New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you. Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! Subscribe today.
“It’s a get-to-know-you kind of piece,” I tease Katie Schide.
“Good luck. It’s never been done!” she laughs.
We’re both being sarcastic. On my desk is a copy of one of France’s top trail running magazines. And in the corner is the headline, Rencontre Katie Schide et Germain Grangier. Rencontre, which roughly translates to “get to know you.”
After winning several of the world’s most competitive trail races, almost every trail running media outlet has written the rite of passage get-to-know-you piece on the trail running couple.
Yet, even if the outlines of the story are commonly known, Schide, the 32-year-old New Englander and professional trail runner for The North Face, remains somewhat of an enigma to followers of the world’s marquee races. That’s especially true for U.S. trail racing fans now that Schide is entering her eighth year living in Europe.
She lives in just what might be the most remote spot in France: Saint-Dalmas-le-Selvage, (population 60), in the heart of the country’s sprawling 564-square-mile Mercantour National Park, and over 31 miles down tachycardia-inducing, airy canyon roads to the nearest decent supermarket. If hyperactive, trail-running-crazy Chamonix is France’s version of Boulder, Colorado, then Saint Dalmas is, well, Moosejaw, Saskatchewan.
“Everyone just assumes I live in Chamonix,” Schide says. She frequently gets Instagram DMs asking for the best runs in the Chamonix valley. “I honestly don’t know what to say,” she laughs. “I live eight hours from there!”
Then there’s Schide herself, introverted and happily quite private. Take, for example, the most famous photo of her, captured a few seconds after winning the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) in Chamonix in August 2022. In the shot, Schide has her hands to her mouth, creating a modest, gosh-what-just-happened look that could not have been farther from the high-fives-I-crushed-that-course showmanship that’s the norm. The photo resonated among her close circle of friends and admirers.
“Katie doesn’t brag about her successes. She doesn’t get in your face,” says longtime friend Hillary Gerardi, an American runner sponsored by Black Diamond who lives in Chamonix and last year reset the women’s Fastest Known Time up and down France’s Mont Blanc. In short, in a world of TMI social media oversharing, Schide is perfectly fine not basking in the limelight.
It would be a big mistake to equate an off-the-grid life and out of the spotlight style for inaction, however. Schide has steadily, quietly, and diligently been working hard at becoming one of the world’s greatest trail runners.
And it’s starting to pay off.
Following the UTMB victory, Schide had a 2023 that was both diverse and impressive. She placed second in the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run. She was second in the short, fast 55 kilometer UTMB Mont Blanc’s OCC, and she concluded the season with a win at the 102-mile Diagonale des Fous. The race, which takes place on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, is notoriously challenging. And in 2024, she notched her second UTMB win, smashing Courtney Dauwalter’s previous course record.
If ever there was a time to finally get to know Katie Schide, it’s right now.
A Childhood on the Trail
Trails, and especially the technical variety, have always been a part of Schide’s world. Growing up in Gardiner, Maine, Schide, her parents, and sister Annie spent family vacations hiking around the neighboring White Mountains, just two hours away. During high school summers, Schide and her father section-hiked Vermont’s 273 mile-long Long Trail that threads through the Green Mountains from Massachusetts to Canada.
“Those trips sowed the seeds of loving being in the mountains for Katie,” says Schide’s mother, Pat Hart, who has served as Mayor of Gardiner since 2018. They became a North Star for Schide in other ways, too. Alpine nights spent at huts in New Hampshire’s White Mountains pointed the way to Schide for her college summer jobs.
In high school, Schide excelled. A star field hockey player, she scored the winning goal when her team won the state championship in 2009. And she was Valedictorian of her class. For her speech, Schide found antiquated rules in the school’s handbook, and tossed them aside, one after the other. It was a speech about defining yourself in a new world, and it perfectly foreshadowed Schide’s own trajectory.
That mix of sports, achievement, and a passion for the mountains coalesced into a love of moving fast through wild areas. In other words: mountain running. Jeff Colt was there to see the transformation. Colt and Schide share a similar trajectory: each attended Middlebury College in Vermont (Class of 2014) where they majored in Geology. Each spent summers working in the huts. Their intertwined worlds continue to this day—Colt is an elite trail runner sponsored by On, as well as a frequent competitor at Western States.
During Schide’s first year in the White Mountain huts, she completed one of the hardest test pieces in New England, the 48-mile long traverse of eight huts. It’s a rugged, technical, rock-strewn feat normally attempted by much more experienced crew members. “It was a huge first effort,” says Colt. Those four summers featured playful late-night missions “raiding” other huts, and big days out on Schide’s days off.
The Schide that emerged was tough, strong, and exuberant.
In grad school in Salt Lake City, Schide ran the 28-mile Logan Peak trail race, in Logan, Utah. It was her first trail race. And she won. The next year, she was second at Moab’s Red Hot 55K. Watching her win the Antelope Island 50K that year, Schide’s mother suddenly glimpsed her daughter’s future. “She was so far ahead of anyone else,” she says. “I just couldn’t quite believe it.”
A Focussed Mindset…Plus a Little Serendipity
Amid the myriad factors in Schide’s steady rise through the ranks, three come to the fore.
The first is Grangier. The two met at an after-race dance party in Limone, Italy, not long after she moved to Zurich, Switzerland, to pursue a PhD in Geology. (Schide completed her degree two years ago.) Grangier has a quick smile that hints of a playful deviousness. He’s both smart and laugh-out-loud funny, but behind the jokes is a no-holes-barred disciplined athlete who is highly regarded for both his strength and insights. Grainger’s 2023 could easily consist of a pro trail runner’s career highlights: A win at Chamonix’s vertiginous 90K race. Second at Reunion Island’s Diagonale des fous. And third at UTMB Mont Blanc.
Three years after meeting, Schide moved in with Grangier to the apartment he had bought in an historic “maison du village” in St Dalmage. Grangier’s family has been coming to the remote valley in the Mercantour since he was in middle school, when the family lived just outside Nice. “We’d come to escape the city, the noise of Nice,” he says. “I always thought I wanted to live here.” And if the village is quiet, the trails can be downright desolate. “Last week I ran 250K and I didn’t see anyone. There’s just ibex, deer and foxes” he says. “There are no Strava segments.”
“Sharing the athletic journey together is a huge part of what has helped me find success,” says Schide. “I can bounce ideas off him. It’s like having a training partner that you never have to race. It’s unique.” Schide cites her 2021 racing season as one example. “I struggled a lot that year. I had high expectations, but I didn’t have the fitness.” She was eighth at UTMB. “It’s a wonderful result, but it wasn’t where I wanted to be. It motivated me to find ways to improve.” Grangier was there with moral support and inspired confidence. Since then, her training has been more deliberate.
That closeness that has emerged is obvious. “We play this role for each other–we make each other confident,” Grangier says. “That doesn’t leave space for you to doubt what you are doing,” Schide says. Each also serves as the honest voice the other needs from time to time. “We don’t lie to each other,” Says Grangier. “If one of us is injured, and a race is coming up, we’ll say, ‘Look, I’m being realistic. I don’t think it’s a good idea.’”
But some things are best tackled solo—like training. “We tried training together for a while, and it wasn’t that productive,” Grangier says. “Now, we have breakfast together, then we train independently.” Living in a small apartment, those hours also constitute needed alone time.
The second factor in Schide’s success is directly apparent to those who know her. She has a full-on, unflagging determination. It’s about as close as one can come to pure grit. “Katie has an incredible drive and an absolute belief she can do incredible things,” says Gerardi. “And then she does them.”
Grangier has seen that focus up close. “Over days, and year after year, Katie’s training has been super consistent,” he says. “She has methodically focussed on everything under her control: pacing, nutrition, mindset.”
And now, after eight years of high-level trail racing, Schide is one of the veterans. She’ll be one of the more experienced racers at the start line. “These days, I know what to do. I know the answers to all the small decisions about what to wear, which socks to use, how to fuel, what procedures work for me. I’ve gained a lot of experience,” she says.
“Time has made a difference, ” says Grangier. “She knows the races better, she knows herself better, she knows her approach and what to do.” That’s not to say it’s been a smooth trajectory. “For sure, she has made mistakes, when things weren’t optimized. She used to be anxious before races. Now, that doesn’t happen.”
In Schide’s case, it was Grangier who helped her focus on logistics, fueling and crewing. “She’d prep for a race, and one week before, she’d say, ‘Oh, shit! I don’t have anyone to crew me.’ She’d let it slide. I told her, ‘You need to change that.’ It wasn’t all selfless generosity. “It’s also taking energy from me,” said Grangier. “I was often in the same race.’”
A Simple Life
Their home in the Mercantour serves as a safe haven amid the races, travel, and sponsor demands. “It’s our basecamp, our cave,” says Schide. Deep in the middle of the Mercantour, their village has an 1800’s end-of-the-road outpost feel to it. Schide is direct about it. “It’s a different world,” she says. The cobblestone streets are lined with ancient buildings, and there may be more cats than people on some mornings. There’s a small seasonal inn or two. There is one local restaurant which is open only from 7-9 pm, Thursday through Sunday, and only during the summer tourist season. Saint Dalmas is both charming and occasionally eerily quiet. Fittingly clichéd for France, an occasional pensionnaire can often be found gazing from an open window several stories up.
Inside Chez Grangier-Schide, however, it’s all business. The couple work together off the trail, constantly working to balance training demands with requests from their shared sponsors. “There are always a lot of requests. This last year, we’ve been trying to slow down and focus. We reinforce each other. It’s important to be strategic. We only have so much time.” Each approves the others’ communications. “We talk all the time about everything,” says Schide.
This month, with nine time zones between them, that business partnership takes a little more planning. “The time change is challenging. Staying up on the day-to-day stuff, and maintaining a relationship is a lot of work.”
‘And what if I did something at 100 percent?’
Geology PhD in hand from one of the world’s most prestigious universities—ETH Zurich is nicknamed by Americans as “Europe’s MIT” (six years older than MIT, the shorthand should be reversed)—Schide put geology on hold so she could focus on being a professional athlete.
“I like to do a mix of things. But I was doing everything at 75 percent. I started wondering, what if I did one thing at 100 percent? I want to be really good at something. So for now, I’m focussed on ultrarunning.”
Now, however, there are no excuses. “In some ways, it’s pretty scary. If I try really hard and fuck it up, it’s on me.”
Schide is still, however, very much a multi-sport athlete. In 2020 she and Grangier skied and climbed their way through the Alps, from Cervinia, Italy to Chamonix, France. In 2019 and 2022, she raced Pierra-Menta, one of the world’s hardest multi-day skimo races. And if she is skiing less than in the past so she can train for Western States, Strava still shows her skiing far more than many other top trail racers. To this day, she does more ski mountaineering races than trail races. And in an era when trail racers are specializing, her trio of successes came in different types of races.
Schide is trying something else different, too. She’s opening up more about her training. “I’m still a fairly private person,” she says. “But I’m opening up more.” Schide shares all her workouts on Strava, now, for example. “It’s really hard to do,” she says. “Some days you don’t want to share things.”
Finding a workable privacy-versus-authenticity balance point is one of the challenges for trail runners who are publicly scrutinized. Why the shift towards being, well, more vulnerable? “It’s important for people coming up into the sport to see what I actually do and think,” she says. And Schide was tired of the trail running tropes, where every elite athlete is casually just living life, never doing brutal interval workouts, never obsessing about gear, never hiring experts to unpack gnarly problems.
Le Trajet: Auburn, Flagstaff, Auburn
If there is one word to describe Katie Schide, it’s focussed. This spring, the first race on her calendar was UTMB’s Canyons, a 100K long course that includes sections of the Western States route. To train, she would drive an hour and a half south to Nice, where she stayed with Grangier’s parents. From there, another 30 minutes would bring her to a region called the Esterel that offered comparable terrain and weather, with dirt roads and higher temperatures than the Mercantour.
Then, on April 18th, Katie Schide drove the 63 miles to Cagnes sur mer, south out of the mountains, took a flight from Nice to London, then London to San Francisco. A week later she raced—and blew away the field. “I knew she could do that,” said Grangier. “Her training has been really good. Her pace was super good. She really planned her logistics.”
“I was surprising myself all the time,” says Schide. “I ran steady the whole time.” Schide beat second place Emkay Sullivan by 51 minutes, coming in sixth overall and landing amid some of the best male runners in the world. Mammoth, California’s Tim Tollefson was right behind her. “I spent 30 miles attempting to break her,” Tollefson says. “Instead, she broke me. Women are changing the game and I’m lucky to have courtside seats.”
Following Canyons, Schide settled into Flagstaff, Arizona, a sort of home-away-from-home, where her focus has turned directly to California’s 100-mile Western States Endurance Run on June 29th. Flagstaff offers similar terrain as her upcoming Western States run, but it’s missing the extreme heat for which the race is known. For that, Schide uses a sauna, or takes a short road trip to the Grand Canyon or Sedona, Arizona.
These days, Schide’s routine is a trail running version of Groundhog Day. “I wake up, eat breakfast, then run. Then I answer emails. Eat, do shopping,” she says. “The days are a blur. They kind of melt into each other.”
The changes that comes with moving from a village of sixty to a small city of 76,000 are not lost on Schide. “There’s more infrastructure here,” she says, pausing to acknowledge the mundane benefits that others take for granted.“I guess that must be obvious. There’s a supermarket. A coffee shop I can hang out at and work. And there’s Amazon.” (France has Amazon, too—but the road to Saint-Dalmas closes from time to time due to rockfall and the houses in the village have no street numbers, making deliveries confounding.)
There’s something else in Flagstaff, too—a social life. Schide lives alone by choice, but the interaction is there if she wants it. Her friends in Flagstaff include top trail runners Abby Hall and Jared Hazen. “If I’m feeling a little lonely, I have a bunch of people I can text,” she says. “I can go have coffee. That’s pretty cool.” The observation points out just how off-the-grid life is in the Mercantour. “It’s nice to have some other people around.”
Return to Olympic Valley, California
This Saturday morning at 5 A.M., Katie Schide will be at the start line for the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run.
Last year was her first year racing the course, and Schide finished second behind Leadville, Colorado’s Courtney Dauwalter. But both were under Ellie Greenwood’s 2012 record of 16:47:19. (Dauwalter obliterated that time, Schide came in just over three minutes faster.) About racing Dauwalter, Schide says, “It’s cool to race her. She’s the best we’ve ever seen.”
From a distance, a casual onlooker might tell the story of one runner (Schide) laboring under the long shadow of another (Dauwalter.) Not only would that be wrong, but it also misses an interesting point. In at least one respect, Schide has Dauwalter to thank. “In 2019 and 2021, she was beating everyone by so much. I thought, ‘Look at what’s possible. There’s a lot of growing to do here.’”
Used to the European frenzy that brings fans out along a 100-mile course, Schide was surprised by the solitude of Western States. “In all the photos, there are tons of people,” she says. “But besides a few small aid stations, you don’t see people for miles. You’re really alone for most of the race. It’s different from Europe. You need to be in your own head.”
“There’s always that feeling—did I get lucky that day?” Schide says. Now, she’s leaving nothing for granted. Free of any major injuries, she’s also been able to train consistently. And now she knows the course.
Some are wondering if she could beat Dauwalter’s time, but Schide points out the enormity of that challenge. “I think that’s a bit disrespectful of Courtney’s time. I was an hour and 15 minutes behind her!” And there’s lots to factor into the equation, too—last year’s race included a lingering snowpack, but without the often sweltering temperatures so common for the race. “I don’t want to put a ceiling on my abilities, but I also want to be realistic,” she says. “If I can run the same time as last year, with it being super hot, that would be a great success.”
‘Owning Wanting to do Well’
Katie Schide is ready. Maybe more ready than she’s ever been for a race. It’s been eight years since that first race in Limone, and the way Schide talks about racing using the language and mental approach of a seasoned vet. “These days, I’m owning wanting to do well. I’m making the best decisions for myself. I don’t feel a need to impress anyone.” Schide now comes to the start line with the mental clarity of a seasoned trail running vet. “I’ve built confidence through experience,” she says. “I question myself less.”
Pat Hart has seen the changes over the years. “She is fastidious about preparing. She’s got her plan. It’s impressive and inspiring to watch. We’re both proud and excited.” Mayoral obligations will keep Schide’s mom at home. Longtime friends Topher and Kim Gaylord, along with Schide’s father and sister and friend Brandon Chalk will handle crewing duties.
There’s an irony in Schide’s approach. By tamping down the external pressure, she is setting herself up well for a result that just might lead to the most external validation ever.
But none of that seems to matter very much to Katie Schide. Two days after Western States, one of the best American trail runners will get on a plane to Paris, then Nice, drive a long windy canyon road, to a little village where the only restaurant is almost certainly closed. And there, she and Grangier will get back to work, training hard on the remote Mercantour trails they share with ibex, wild sheep, wolves and marmots.