When Nina Engelhard, clad in her Team Germany singlet, arm warmers, and shorts, crested the final rise of the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Uphill race in the lead and crossed the finish line 26 seconds ahead of second-place Susanna Saapunki of Finland, there were admittedly a few whispers amongst the gathered crowd, including myself, asking, “Who is that?” The race was part of the four-day 2025 World Mountain and Trail Running Championships, held in Canfranc, Spain, in late September, and gathered the world’s best mountain runners and trail runners.
Just three days later, when Engelhard ran to a commanding victory at the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Up and Down race — with a small, barely perceptible smile on her face for much of it — she had already made the transition from a relative unknown in the international off-road running world to an instantly recognizable face.
Nine Engelhard only meters away from winning the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Uphill race. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Then, much to the chagrin of members of the media and those curious to learn more about her, Engelhard, who has no social media presence and keeps her digital footprint to a minimum, turned her phone off for a week and went on vacation to the Atlantic coast of Europe with her family.
A week after becoming a double mountain running world champion, she returned to her full-time job as an environmental engineer and freely admits during our conversation, now a full month after the event, “I’m looking forward to when all the things are over and I can go back to my daily life and routines.”
The 28-year-old from Kassel, Germany, who only really started trail racing in 2023, doesn’t train with a coach, frequently doesn’t race with a watch, and only runs 50 to 70 kilometers a week — supplementing her daily exercise with swimming, rowing, and cycling. She says, “I can’t say what a general week looks like because it’s really decided on a daily basis.”
Contrary to most runners at her level, she has no intention of leaving her regular career to pursue a professional running lifestyle. In a world where social media presence is highly valued and top runners continue to chase their next sponsorship deal while building their public persona, Engelhard is an enigma with her quiet confidence and commitment to doing things her way.
One gets the sense that when the media attention from the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships dies down, Engelhard will quietly resume her everyday life, only to return to the public eye when it’s time to pin a race bib on again.
Winning the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Uphill race, and becoming known to the greater off-road running world. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Finding Purpose in Running
Engelhard grew up and lives in a small village outside Kassel, Germany. In the middle of the country, it’s not surrounded by the mountainscape that most mountain runners choose as their training terrain. However, Engelhard’s family was active — her dad a climber and paraglider, and her mom a “hobby runner,” as Engelhard calls her — and they spent all their summer vacations in the Alps. By age 11, Engelhard was joining her mom on regular runs and getting faster. Before long, she was recruited to join the local running club.
The 13-year-old Engelhard trained alongside runners in their twenties and older, but she thrived in the group environment. She says, “It was a really nice group, and up to today, many of them are good friends, even though some left the club.” The club gave her running some structure, and members would meet three times a week to train together. Before joining, she said, “I didn’t know what training for a purpose was because we were doing all things just for fun — being outside, being in motion.” While Engelhard participated in many sports, including swimming, ping-pong, trampoline, and judo, she says, “In running, I found my absolute favorite hobby. I seemed to find my purpose,” and she participated in a variety of classic track and road running events during her teenage years.
Riding bikes is just one of the many cross-training activities Engelhard turns to. Photo courtesy of Nina Engelhard.
After finishing school, Engelhard took a gap year before heading off to university, but not of the traditional type. She says, “Other friends of mine did an au pair year in a foreign country or something like this, and I was, ‘No, that’s too basic.’” Instead, she joined the German Army for a year, not for a career, but because she wanted to introduce more self-discipline and learn a different way of living. She says she emerged from the experience with increased self-confidence and trust in herself.
Finding Trails
Throughout the subsequent years at university — where she earned a bachelor’s in forensic science and a master’s in ecotoxicology — she cut back on her racing while still staying active. It was in the couple of free months between finishing her studies in 2023 and starting work that Engelhard found trail running.
She signed up for the 2023 Gamperney Berglauf race in Switzerland, an 8.8-kilometer route with 1,000 meters of elevation gain. She won the sub-one-hour race by more than two minutes. “It was overwhelming and very exciting for me,” she says with a smile. “I had so much fun. It was quite different from all the past races on the street or on the track, and I was like, ‘Ok, I have to try more of those.’”
Engelhard’s first trail race, the 2023 Gamperney Berglauf in Switzerland. She won and says she loved the experience. Photo courtesy of Nina Engelhard.
Less than four months later, she raced the 2023 Großglockner Mountain Run, an iconic mountain race in Austria, placing second behind Kenyan mountain running phenom Philaries Kisang by less than a minute, ahead of many of the top mountain runners. It was also a race she’d return to in 2024 to win — this time ahead of Kisang.
The German Athletics Federation immediately saw her talent and encouraged her to try to qualify for Team Germany for the 2024 European Athletics Off-Road Running Championships Uphill and Up and Down mountain races. She won the qualifying race and was on her way to represent her country, and says, “I had never dreamt of competing on an international level because sports for me were always just fun.”
Going into the 2024 European Athletics Off-Road Running Championships as a relative unknown, Engelhard put no pressure on herself and focused on enjoying the racing. Just getting to start was an honor enough. She won the uphill race by 95 seconds, and as she puts it, “It was a real surprise.” Two days later, she won the Up and Down race, becoming a double European mountain running champion, just a year after her first foray into off-road running.
After the weekend and with little fanfare, she returned to her job with Germany’s Autobahn, where she assesses and mitigates the environmental impacts of new roads.
A Different Approach
Many of the racers Engelhard competed against at the European Athletics Off-Road Running Championships were professional runners, making their living from sponsorship and racing. No one would have been surprised to see Engelhard pursue something similar. But she didn’t, and for very calculated and personal reasons.
She says, “I earn my money working because I do not want to be told which races I have to compete in.” She explains that she doesn’t want the pressure to join social media, which seems to come hand in hand with sponsorship in the modern era. “I never got sucked into [social media] in the first place, and then I’ve never seen the point in being there and comparing myself to others.” She also sees no reason for publicly sharing what she’s doing, saying, “I’m doing it all for myself. I’m not that interested in what other people do for daily training.”
Engelhard on her way to winning the 2023 Hochfelln-Berglauf race in Germany. Photo courtesy of Nina Engelhard.
Englehard is willing to acknowledge that there are potential benefits to living a lifestyle of a fully professional runner. She says, “I have six weeks of vacation from work in the year, and I have to distribute it cleverly if I want to compete in many races. I have no real vacation because the six weeks are mostly spent on going to races.” But for Engelhard, the trade-offs of giving up her independence in exchange for being paid to run don’t seem worth it.
Trusting Intuition
Engelhard’s training is far from traditional. She only runs 50 to 70 kilometers a week, filling in the rest of her exercise needs with cross-training activities like cycling, rowing, and swimming. She doesn’t work with a coach, saying, “For me, the most important thing is that I have fun on a daily basis.” She’s also realistic about most coaches, saying, “No running trainer would say 50 kilometers of running a week is enough for competing internationally. So I’m staying with my way of doing it.”
When asked what she thought would happen if she were given a strict schedule, it’s clear that she knows herself well. “I just wouldn’t follow the training, plan, or schedule so strictly. I just know it.”
That’s not to say that Engelhard trains in a completely free-form manner. She is an engineer after all. She simply realizes that her life involves more than just training and racing; balancing all the different aspects allows her to thrive. She says, “I can’t train on a fixed schedule because I never know how I’ll feel after a long day of work, so if there were a fixed hard interval training, I’d be like, ‘No, I can’t do anything.” Instead, she does hard running workouts when she can and does other sports on her easy days.
Engelhard descending in the lead during the first lap of the two-lap 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Up and Down race. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Engelhard believes that mountain running requires far less structure than road and track running, which she did earlier in her life. “In the mountains, no race is comparable to another race. Times, paces, and heart rates do not count that much. And that’s what I love about the sport.”
Still, there’s a certain scientific approach that Engelhard seems to take to the various aspects of training, saying, “I’m interested in nutritional things and so on, but I’m doing it for myself and testing it for myself and just seeing what works best for me.” She’s followed the approach long enough to say, “I get a feeling very fast what works for me or what doesn’t.” While it would be easy to categorize Engelhard’s watch-free and coach-free training as fancy-free or whimsical, on closer inspection, it seems that it’s the perfect blend of science and intuition for someone who values process and data and still puts the joy of running as her top priority.
2025 World Mountain Running Championships and Beyond
After a week of rain and cold weather in Canfranc, Spain, the morning of the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Uphill race — the first event of the 2025 World Mountain and Trail Running Championships — dawned clear and crisp. From 44 different countries, 107 racers lined up to race 990 vertical meters (3,248 feet) over 6.4 kilometers (4 miles).
Like she did at the 2024 European Athletics Off-Road Running Championships Uphill race, Engelhard wasted no time getting to the front of the field. This came as a surprise to many followers, as she ascended the course ahead of a literal who’s who of women’s mountain running. Perhaps her performance should have been less of a surprise, given that Engelhard had already earned double victory at last year’s European mountain running championships. That said, in addition to eschewing a public persona, she was yet to compete in any of the top global mountain running and short distance trail running series — like the Mountain Running World Cup and the Golden Trail World Series — where most short-distance off-road runners currently cut their teeth in the sport.
Engelhard says she never felt great in the race, having to dig deep to stay ahead of the chasing women. She explains, “I had to push myself on my limits, beyond my limits.” The look on her face in the race’s final meters was pure agony and suffering, but she broke the tape to win her first mountain running world championships title. “I just felt really bad,” she says, and the subsequent days waiting for the Up and Down race were tough.
“I didn’t know if I could push myself so hard again,” she says, describing the mental struggle of the anticipation. But Sunday, the final day of the competition, saw a completely different Engelhard toe the line at the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Up and Down race. “Even while warming up, I felt great and just wanted to enjoy the last event.” She took off from the gun, gaining the lead on the first climb and extending it as the race went on. On the second climb, one could almost make out a smile on her face as she passed cheering fans.
With plenty of daylight behind her while leading the race, Engelhard ran with a smile during the second lap of the 2025 World Mountain Running Championships Up and Down race. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
She crossed the line to win her second mountain running world champion title, with a huge gap of just under two minutes ahead of second place. She smiles when discussing the race, saying, “It was just a pleasure and a gift.”
A week later, after using some of her precious vacation days to spend time with her family, Engelhard was back at work. Her co-workers threw her a party and told her they watched the livestream of her races when they should have been working. After the party, they all went back to their daily tasks. For Engelhard, it was back to cycling, swimming, cross training, and running — every day a new opportunity to do the things she loves, on her own terms.
Call for Comments
- What do you think of Nina Engelhard’s unconventional approach to training and running?
- What can we learn from Engelhard’s commitment to doing things her own way?
