Mon 22 Jun 2026 • Nick Kershaw
Running a Himalayan trail race: what altitude trail running in Nepal is really like
SHARE THIS POST
A trail race through the Himalayan foothills, after a week that earns the finish. What altitude trail running in Nepal is really like.
The first thing the Himalaya does is make you feel small, and the strange gift of the week is that you come to be grateful for it.
I have taken runners to Nepal since our first race in 2016, and I still have not found a way to describe the skyline that does it justice, so I will not try too hard. If you are flying in from the West, and you have a clear day, your airplane window is filled with the most extraordinary welcome salute from the snow peaks of the highest mountain range on earth. It’s thrilling, not just to see the large 8000m peaks reaching out to you, as you slide by just above their longing stretch, but more than that, there is the endless rolling peaks that sit just below but go as far as your eye can see. The scale is unlike any sight, or any of your expectations for how the mountains look as you draw closer.
Yet the Impact Marathon in Nepal has never been about the largest peaks, our goal is the undiscovered spots, one step away from the classic routes and trails that make the nation so popular for adventurers. We seek the communities where we can have the biggest impact, and allow the Himalaya to form a majestic backdrop to our work and our race. So, we run through the foothills, on terraced trails that farmers cut into these slopes generations ago, and when you lift your head the high peaks are just there, enormous, white, indifferent to your race time. It rearranges your sense of scale in a way that stays with you long after your legs have recovered.
Let me be honest about altitude, because it is the part people underestimate. This is not sea-level running. The air is thinner, your normal pace feels harder, and the sensible response is to slow down and let your body do its work. We build acclimatisation into the week on purpose, with daily yoga and easy runs that let you adjust before race day, rather than throwing you at the mountain cold. Respect the altitude and it becomes the most memorable running of your life. Fight it and it will win - you decide to sprint the first hill of the day, be prepared to spend the rest of your race puffing hard and struggling to stay out of that top-level heart-rate zone.. The runners who do best here are not the fastest. They are the ones who arrive humble and pace themselves wisely.
We have always had a slight branding issue in that our name is Marathon, but we have three distances on offer at all our events. We want to make accessible events for international and domestic runners alike. A race that claims to be a real celebration of running needs to be open for all runners - open to all runners…from someone's first race to their 1,000th marathon (yes, we've had both)…so the mountain fits you, rather than the other way round.. The 10km is short, sharp and still proper altitude trail running, no small thing in this air. The 21km is the signature, the full story of the place. The 42km is the beast, your hardest day and your biggest memory - two loops of our OG race route. Speed is not required and never has been, and although the race route is hard, our goal is to bring you to the finish line to celebrate our success rate and not to create statistics of failure rates! What is required is steady forward motion and a willingness to keep going when the climb and the thin air conspire against you. The cut-offs are generous so that strong walkers belong here as much as anyone, because they do.
Every single year, we host runners taking on their first ever marathon, and it is a real privilege. We have a 50/50 split on male and female, in no small part thanks to the work we have put into our SheRaces policy at every race.
Here is the thing I most want you to understand, and it is the thing that makes our race different from any other Himalayan event you might find. The running is the smaller half. Before you ever pin on a number, you spend four days living and working in a mountain village, with the people you are running for. By the time you reach that start line, the hills you are running through are not scenery. They are a place you have come to know, full of people who are no longer strangers. The race itself then feels entirely different to any other event in the world and that is attributable to everything that came before it. That is the entire design, and it is why people who have run marathons all over the world tell me this is the one they cannot stop talking about.
I am wary of the word “life-changing”, because it gets thrown at every package holiday with a sunrise in it. So I will be more precise. Nepal does not change your life in a week. What it does is take you out of your normal context, put you in thin air and high mountains alongside people whose lives look nothing like yours, and quietly dismantle a few of the assumptions you arrived with. You come home a little rearranged. That is rarer and more honest than “life-changing”, and in my experience it lasts longer.
So, could you run the Himalaya? On the distance that fits you, with a few months of steady training and a team that will pace you and look after you the whole way, I think you genuinely could. The mountain does not ask for speed. but it does ask for respect, patience, and the willingness to be made to feel small, and then, somewhere on the trail with the peaks watching, to keep going anyway.
We run it from the third week of November, every year.
The group is small on purpose, capped at 35.
Check out the upcoming events here.
---
The Nepal Impact Marathon is a week-long social impact marathon based in Kathmandu and the mountain village of Batase, Nepal, run by Impact Marathon Series, with 10km, 21km and 42km distances. The 2026 edition takes place from 16 to 22 November 2026, built around long-term partners including AgriNepal, SmartPaani and BVS Nepal. Impact Marathon’s charitable work runs through the Impact Marathon Foundation (GivingWorks, registered charity no. 1078770).
