UTA22

May came around and, for the second year in a row, my wife and I took on the UTA22 course in the beautiful Blue Mountains. UTA weekend features events ranging from the Kids 1 km all the way up to the Miler (160 km).

Race weekend started with picking up our bibs and race shirts from the expo. Getting there was straightforward, with UTA providing shuttle buses to and from the venue. The expo itself was small but impressive, with many of the brands we use in training on display. Once we’d finished looking around, we caught a bus back to Leura, checked into our accommodation and enjoyed a relaxed afternoon before race day.

Friday morning began with light rain as we walked the short distance from our hotel to the shuttle bus stop in Leura. From there, it was about a 20-minute ride to the start at Queen Victoria Hospital. UTA22 is the only point-to-point event of the weekend and the only race that requires runners to take a shuttle bus to the start.

Once you arrive at Queen Victoria Hospital, there’s a five to ten-minute walk to the start line. Runners are released in waves approximately every 20 minutes. We were fortunate enough to arrive just before the next wave, so we slipped in at the back and waited for the countdown.

The race begins with a short uphill section before opening onto what is, for me, the best part of the course. An incredible 8 km descent along wide fire trails. The views across the valleys are spectacular, although on this occasion the fog hid much of this but we did have glimpses. Along the way you cross several small creeks, and there’s something about the sound of running water that I always find incredibly calming. It rained for most of this section, but rather than taking away from the experience, it made it feel even more like an adventure through the wilderness.

Once the descent ends at around the 8 km mark, the course changes dramatically. From there, it’s almost all climbing back towards Scenic World. You tackle two steep climbs before reaching the only aid station on the course at 13 km. As always, the volunteers had it well organised and fully stocked. However, with the constant rain and thousands of runners passing through, the area had turned into a sea of mud. After refuelling, the climbing begins again.

At around 16 km, the course narrows into single track through the beautiful Leura Forest. This is another highlight of the race. The trail winds through towering trees, passes several waterfalls and offers some stunning views across the Blue Mountains.

Then comes the section every UTA runner knows about, the Furber Steps. All 961 of them.

Mentally, this is the toughest part of the course. These aren’t uniform staircase steps either. They’re large, uneven steps that seem to go on forever. Every distance, apart from the Kids 1 km, finishes by climbing them. The fastest runners can power through in around 10 to 15 minutes, while others may spend close to an hour making their way to the top.

For me, things became much harder about 2 km from the finish when my right calf started cramping. Although I fuelled better than I had the previous year, I still wasn’t paying as much attention to my nutrition and hydration as I should have been. The cramping stayed with me all the way to the finish and made those final kilometres far tougher than they needed to be.

Despite that, I made it to the top and crossed the finish line. Although I missed my target time by around five minutes, I was really pleased with how much I’d improved compared with last year. My wife had an even more impressive run, finishing around an hour and a half faster than she did the previous year, which was a fantastic reflection of all the work she’d put into her training.

UTA22 is an event I genuinely love and one I’ll definitely be back for in 2027. The past two years have been completely different experiences thanks to the weather, my fitness and simply knowing what to expect. One thing, however, never changes. It doesn’t matter how difficult the course becomes or how much your legs hurt. The only way to cover those 22 kilometres and 1300m of vert is to keep putting one foot in front of the other until you finally cross the finish line