Kilian Jornet has revealed that the knee injury which ruled him out of UTMB had been troubling him for three years – and admitted that his continued improvement in training helped him avoid addressing the underlying problem.
The four-time UTMB champion withdrew shortly before the 2026 race after pain and instability returned during a five-hour training run on the course between Courmayeur and Chamonix.
Jornet said at the time that he had been dealing with the injury for “several months” and would undergo surgery after an attempt to manage it conservatively failed.
But in an hour-long conversation with Olympic triathlon champion Jan Frodeno recorded during UTMB week and embedded below, the 38-year-old explained that the warning signs had been present for far longer.
“I have been thinking a bit, and it’s an injury that I have been dealing with for three years now,” he said.
“It was like: okay, I want to navigate through that injury and really work with the load and the training.
“But I think it was mostly not admitting it. I was looking at my times in training, on training routes that I’m training all the time. It’s like: I’m getting faster, I’m getting faster, I’m getting faster. So I can train more.”
‘It was really stupid on my part’
Jornet had previously said that an MRI following Zegama-Aizkorri in May showed a horizontal tear in the lateral meniscus of his left knee, cartilage damage behind the kneecap and adjacent bone-marrow oedema.
He had felt the familiar pain during his build-up to Zegama but completed the race at a reduced intensity, finishing 43rd at an event he has won 11 times.
Jornet subsequently started Western States but withdrew at around 61km, before missing Sierre-Zinal in the hope of recovering sufficiently to return to UTMB for the first time since his record-breaking fourth victory in 2022.
While his knee was struggling to tolerate fast running and heavy impacts, his results on familiar training tests continued to suggest that his overall fitness was moving in the opposite direction.
Jornet now believes that progress allowed him to overlook a decline in the neuromuscular qualities which help the body control movement and absorb the repeated impacts of running.
“I was really neglecting all the other part, like the neuromuscular part,” he told Frodeno on a fascinating episode of the ‘Going Mental’ podcast which covers many different topics and is well worth a watch.
“But because I was seeing that progression, it was like: I can do it afterwards. Then the body is just compensating – pushing more on the tendons and the muscles and everything – until a point.”
Why successful training cannot simply be repeated
There’s clearly huge mutual respect between Frodeno and Jornet who are legends of their respective sports. And both face similar challenges, with a nice crossover in Chamonix as 45-year-old Frodeno won his age category in OCC, three years on from retiring from professional triathlon.
And this latest experience has forced Jornet to confront one of the most difficult adjustments facing athletes as they grow older: accepting that a programme which worked previously may no longer produce the same response.
His aerobic and metabolic capabilities can still be improving at the same time as other systems are beginning to decline.
“I think what takes time to figure out, or to accept for oneself, is that we have the memory of: okay, last year I did this training and it worked well for me,” he explained.
“Or five years ago I did this race, it was amazing, so I want to replicate the same training. But our body is not the same. It’s changing.
“What is fun now, I can see that metabolically I’m progressing. I’m doing better times on something that is purely metabolic. But on the neuromuscular side, I see that I’m getting worse every year.
“I need to adapt my training to this reality. I think that’s the hardest with sport: we always want to replicate because we fear doing different things, because we don’t know the outcome.
“But doing the same thing will not put us in the same place because we have changed.”
Injuries rarely have one cause
Jornet also argued that injuries should not always be viewed as the simple result of one physical mistake.
Training provides only part of an athlete’s total load, which can also include the physiological demands placed on the body and the pressures created by work, family life and stress.
“Injuries, from what I have seen, are always when there is some kind of imbalance in any of these things,” he said.
“We often think of a mechanical injury as a mechanical problem: okay, I was running too many miles and I got a stress fracture.
“Rarely is the cause of the stress fracture that you were running too many miles. Often it is multifactorial – stress and load from other things in life. Maybe it is more physiological or a metabolic load that was too high.
“It’s just the body saying something is dysregulated and we need to find what it is.”
That balance becomes harder to find with age as an athlete accumulates more responsibilities away from training, although Jornet views the challenge of working around those constraints as part of the continuing fascination of elite sport.
“When you are younger it’s easy because you don’t have many things to think about,” he added. “That’s what makes it more complicated with longevity.
“But this is also the fun part of trying to get around it, because I know that in some other things I’m improving a lot. It’s: okay, how can I push on that while managing all the other things?”
‘What’s an injury?’
Jornet’s reaction to the latest setback is shaped by an extraordinary history with the same left knee.
In 2006, when he was 18, he broke his kneecap after jumping between two streets and landing heavily on cobblestones while running home from school with his arms full of books.
The fracture required an operation and left lasting differences in strength and range of motion. Jornet has said the prognosis was sufficiently concerning that his doctor was unsure whether he would compete at a high level again.
What followed was one of the greatest careers in mountain running, including four UTMB victories, 11 wins at Zegama and a succession of extraordinary racing and mountaineering achievements.
That experience helps explain the striking simplicity and perspective with which he now regards another interruption to his career.
“What’s an injury?” he asked Frodeno. “It’s just like a step back. Nothing more than that.”
