Val d'Illiez, live.

Every line ends at the lake

Eight races, one finish line: whichever start a runner takes in the Valais, the SwissPeaks Trail brings them down to Le Bouveret on the shore of Lake Geneva.

The organiser’s motto is “from glacier to lake”, and the race programme is built that way. The 2026 edition, the tenth since the first SwissPeaks in 2017, ran from 25 August to 6 September. The longest format, the Odyssey, left Le Bouveret on 25 August for 643 km and 43,800 m of climbing; the Legend set off from Brigerbad on 30 August for 397 km. Then the starts move down the valley and closer to the water: the 100 Miles from the Grande Dixence dam, the Ultra from Salvan, the Challenge from Val-d’Illiez, the Marathon from Morgins, and the Half Marathon and the Friday-evening Discovery from Le Bouveret itself.

That makes this a race of very different time scales. The organiser puts the Odyssey at nine to twelve days and the Legend at four to seven, with 32 refuelling points on the Legend route and six of them carrying drop bags. The 100 Miles is a two-to-three-day race with 10,990 m of ascent and 15 aid stations; the Challenge is done in a single day. In 2017 the first edition had 1,250 runners from 41 countries on a 170 km course.

For the people waiting in Le Bouveret, a runner on the long formats can be out of sight for days, on passes where a phone holds no signal. On Livebib the runner shares a link; family and friends open it in a browser, without an account or an app, and see the position on the course line, the distance covered and a finish estimate that updates as the race goes. When the signal drops, the position is carried forward along the course and marked as estimated rather than frozen. The runner decides who gets the link.