Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Sur les Traces des Ducs de Savoie (TDS) The Best Half Marathons for First-Timers.
But given that she helped deliver her own daughter two years ago, there isn’t much that seems to phase her when it comes to doing difficult things.
Although it was Arnold’s first time racing in the Alps, the 35-year-old runner from Paonia, Colorado, made it look relatively easy, winning what many consider to be one of the hardest events in the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) week of races in 22 hours, 58 minutes, and 52 seconds. She won the race by a margin of 85 minutes over Hélène Dassy of Belgium, who finished a distant second in 24 hours, 23 minutes, and 22 seconds.
The undulating course features eight steep climbs and descents, 29,527 feet of elevation gain, and a high point of 8,517 feet over Col Chavannes, where the route passes from Italy into France.
Health & Injuries.
“It was so hard, and so steep,” Arnold said after finishing late Tuesday night. “It was just long steep ascents and long steep descents all day. My quads actually went out in the last 50K, so it was difficult running downhill on them. And then my energy tanked just going on the climbs. And then when I got on the flat section on the way back (to Chamonix), my legs started cramping badly. So it was a lot of different things that I had to work through.”
Although she was involved in sports all her life, Arnold only really began running in 2020 amid the pandemic shutdown. But as the mother of two young daughters, Cypress, 5, and Shiloh, 2, Arnold has developed robust “mom strength,” which is why her husband, Derek Brinks, is never surprised at her tenacity and endurance.
She ramped up her running to long ultra-distance races after having children, running her first marathon about eight months postpartum in 2021, and then running her first 100-mile race in June of last year, eight months after the birth of their second daughter.
“Careth is a master at managing stress and overcoming challenges, and I think you see that today,” her husband said “This is the perfect moment for Careth. It's a culmination of her training, the effort she puts in, and her discipline.”
The race started in Courmayeur, Italy, at 11:45 p.m. local time on Monday night. Arnold started the race conservatively, in part because of the series of three big climbs in the first 22 miles of the race. As the course crossed the international border into France, she was in third place among women behind Germany’s Ida Sophie Hegemann and Manon Bohard Cailler of France.
She caught and passed each one during the long, steep climb out of Bourg Saint-Maurice, France, and never relinquished the lead again. Hegemann and Cailler dropped out of the race not long after Arnold passed them.
“I definitely entertained the thought, too, but I was like, ‘No, I'm super stubborn. I’m going to keep going,’” said Arnold, who, aside from being a professional runner for Altra, is also an artist and a horticulturist. “I think that's my talent as an ultrarunner. I have so much to learn in regard to speed and fitness and all that, but my stubbornness is my thing right now.”
Arnold earned qualifying points to enter the TDS race by finishing second in a UTMB World Series 100K race in Chiang Mai, Thailand last December. That was a bit of a homecoming for her. She was born in Thailand after her parents had moved there as missionaries and wound up staying for the first 15 years of her life.
To be more precise, she was actually born in the back seat of a taxi in Bangkok, as her father delivered her while her parents were stuck in traffic on the way to the hospital. And, as life has a curious way of repeating itself sometimes, two years ago, after settling in Colorado, Arnold more or less delivered her youngest daughter, Shiloh, on her own at home with some coaching assistance from her doula prior to her midwife arriving.
Arnold said that experience, as well as those of being a mom to her two girls has given her a new understanding of what pain, daily challenges, and perseverance are all about. She says she does most of her training in the early morning hours, often getting up at 4 a.m. to run before managing the kids during the day.
She said she’s taken a lot of inspiration from their girls, but she’s also learned from them, too.
“It helps me mentally kind of prepare for challenges, because kids are challenging,” Arnold said. “But it's also motivating to have kids, too, and to be a good example and a role model for them. I always want to inspire my kids to do hard things because kids aren't naturally inclined to do difficult things. Doing hard things is something we have to learn, and I'm learning that especially with young children, that courage is something you learn. Patience is something you learn. Perseverance is something you learn. So I feel like the more I can be a model for them, maybe they'll learn a little bit more. But I definitely learn a lot from them too.”
On the day she was supposed to fly late last week, Arnold ran into several travel snafus that almost forced her to cancel the trip. She was supposed to fly from nearby Montrose, Colorado, to begin a multiflight journey to Geneva, Switzerland, but when she got to the small local airport she was told the plane she was having engine trouble and couldn’t fly, and ultimately, the flight was canceled.
Without any time to waste, Arnold scrambled to rebook, but the only option at that point of the day meant flying out of Denver. Once she booked a new (more expensive) flight, she then had to book a one-way rental car and drive five hours from Montrose to Denver.
Once she arrived in Geneva the next day, the original shuttle ticket she booked had expired and couldn’t find a seat on another bus, so she opted to book an Uber for the 60-minute trip to Chamonix.
“Yeah, I had quite a time just getting here,” she said. “At one point, I was wondering if all of that was worth it, especially because it was going to be more expensive. But I didn’t want to quit before I got here. I wanted to give myself a chance.”
Brian Metzler is a Boulder, Colorado, writer and editor whose work has appeared in Runner’s World, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Outside, Trail Runner, We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back, and Red Bulletin. He’s a former walk-on college middle-distance runner who has transitioned to trail running and pack burro racing in Colorado.
