How She Did It: Katie Schide’s Record-Setting Hardrock 100 Victory

Written by:

Jason Koop

CTS Premier Ultrarunning Coach

Updated On

July 17, 2025

How do you follow up a 2024 season highlighted by victories at Western States Endurance Run (in the second-fastest female time on record) and Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc? For Katie Schide, it was to win the 2025 Hardrock 100 in her debut appearance and break the counterclockwise and overall female course records! Hardrock is a very different animal compared to WSER and UTMB, meaning the race tested Katie’s adaptability and resilience along with her physical capacity. With her win in Silverton, Colorado, Katie joins Courtney Dauwalter and Kilian Jornet as the only athletes to win the combination of WSER, UTMB, Diagonale des Fous, and the Hardrock 100 within their careers. Here’s an inside look at how she did it.

Starting Point: 2024 Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc

Winning WSER and UTMB in the same season was a major accomplishment, but it exacted a big toll on Katie in terms of focus, training load, and fatigue. I knew she would need a substantial break after UTMB, so we planned for about a 4-week Transition Period. Traditionally, transition periods feature a lot of rest and some unstructured physical activity based on the athlete’s preferences. It’s a mental and physical break, but it’s also a time to address acute or nagging injuries from the previous season.

Katie had some racing-related injuries following UTMB, so she worked with her CTS strength training coach, Sarah Scozzaro, on some strength and mobility exercises during the transition period. Katie was making great progress with Sarah and I didn’t see any reason to rush back to training, so we extended the transition period to about six weeks (early September to October 15). She started back with a relatively light schedule of 10-12 hours of running per week, and then we increased the weekly volume and added more structured workouts in mid-November.

Living in the mountains in France, Katie spends a lot of the winter skiing and ski mountaineering (skimo). During the winter between 2024-2025, her cumulative training hours between skiing and running added up to about 15-20 hours per week, but the distribution was often 2:1 or 3:1 skimo to running hours.

I think skimo is a great activity for ultrarunners. Athletes can achieve incredible high peak VO2 values while skiing uphill, but with less impact on the legs and feet compared to trail running. It also has some sport-specificity benefits for Hardrock training because uphill skiing is very similar to uphill hiking, and there’s a lot of that in Hardrock. Plus, skimo is a sport Katie loves and she skis in some of the most beautiful mountains in the world, so it’s great from a motivation standpoint deep in the winter. In March 2025, she finished the skimo season with an impressive 3^rd place team performance at the 4-day Pierre Menta.

Preparing Specifically for 2025 Hardrock

The Hardrock 100 is a different type of beast than WSER or UTMB. The race features considerably higher altitudes, more sustained time at high altitude, and 13 mountain passes. To win WSER, an athlete must train to run most of the course, but at Hardrock all athletes spend a lot of time hiking. The overall pace at Hardrock is slower and you’re out on course much longer (compared to WSER).

One of the most important things we had to do with Katie’s training was to slow her down. She needed to be extremely fit, but to adapt that fitness for fast hiking on long climbs and descents rather than training to run at the faster pace she could sustain for WSER. But before making the switch to highly-specific Hardrock training, Katie used her speed and aerobic capacity from skimo to race and win the 115km event at Madeira Island Ultra-Trail in April 2025.

High Volume, then High Altitude

After Madeira, Katie rested and recovered from racing and then embarked on a high-volume training block. Her long runs during this period were 6-8 hours, sometimes structured as two back-to-back 8-hour runs or 4-, 6-, and 6-hour runs spread across three days. It was mostly endurance running, but we also incorporated 1-2 SteadyStateRun workouts per week.

In preparation for an altitude camp in Leadville, Colorado, we used a sauna protocol for heat exposures. This can ease the transition to altitude because heat acclimation increases plasma volume, which is one of the key adaptations that happens when athletes travel to higher elevations. A longer heat acclimation protocol could potentially stimulate an increase in red blood cell production, but that wasn’t our goal. We just wanted to ease the transition to Leadville so Katie could train more effectively upon arrival at 10,000 feet.

I coach Katie’s partner, Germain Grangier, who was also preparing for Hardrock and participated in the heat acclimation protocol and Leadville training camp. Interestingly, the sauna protocol was more effective in easing Katie’s transition to altitude than Germain’s. It took him longer to adapt to altitude, which is simply indicative of the variability in athlete response to heat acclimation and altitude interventions.

Hardrock Training Base in Ouray, Colorado

Although the Hardrock 100 starts and finishes in Silverton, Colorado, Katie and Germain used Ouray as their training base starting in May 2025. The small town of Ouray sits at about 7,700 feet above sea level whereas the elevation in Silverton is 9,300 feet. Ouray is more in the sweet spot for living and training at altitude because it’s high enough to elevate red blood cell production but not so high that athletes can’t get good sleep or good quality training sessions. Plus, more parts of the Hardrock course are easily accessible from Ouray, and course recon was important for Katie because she was trying to win Hardrock on her first attempt.

2025 Hardrock 100: How the Race Was Won

The data set on Hardrock 100 performances is thin compared to races like WSER and UTMB, meaning athletes don’t have as much information to base their pacing and nutrition strategies on. That makes Hardrock less predictable, which can be a difficult scenario for highly organized athletes who like to plan things with precision. To succeed at Hardrock, you need to be able to think on the fly and feel your way through it.

My advice to Katie (and Germain) before race day was, “Don’t race it.” What I meant was that they couldn’t expect to go out and race the way they’re used to on other courses. The terrain and altitude at Hardrock are unforgiving and the consequences for a pacing or nutrition mistake are much more costly. Typically, the time it takes to recover from a pacing or nutrition mistake at altitude is 2-3x as long as it takes at sea level or moderate altitude.

I also passed along some advice I garnered from Darcie Piceu when she and I ran around the San Juans on our own Hardrock journeys. She put the race in perspective by saying something to the effect of, “There are 13 mountain passes and it’s almost impossible to ace them all. The best you can work toward is achieving A-minus to B-plus performances on most passes and avoiding complete failure on any.” In other words, don’t overextend yourself trying to be perfect on 13 passes in a row.

Katie had a pretty smooth race for most of the day, some normal ups and downs, and only really struggled with a stomach issue later in the race. She was feeling bloated going into Ouray, felt better on her way into Telluride, and was feeling pretty bad again when she arrived at Chapman Gulch Aid Station with around 18 miles to go, despite being ahead of course record pace. In an attempt to help the bloating, we moved to soup for nutrition and sparkling water to facilitate burping. Over the final 18 miles she moved even further ahead of record pace and even had a fast and fun final descent into Silverton.

Final Word

Katie’s performance at the Hardrock 100 continues a pattern she’s established at Western States and UTMB. She’s great at learning how to race particular courses and events, which means she tends to get better on the second and third iterations. So, although she won Hardrock and set a new course record, there are still aspects of the race she’s figuring out and she has the potential to come back and race it even faster in the future.

Hardrock 100 team (clockwise from upper left): Sarah Scozzaro, Jason Koop, Meredith Terranova, Katie Schide, Germain Grangier.