out our in-depth women’s and men’s previews and follow our live race coverage on Saturday.
[Editor’s Note: If you are unable to see the video above, click here to access it.]
Hillary Gerardi Pre-2025 Trail World Championships Long Trail Interview Transcript
iRunFar: Eszter Horanyi with iRunFar here with Hillary Gerardi. We are here before the Trail World Championships Long Trail. How are you?
Hillary Gerardi: I’m great. Thank you for asking.
iRunFar: Okay. I think this is your first on-camera interview with iRunFar.
Gerardi: It is.
iRunFar: You are originally from America. You are racing for the French team. Give us the elevator pitch. How did you end up here?
Gerardi: So I am from Vermont. As you said, I’m from the U.S. and I grew up there, but 15 years ago I moved to France with my then-boyfriend, now husband. And I would say that really, I started running in France. For me, my connection with trail running is in France, and so for me it’s pretty logical. Also, selection races are not far from home. It’s much geographically closer for me. And yeah, I would say that’s the biggest part of it is that trail running is associated with France for me because that’s where I’ve always done it, and I now have French citizenship, and I’m excited to run for them.
iRunFar: And how did the entrance to trail running come into your life?
Gerardi: So I actually did, my very first trail run was in the U.S. It was in the Adirondacks at the Great Adirondack Trail Race, which is an awesome event, but I wasn’t totally sold on trail running, and so I kept doing stuff in the mountains. And then actually in 2012 I was living in Grenoble, France. And long story short, I had a pretty bad ski accident. I was mostly focused on skiing and climbing. And at that point I was like, “I got to do something else. I’ve got to connect with mountains in a different way.” And my husband was like, “Hey, remember that time you did running? That worked well.”
And then I started racing around Grenoble, and there’s a gazillion trail races there. I mean, it’s literally on any given weekend between April and October, there’s probably a half dozen races you could go to. And so it was just very easy to get into, and people were really welcoming. And I think that was the other part of it that I hadn’t yet seriously connected with France, as like, “I want to live here. I have my community.” Everyone that I knew I knew through my husband, Brad.
And so as I started running, I started meeting more people and really found a community that I loved. And so I would say that trail running and the trail running community also made me fall in love with France. So it’s a strong connection for me.
iRunFar: Yeah, fair. I feel like when you first started trail running, at least according to your result, you started with some longer stuff. And then, now then you’re very much focused on the shorter skyrace of the super technical stuff. What was that transition?
Gerardi: Yeah, so technically, actually I would say if I go way back in time, I worked in the huts in the White Mountains, like a few other trail runners that you may have heard of. And we were actually doing trail running then, and pretty technical trail running because the Whites are really gnarly. And I did a hut traverse, and that’s 50 miles. And I had this more American, more ultra-focused vision of what trail running was. So I went pretty quickly to longer distances. I actually did 120k here in the Pyrenees in 2015.
And then, the following year, I wanted to keep going long, but I fell off my bike and broke some ribs and couldn’t do volume. And so I needed to do a shorter preparation. And a friend of mine was like, “I’m going to a skyrace, I’ll help you train for it.” And I just fell in love with it. It was like they were so fun, just an incredible ambiance. And skyrunning I love because it combines the mountain sports that I love and the scrambling and the technical terrain that I was comfortable on from the Whites, with speed and endurance.
And I found over the last couple years that the skyraces I liked the most were the longer ones. Maybe it’s age as well, that I’m not quite as punchy as I used to be. And I was never a runner runner. And then also, I mean, 2021, I did the Mont Blanc 90k and really loved that, and especially loved training for it. And living in Chamonix when you’re training for three-hour races, it’s really frustrating because you’re doing lots of short training that’s like, “Okay, I am training for doing intensities, intervals, whatever.” And you’re looking at the mountains and you’re like, “I want to be up there though.” So I was like, “If I do longer races, then I can be in the mountains more.”
iRunFar: Or if you go for a Mont Blanc speed record?
Gerardi: That is another goal that allows you to spend a lot of mountain time. Exactly.
iRunFar: So how did that fit into your racing? Was that just a side project, a passion project?
Gerardi: I would definitely call it a passion project. It was one that was several years in the making, because the idea to do it came up in 2020, when I did a bunch of stuff in the mountains in 2020. And I actually was bringing Mimi Kotka up Mont Blanc in 2020, and she was like, “Hey, you seem pretty comfortable on this terrain. You should try the record.” And I was like, “Huh.”
And then we just didn’t get enough snow in 2021 or 2022. So every year around April, I was like, “Do I want to prioritize this or am I going to do more racing?” And it wasn’t until 2023 that we got the necessary conditions, and I was like, “Okay, I want this to be a big focus.” But it was tough because for a mountain project, you have to just block off a big window for the conditions. You’re not, “On September 27th, I will be in my best shape, and I will go for this.” It’s like, “We’ll just see sometime in this two-month window if there’s a time to go.”
iRunFar: It’s not like a race date where you have a set date and time and you deal with whatever conditions you have.
Gerardi: Exactly.
iRunFar: You wait for when it’s good.
Gerardi: It’s completely the opposite of that, which was hard for my coach because he is not into alpinism and all that. And so he was just like, “Can you narrow it down to a week?” And I was like, “Nope, I cannot.” But so, 2023 I raced less because I was really focused on that.
iRunFar: Gotcha.
Gerardi: Yeah.
iRunFar: So what motivated you to go for world championships for this team and this year? You’ve been in the sport for a while now, and now you’re at Worlds.
Gerardi: I think that in some ways, I had it in my mind as something that might interest me. And I even thought about it for the U.S. when it was in Thailand. And I remember Innsbruck, I looked at the selection course and I was kind of like, “Well, I could travel really far to go to that race and I’d suck at it.” And for selections also, just based on where I live, I’m not running through the winter. So the timing was going to have to work out in such a way that I needed to not be doing a fast selection race early in the season.
And so I think that on paper, this race course interested me. Also, the ratio of distance to vert is one that I could even go a little bit more vert, honestly. But no, I liked that. And the qualifier race in France, which was at the High Trail Vanoise, I was like, “Oh, that’s a race I would really like to do.” And so that helped get me motivated.
I would also say to my coach, his name is Antonio Gallego, and he is actually French, but he is the trainer for the mountain running team, and he just loves the World Championships. He wanted me to run for the U.S. when I was only American, and now I have dual citizenship, and he was like, “You can run for France.” And he was very enthusiastic about it. So he’s actually here with our team right now.
iRunFar: Oh, that’s very cool.
Gerardi: Yeah.
iRunFar: And how’d that qualifier race go?
Gerardi: Honestly, pretty awesome.
iRunFar: Yeah.
Gerardi: Yeah. Yeah, it was the first time. So I am mostly a pro athlete. That’s my main job. But I also do some like CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) work, and I’m pretty involved in different non-profit stuff, either with inclusivity and accessibility to the mountains and environmental stuff. And early in the season, I was not finding balance at all. And when I went to my first race of the year in April, I was just not in it at all.
And I was like, “Oh, shit. Maybe I don’t really have the desire to push myself really hard anymore,” which would be fine because I have other stuff I’d like to do in my life. But I started working with not exactly a sports psychologist because she doesn’t have a psychologist degree, but a mental-preparer person. And we worked together and along with my coach. And it was the first time I’d done that, and we worked on visualization and mantras and strategies.
And it was the first time I did that and I was able to execute it exactly how I wanted to. And that was honestly, one of the most satisfying things about that race is that it went super well. But it was like, I got to the end and I was like, “I did exactly what I planned.” And that was really awesome.
iRunFar: Yeah. When it works out like that, that’s always fun.
Gerardi: Yeah.
iRunFar: So pivoting to the World Champs course, I’m assuming you’ve recced all or most of it.
Gerardi: Yeah, so I mean, one of the things that is cool about being on the French team is there is this real sense of team. So we all came over here together in August and did the course together. And I would say it’s a pretty heterogeneous course. You couldn’t really just characterize it in one way. Some people will probably say like, “Oh, my God, it’s super technical.” I don’t feel like it’s super technical, but that might be my skyrunning side of me.
There’s definitely parts of it that are steep, parts of it that have a bunch of rocks, and parts of it that are super runnable as well. And so I think that there’s a little bit for everyone. The technical parts, Katie [Schide] and I were talking about it because she was actually here just before us doing a recce, and we were like, “Yeah, it’s technical but not fun and playful technical. It’s technical like, ‘Huh? Why are we going here?’ kind of technical.” So definitely it’ll be fun to see what that looks like on race day.
iRunFar: Speaking of Katie, do you have a story of in 2015 when you called her up and talked her into racing the Limone Extreme?
Gerardi: Yeah. Actually, our first date was at the-
iRunFar: First date.
Gerardi: …. Alp Du Grande Serre Vertical Kilometer Race.
iRunFar: Okay.
Gerardi: Yeah. She came and visited me in Grenoble, and we did that first, and then we were like, “Wow, that was fun. Let’s go to Limone.”
iRunFar: Does this feel a little full circle, the both of you coming back here to race World Champs?
Gerardi: I don’t know if I’d say full circle, but it is cool because we actually then were like, she did a bit of skyrunning, so we were at some of the same events. And we even did a stage race together, the summer Pierra Menta. And I’m just really excited to be doing the same races as her because we went in two different directions. And to come back, it’s just going to be fun to see her.
iRunFar: Yeah, I think you guys will both do really well. I’m excited to watch.
Gerardi: I hope so. I mean, all we can hope is that we each have an awesome day. I mean, I think that that’s certainly my biggest ambition is to once again, get to the finish line and be like, “I did the best race I had in me today, and that’s all I can ask for.”
iRunFar: Well, best of luck.
Gerardi: Thank you.
iRunFar: And we’ll see you out there.
Gerardi: Thanks so much. And I can’t wait.
iRunFar: Yeah.
