David Sinclair of the U.S. is racing the 2025 Transvulcania Ultramarathon, his first time at the event. In this interview, he talks about his impressions landing on the island, his short build-up for this race following a ski mountaineering race season, and his thoughts about how he’s able to excel in diverse terrain and distances.
For more on who’s racing, check out our in-depth women’s and men’s previews and follow our coverage here on the website and on Twitter/X over the weekend.
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David Sinclair Pre-2025 Transvulcania Ultramarathon Interview Transcript
iRunFar: Meghan Hicks of iRunFar. I’m with David Sinclair. It’s a couple of days before the 2025 Transvulcania Ultramarathon. Here we are, two Americans, finding ourselves in the middle of the ocean on an island.
David Sinclair: Yeah, it’s pretty incredible. It was a little unreal to fly in the other afternoon and be like, there’s just this island, or a couple islands that you can see rising up out of the ocean. Yeah, never been anywhere like this before.
iRunFar: Rising up out of the ocean in these perfect volcanic forms, right? Like textbook volcanoes.
Sinclair: Yeah, it’s beautiful. I studied geology in college, so it was pretty cool to see this place.
iRunFar: You did? Yeah, so you could interpret it for us geologically. Young volcanic islands rising many thousands of feet above the ocean floor.
Sinclair: Yeah.
iRunFar: But we are here for running. I think the last time iRunFar saw you race in person was your longest race to date. That was the 2022 Canyons 100k. Now we’re back to kind of a long race for you again, right?
Sinclair: Yeah, I’m excited to give it a try. It’s been a few years since I got around to being healthy enough to feel like I was ready to go to a true ultra-distance event.
iRunFar: Yeah, we’re here at, what is it, 70k, 14,000 feet of climbing? I forget what that is in meters. So, 40-some-odd miles, 14,000 feet of climbing. Men’s course record is just under seven hours. This is like the core of ultrarunning right here. Those stats, right?
Sinclair: Yeah, I think it’s a good distance and vert profile for me.
iRunFar: You are sort of digging in on making yourself known for your versatility in the sport or in multiple sports. Mountain running, trail running, ultrarunning, ski mountaineering, things like flatter, faster stuff, but then things that are more mountainy and vert-y like this. How are you able to stay kind of good at lots of different disciplines?
Sinclair: Yeah, I have no idea. I think doing different types of courses is just a good challenge for me. With my skiing background, I think the emphasis on cross-training and breaking it up and doing a different sport in the winter has worked well for me in the past.
iRunFar: Well, maybe let’s start with skiing then, because you’re coming off a ski season, and this is going to be your first running race back for the year.
Sinclair: Yeah.
iRunFar: What was that transition like?
Sinclair: Yeah, it kind of remains to be seen how it’s gone. I had a long ski season, went pretty well, raced a bunch of the Ski Mountaineering World Cup, so I spent the majority of the winter actually over in Europe. Then I kind of didn’t know what to expect after lots of racing and travel all winter, but I got home and I started feeling really good right away at running. I made sure to run two or three times throughout most of the winter. Then, yeah, had a really good intense 10-day block of training and then felt a little beat up right at the end of that. I’ve been lying pretty low and taking it easy and hoping that the body is ready to go on Saturday. A quick training block, which is like train hard and then taper hard. Yeah, I didn’t have enough time for anything else, so it’s not ideal. We’ll see how the body responds to it.
iRunFar: I think you’re not alone in this being early in the running season. A lot of these European athletes who are coming down to La Palma too, they’re also, maybe they’re not skimo racers per se, but they’re coming off of seasons where they’ve been cross-training in the mountains on skinny little skis as opposed to running. Maybe everybody, or the majority of people, are in a similar place early season.
Sinclair: Yeah, that’s a good part of what I chose this race for. I was looking at the course profile and seeing really climbing heavy and then a lot of it comes late in the race. I thought just good fitness and good climbing legs would hopefully be enough to have a pretty good performance here.
iRunFar: Yeah, and with your diverse skill set, you can run, but also you’re quite good on the vertical stuff. This is a very unique course, tons of front-loaded uphill and then tons of back-loaded downhill type of thing. I mean, you’re climbing to the top of a couple of volcanoes and then back down to the sea again. Have you thought strategically how you’re going to approach it, where you’re going to use your own strengths, weaknesses, training thus far?
Sinclair: I don’t have a master plan. It’s too early to know how my body’s going to respond to the day, but if I felt good and was having a good day, I think I would try to push a little bit more on the climbs because I think the big question mark would be how my body responds to lots of downhill mileage right now.
iRunFar: All the downhills prior to this being on skis as opposed to…
Sinclair: Yeah, it’s not the same at all.
iRunFar: Totally different.
Sinclair: If I could pull my skis out for the downhill, that would be nice.
iRunFar: Maybe let’s talk a second about your 2024 season. Front half of the year, you did some shorter distance mountainy stuff, and then you must have had a specific training block for JFK [50 Mile] and you pulled a huge course record out on that day. Maybe talk a little bit about how that season went, how you transitioned from doing two really different types of disciplines.
Sinclair: Yeah, the focus through the summer was I prepped up Broken Arrow [Skyrace] as my first big race and had a really good training block. I was living in Tahoe, so it’s really easy to train for, and totally nailed that race. Then I was able to recover pretty well and build again and crushed it again at Speedgoat [50k].
iRunFar: Pretty quick turnaround too, just a couple weeks, right? Three, four weeks?
Sinclair: Yeah, it’s like a month or so, maybe a little over a month. Yeah. That went pretty well. Then we moved back to Vermont, and I was pretty beat up in the moving and everything. I just had a terrible August into September and ended up having to take pretty much two weeks off with a little injury. From there, I decided to sign up for JFK. I’d run marathons pretty fast in the past, at least decently fast. I thought the mix of the first 15, 16 miles on a little technical trail and then flatter running could be something that I had potential to do well. I ended up having a really good two-month build, doing more focus on a mix of some trail running and flatter speed work. Yeah, it came together.
iRunFar: It came really together for you that day.
Sinclair: Yeah.
iRunFar: Was it like you moved to the East Coast, you said you worked through feeling beat up and being a little bit injured, and then started training again? Were you feeling well on the flatter, more runnable stuff, and you’re like, “Oh, hey, JFK?” Or were you like, “Oh, hey, JFK,” and then you tailored your fall to that?
Sinclair: Yeah. I was looking at a race to try to do in the fall, and after not feeling good in August and stuff, I was like, that’s far enough away that I can have time to reset. I’d been doing the steeper mountain running all summer, and it just seemed like a good change of pace and would be something that would be easy to train for. Motivating.
iRunFar: Motivating, yeah. You’re pretty familiar with the Euro ski mountaineering racing scene, coming to Europe, going to some mountain town, staying a couple of days, doing a race, moving to the next spot. Doing that for running, even though we’re, I don’t know, we’re technically still in the Euro zone.
Sinclair: [laughs] Right.
iRunFar: It’s like familiar but different territory for you, right? Coming here.
Sinclair: Yeah. I think it’s always a challenge to travel to Europe, especially when you’re coming from the U.S. I’d always want to think it’s going to be easy and it’ll be no problem, and then the time change always kind of hits me hard and yeah, so make sure to give yourself a few days. But I did a bunch of that this winter, so hopefully I’m getting better at it.
iRunFar: Back and forth and back and forth.
Sinclair: I just did two trips to Europe and then a two-week block at home, so trying to minimize the amount of transatlantic travel.
iRunFar: Well, best of luck to you representing America, Team USA, being one of the couple fast USA dudes on the starting line this weekend. Best of luck to you.
Sinclair: Thanks, yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Looking forward to the race.
iRunFar: Awesome.
