Aurélien Dunand-Pallaz

FROM MARTHOD TO THE BAUGES RECORD

As a child, Aurélien Dunand-Pallaz imagined himself running after a football rather than a stopwatch. A Savoie native born and bred, it was in Marthod, a small village between Ugine and Albertville, that he discovered the joys of competition as a member of the French football federation, and in winter by skiing between slalom poles. This was his path. Not the easiest, but the one that suited him best. It was his schoolboy fantasies that would change the course of history. As a teenager, he dreamed of becoming a physiotherapist. At the end of his first year at university, he passed the entrance exam for physiotherapy school and decided to “get on my bike a bit more and go for some rides in the mountains behind my house.” That was 2011. A year later, he took part in his first trail running races. He was immediately attracted to the long format and even completed the Ultra Tour du Beaufortain in 14 hours. “I enjoyed the environment, the practice setting, but what really got me was the feeling of performance,” he explains. “I like the whole approach, the fact of making progress every day, and I like competing against the very best.”

In 2018, six years after his debut, he was crowned French Long Trail Champion. Now a recognized face among the elite, he started to make a name for himself. In the summer of 2020, in a locked down France due to the pandemic, he decided to tackle the record of the 14 peaks over 2000 m in the Massif des Bauges, the mountains he grew up in and where he trains every day. He completed the 82 km and 8800 m of elevation gain in 14 hours 26 minutes. A big-time performance on technical and wild terrain in which he set a new benchmark time. 

2021, YEAR OF RECOGNITION

2018 was the year of revelation. 2021 would be the year of ultimate recognition. Winner of the Transgrancanaria in the spring, in late August he came second in the UTMB in just under 21 hours 13 minutes behind François D’Haene. A podium finish that would definitively cement his place among the best ultra-trail runners in the world.

Although the following year was difficult due to an injury, he became a father for the first time that summer. He has successfully embedded his sporting career in this new life.  “My family is the most important thing in my life,” he explains. “I build and organize everything around them. That’s the priority. My partner is my rock. She brings me back down to earth.”

This would be one of the major ingredients of his success in 2023. Winner of the Hardrock 100 in Colorado in the United States in early July, after running alone from the first to last kilometer, he added his name to the winners list of the Diagonale des Fous on Réunion a few weeks later in a race he dominated from start to finish.

But the story doesn’t end here. There are still chapters to be written, races to be won and records to be broken...