Broken Arrow Skyrace: Born in the USA with a Euro Vibe

How the founders of the Broken Arrow Skyrace infused Euro-style trail racing DNA to create the ultimate U.S. trail running festival.

I am a few dozen meters off the deck, high above the summery slopes of Palisades Tahoe ski area, feet shuffling along a single cable, calmly talking myself through the next move in the Broken Arrow Skyrace’s airy and technical Iron Face Challenge when I find myself both cursing and celebrating race director Brendan Madigan. I’ve long since considered him a role model for the best qualities of trail running, but right now, for a brief moment, that friendship is briefly, literally on the ropes. 

Brendan has always prided himself on Broken Arrow Skyrace being a very Euro-style event. 

“Euro,” I say out loud to no one. “Very. F’ing. Euro, Madigan.”

I’m cursing him because of the butterflies. I’ve raced along airy ridges around the Alps enough to recognize the return of a certain feeling to focus, settle in, and manage the innate fear that reminds me that yes, this is a very exposed spot. 

That exposure is de rigueur for the Alps. And Broken Arrow’s Iron Face Challenge has it. It’s very much a Euro-style 5-mile trail race that goes 1,700 feet up and down the ski mountain with a precarious via ferrata section at the top. 

It’s one of the older “vias” in the U.S., dating to 2018. Prevalent in Europe since armies used them to scale cliffs in World War I, via ferratas are becoming more commonplace in the U.S. as recreational features in mountain towns. Ogden and Zion, Utah, Arapahoe Basin and Telluride, Colorado, and New York’s Shawangunks, each have their own. 

Since its inception a decade ago, Broken Arrow Skyrace has prided itself on bringing to U.S. the best qualities of European trail racing. 

And because of life’s serendipity, I’ve ended up in a position to know from a first-hand point of view. 

The European Life of a Trail Running Expat

For the last nine years, I’ve lived full-time in Chamonix, France—writing about the trail running scene, and operating a trail running tour company. I call it my Forest Gump life. The intense trail running gravity of Chamonix pulled me into the vortex, and I just sort of found myself there. (OK, life’s more complicated than that, but that’s the intercontinental abbreviation.) 

This past weekend, I had a chance to see if those strands of DNA were part of the Broken Arrow culture. In that moment of weakness any trail racer knows, I somehow found myself at UltraSignup, looking to see if there were entries available for the Iron Crown, that trilogy combining Broken Arrow’s Iron Face Challenge with the 23K and the 46K trail races. The event was far enough off to seem unreal. In other words, just what one needs to click “register.” 

But Broken Arrow and I go back much further than a dalliance on UltraSignup. In September of 2018 I met Brendan’s Broken Arrow partner, Ethan Veneklasen, at a small café on a side street in Zermatt, Switzerland after he and his wife, the legendary trail racer Emma Winfield, had finished the Haute Route, that epic mountain traverse between Chamonix and Zermatt. Broken Arrow had just had its second edition. In a sense, Veneklasen was busy gathering more data for the Euro vibe of Broken Arrow.

In the years since, I’ve watched from a distance as Ethan, Brendan and Geoff Quine have devoted themselves to building Broken Arrow into what I experienced this past weekend. 

“We modeled Broken Arrow after the iconic European mountain running events,” Ethan told me. “We wanted to blend the best of European trail running culture with American trail running culture. First off, there’s the course. We have an alpine course, it’s above treeline, it’s technical. And we wanted to prove you could do a highly competitive event that still celebrated every runner.”  

They distilled it down to the now ubiquitous motto, “Whether you finish first or last, you’re a rockstar.“ 

“That,” Ethan said, “Is the secret to our success.”

They’ve done their work. Broken Arrow Skyrace shares a lot of DNA with the Euro trail running scene. As the weekend passed, I had plenty of time to think about the similarities. Here’s what came to mind. 

An Infusion of Trail Culture

Many years ago, I was trading emails with Irunfar’s Meghan Hicks. She said something that hit home, and I’ve used it ever since. She pointed out that in the U.S., mountain running is a subculture. But in Europe, and particularly in the Alps, it’s the culture. In the years since, I’ve personally experienced that difference.  Trail running vests don’t get a second look when you’re walking down Rue Ravanel in Chamonix. Victorien, the dairy farmer from whom I get my cheese and yogurt, is a licensed trail running guide who is training for UTMB. 

Here in the U.S., however, conversations about quantum mechanics are more likely to find common ground than, say, that technical 50K you’ve been eyeing. 

Not so in Palisades on the weekend of Broken Arrow. There’s critical mass, and that makes all the difference. We’re with our people. For 72 hours, the culture shifts, and there’s no need to explain yourself. I overheard casual conversations about course details for obscure Alps trail races and saw dozens of familiar faces I’m more used to seeing at L’Atelier Café in Chamonix than in the Sierras. You are, for a brief long weekend, happily normal. 

Of course, it’s not an exact replica. There were no errant cows walking through the village. And blueberry tarts are not a thing here yet. But a guy can always dream. 

An Americanized Euro Trail Racing Vibe

Then, there’s the vibe. Broken Arrow shares a lot of Euro DNA. Elite runners mingle with back-of-the-packers with ease because, well, we’re all trail runners. At one of my first trail races in the Alps, I was one of about 100 runners, one of whom was Kilian Jornet. We struck up a conversation and, incredibly, I was the more introverted of the two of us. 

That same experience happens with ease at Broken Arrow. Want to talk with one of the winners? Just go up and say hello and introduce yourself. There’s an adage that you should “never meet your heroes,” but trail running is a counterpoint to that saying, and at Broken Arrow, you’ll literally bump into them. They are here in spades and they are happily hanging out. 

As Brendan puts it, “For us, a big part of Broken Arrow is the innate human desire to be part of a community, to be a part of something bigger than yourself.” This past weekend, thousands of us had more than a little bit in common with the likes of Philemon Kiriago, Mădălina Florea, Eli Hemming, Dani Moreno and Joe Gray.

Top European races have been uber competitive for years, of course. Races like Sierre-Zinal and Zegama-Aizkorri have brought together the world’s top trail runners for decades. More than a decade ago, Rickey Gates, a top U.S. mountain racer, looked around the tent at Sierre-Zinal after the race. It was a who’s-who of trail running. 

“There are no other races this weekend. None,” he declared. “There’s only Sierre-Zinal.” 

Meaning, it was the place to be. This weekend at Palisades Tahoe felt the same way. Martin Gaffuri, who consults for Nike, was an announcer for the Broken Arrow livestream during the races this weekend. 

“F*ck yea, this is on par with those races!” He said. “You have $30,000 for the win on the line. But the money is not enough by itself. You need to have the media, the live broadcast, and the course. Broken Arrow has ticked the boxes and they’ve done it right.”

In Europe, that elite-level drama never comes at the expense of others. Races there go out of their way to celebrate everyday runners. Switzerland’s Sierre-Zinal, the 31K mountain race that some call the most competitive in the world, hosts 5,000 runners each August. And most of them race in a category called “tourist”—they get a time, but no ranking. The point is to show up. 

Even UTMB Mont Blanc—arguably the most sought out race in the world—celebrates the lanterne rouge. Named for the red lamp that once hung to mark a train’s caboose, it’s awarded to the last runner to finish the race, 46 hours and 30 minutes after the start. 

Ring Das Bell

Then, there’s the bell. If ever there was a symbol of the connection to Alps trail running, it’s la cloche. In Euro trail races, bells are seen and heard, well, everywhere. They’re at the start line and the finish line, and everywhere in between. Fans line the courses, ringing them with wild abandon. In the middle of a long race, you’ll hear them ringing amid the high pastures on the cows, the sheep and goats. 

They even go to the winner. American-born Chamonix resident Hillary Gerardi, who holds the women’s FKT for the fastest round trip on Mont Blanc has a collection of bells from various victories. The largest of them looks like it could practically topple the 5-foot, 2-inch champion Skyrunner.

The Broken Arrow bells hold a unique place in my quirky world. In two of the stranger errands of my life, I’ve found myself at foundries deep in the Alps discussing the nuances of special orders for both bells that now grace the finish line at the Broken Arrow Skyrace. 

And in a moment of just-in-time-delivery, last week, with colleagues from Run the Alps, we carefully packed 35 pounds of bell into a duffel in Chamonix, transported it by train to Zurich, then checked it onto United flight to San Francisco, daydreaming about the conversation among bored TSA workers. (“Gettaloadofthis!”)

This last week, I heard bells across the courses, and nowhere more so than at the finish, where the steady ringing celebrated runners crossing the line. (With any luck, the new bell will sustain fewer fractures. Upon seeing photos of the injuries to the first one, the new foundry told me they were making this new one with intentionally thick walls.)

Broken Arrow x Trail Dents du Midi

None of this has happened by accident, of course. And a few years ago, Broken Arrow Skyrace took another intentional step, cementing a transatlantic connection thanks to a partnership with Trail DDM in Switzerland. The oldest trail race in the Alps, after 55 years, it is still run entirely by volunteers. Looping around the wild Dents-du-Midi range on the Swiss border with France, the race is an under-the-radar classic.

There are differences, of course. The land here is drier, and there are no sheep blocking the course (it happens more than you might think), no mountain cafés perched in improbable locations. You don’t “Bonjour!” people on the trails, and the glaciers here have long since receded to the point of extinction. 

And there’s one big difference that didn’t bother me in the least: the solid connection between rock and runner on Broken Arrow’s via ferrata. In European sky races, the kilometers are filled with what are euphemistically called “no fall” zones. Most Euro trail runners grow up amid the vertical world, so there’s a certain nonchalance to it all. But for this American-transplanted-to-Chamonix, being tethered to Mother Earth was, well, one difference I was happy to accept.

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