Here we go! That’s right, we’ve made it to the top five of this year’s TROY awards! Both of the runners who landed in our fifth spot this year are repeat TROY top-ten athletes, showing up consistently year over year both on and off the trail. The fact that these two athletes are some of the most decorated in our sport with four more days of Trail Runner of The Year to go has our minds blown by everything that happened in 2024. As Dylan would say – Best. Sport. Ever. If you’ve missed any of the countdown thus far, you can find them here: sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth.

In fifth position this year we have adidas TERREX’s Ruth Croft and Nnormal’s Kilian Jornet.

Ruth Croft is one of the most consistent and decorated women in trail and ultra running, and this year’s appearance in the TROY top five marks her third appearance in as many years. Since stepping up to the 100-mile distance at Western States in 2021 and winning the race in 2022, we’ve been waiting for Ruth to make her UTMB 170km debut. Unfortunately, getting to that start line has been just out of reach for the last several years. The stars aligned in 2024, our wishes were answered, and the debut we’ve been waiting for finally happened. Oh, and it didn’t disappoint. Ruth would go on to finish 2nd at this year’s UTMB, but in the process, she ran the best back-half splits in race history! It goes without saying we are already looking forward to next year. 

UTMB wasn’t the only success of Ruth’s 2024 season – in fact, of her four races it was the one race she didn’t win this past year. Ruth kicked off her season last February at home in New Zealand absolutely throwing down to win the Tarawera 102km. May saw Ruth return to Transvulcania 73km, running away from previous champion and course record holder Ida Nilsson to take the win and establish a new course record in 8:02:49. Finally, Ruth used the Zugspitz Ultra Trail 67km to kick start her UTMB build with a win in 6:49:23. 

We asked Ruth what her highlight of 2024 was and loved her focus on embracing challenges, “I never really considered myself as being strong at hiking up mountains with a pair of poles, so it’s been a new challenge being able to work on that craft and seeing it all come together at UTMB, while being carried around the course with the support of my family, partner, and team – which was definitely a highlight.” Whichever startline Ruth toes in 2025 – we’ll be watching!

While FKTs are not considered as part of TROY, this year’s fifth-place male needs a little extra kudos for his FKT of the year for his Alpine Connections Project. If you have not yet read his post on the project, we highly encourage you to go check it out. Kilian, we applaud you. Something that has continued to impress and awe us throughout Kilian’s career is the incredible range he routinely puts on display, often within a calendar year. You want a guy who is good at a VK, Kilian. You want a guy who can run fast and flat, Kilian. you want a guy to crush a trail marathon, Kilian. You want a guy to win a mountainous 100-mile race in record time, Kilian. You want a gut to run and climb for 19+ days straight all human powered, Kilian. Any one of these goals and accomplishments could be a lifetime’s worth of work, a worthy career, and yet Kilian blows us away often connecting many of these things within a summer, sometimes meer weeks apart. While we may never comprehend it, we are happy to be along for the ride.

So, in classic Kilian fashion, it’s no real surprise that in a season we will most likely remember for him climbing all 82 4000meter peaks in the Alps in one push under 20 days came on the heels of winning two of the most famous and hotly contested short trail races in the world. In May, Kilian returned to what we would like to call his favorite race in the world (he’s run it 12 times now), the Zegama-Aizkorri Marathon, which he won for the 11th time. He then backed that up by returning to the iconic Swiss race, Sierre-Zinal, for the 13th time and collected his tenth victory there – in a course-record time of 2:25:34. The thing is… these fields are not getting weaker, Kilian just keeps getting stronger as well. It was an incredible season for Kilian and lucky for us we don’t have to wait that long to “see what he does next.” We are getting our popcorn ready, because rumor has it we’re about to watch the golden ticket hunt heat up.

We asked Kilian what his highlight of 2024 was and while it’s hard to put yourself in Kilian’s shoes we can appreciate how years of hard work lead to incredibly special moments, “My highlight of the year can be explained on a very precise instant during the Alpine connections. While climbing up Weisshorn, I didn’t felt tired despite the effort of continuous days climbing, my broken rib didn’t feel any pain, and my brain was lucid and fresh despite the severe sleep deprivation and deep concentration over days. With the sun setting on my left and a broken spectrum on my right, I was climbing fast, and light, there was not any notion of time, there wasn’t any feeling of body as a mass, not even a feeling of if I was alive as a body or not – it was only my consciousness on that ridge. I was flowing, and that’s why all the efforts of years of training, lows, and obstacles are worth it. For that.”

Ruth and Kilian are absolute stars, inspiring each of us to dream up and go after big, sometimes scary, goals. Thank you for continuing to stoke our fires with your grit and grace on and off the mountains, we can’t wait to watch you tackle new goals in 2025. Check back here tomorrow to see which two runners found their way to number four!