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Juan Pablo Blanes

@blanesan

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Marathoner X10 / PB 2:46:55

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KODIAK UTMB 2026 🇺🇸

From “And Then The Vulture Eats You” by John L. Parker, Jr

“Sometimes people could be disappointed to hear that much of an ultra-runner’s time is preoccupied with more or less the same concerns that occupy society in general: the problems of energy, food and water, shelter, health, self-defense, and waste.

The difference is that whereas the runner in his place of work is responsible for only a minuscule part of a section of a division of one of life’s innumerable problems, on the trail he takes responsibility for the entire universe of human survival, in microcosm.

The runner in his office may be an Assistant Manager of bottle capping machine maintenance for a Southwestern North Carolina regional bottling plant.

On the trail he is King of the World— the top decision maker, the nerve center coordinator in charge of all aspects of all things: the delivery of water and fuel to the cells; production and conservation of energy; regulation of heating and cooling; disposal of waste; and protection from external and internal threats.

In short, the cerebral cortex of an ultra-runner, or at least the left side of it, is a very busy center of autonomous government, with no time for boredom or vacuous thumb-twiddling”

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I run every day for the simplest reason. Left foot, right foot. If that were all this sport gave me it would be enough.

But it isn’t.

The thing I keep noticing is that every door I open in this sport shows me there are + doors.

Distance first. Then the time, for a while.

Then the friends, and the whole life that came with them.

Then places I’d only meet running. Then something I still don’t have a word for. From inside any one of those it looked like the whole building.

But none of them were.

Each one is another way to live running. Another experience I wouldn’t have gone looking for.

Another angle on myself and on the people and places I move through.
That’s the part I find beautiful, and I don’t think it has an end.

But it only stays open if you can hold it.

Running gets good to you and starts handing you a self, and it never takes everything at once. Ego on top of your essence, losing the ground, comparing yourself to others

And when that happens the doors stop opening.

Not because the sport punishes anyone. But because you stopped being able to walk through them.

And from the outside it all looks the same. Same mileage, same races, same person in the photos. That’s what makes it hard to catch.

So I do believe running is a privilege, and I don’t say that lightly. The body. The hours. The people who make room.

And the balance, which I’ve never been sure is character or luck.

Winning, if that’s the word, has almost nothing to do with fastest. Every number gets taken back eventually. By age, by a bad day.

What doesn’t get taken is still being out here at sixty with everyone you love still in the room, still opening doors.

None of this is really about running. I’ve noticed that everything that gets good to me does the same thing.

The company you sold. The work. The thing people count on me to keep being.

Running just gets there first.

Every door I’ve walked through was disguised as the last one. Each one felt like arrival. Each one turned out to be a hallway.

I don’t think we should measure this in how fast anymore. I think we should measure it in how long, and with who.

I hope, and I’m sure that the doors never end.

Left foot, right foot.

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A few frames from my work with @leicacamerafrance documenting @thespeedproject and the @bursbuildup team.

@m75works

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#runningmotivation #runningcommunity #runner #runnerscommunity #runnerslife

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Maratón CDMX 2026

Corrí con mis amigos.
Corrí con mi novia.
Corrí con un ejército en mi espalda.
Corrí con los que estaban detrás de las vallas.
Con los que gritaban mi nombre sin conocerme.
Con los que aparecieron justo cuando los necesitaba.

Si yo puse las piernas, ustedes pusieron todo lo demás.

Tocó correr.
Y qué chingón se sintió hacerlo acompañado.

Gracias por la foto de mi maratón @jupabg

Mi pandilla

No corrí solo, todos ellos iban conmigo.

Pura frescura.

Las porras de Mariel.

La Cabra e Iñigo dando cátedra de cómo llegar a la meta.

#TeamNike

Pura hidratación.

La porra de Marifer

Thal capturando los gritos de Violeta

♥️♥️

Gratitud.

Alegría.

Los padrinos.

Mi flaca.

Mi alegría.

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TSP CHX 2026 🏴🏴🇫🇷. @thespeedproject // @bursbuildup

450 kms: Chamonix -> Marseille.
8 runners: One shared passion.

countless roads, mountains, views, sunsets, laughs, doubts, pain and moments i’m still processing.

que nunca me falten piernas para seguir haciendo locuras con ustedes! grateful for you: @lmatwotwo @blanesan @pamevazco @de.linas @josepablo.buenfil @robertodiazt_ @luisangeldjc

📸 by: @de.linas !!!

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TSP CHX - MAR 2026 🇫🇷

You can train next to someone for years and still not really know them.

Then something like TSP happens, and forty-five hours undoes all of that. Not because the distance was long. Because there was nowhere left to manage how you looked while doing it.

Exhaustion is honest in a way conversation rarely is. It doesn't ask permission. It just shows up, in front of everyone, and there's no editing it after the fact.

That's what we watched happen inside this team. Not performance, not personal bests. People, plainly, at their least composed, being taken care of by the person next to them anyway.

We've coached a lot of athletes through a lot of hard training. We've never watched a group get this close, this fast. It wasn't something we could have organized. It happened because everyone ran out of the energy it takes to seem fine, at the same time, in front of each other, and nobody looked away.

We arrived together at the end of it different than we started. Closer in the way that only gets built by going through something, not around it.

An ode to being alive.

@thespeedproject

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⛰️🇫🇷 TSP CHX. Chamonix to Marseille.

This wasn’t a race. 🏁
It was a door. 🚪

We’ve run competitive marathons. We’ve run ultras. Nothing has ever hit us this deep, this genuinely.

@blanesan unexpectedly out front through Col du Joli.
@pamevazco flying like a goat through Cormet d’Arêches.
@josepablo.buenfil grinding his quads to nothing on the descent off Col de la Madeleine.
@luisangeldjc opening TSP on segment one. That energy. That moment. Still with us.
@astridmtzv running the night like a gazelle through Le Bourg-d’Oisans.
@de.linas back to back, running and filming every second of it.
@robertodiazt_ holding all of us together, spilling that caring energy the whole way.
@lmatwotwo lost and found in the Chemin du Rosset forest at 3am.

These are the moments that built this into a life changing experience. It felt like we opened a door into a room we didn’t know existed, one that changes how you think about what running can actually feel like, and what it can do to a life.

“An ode to being alive”

📷 @de.linas

🙏 @nils_877 @rafari_shoots @thespeedproject

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This is the view when you stop moving for ninety seconds during a handoff and actually look up.

Just glacier ice pouring down black rocks under Mont Blanc, indifferent to whatever any of us were doing on the road below it.

Col du Madeleine. Col du Glandon. The forest along the Chemin du Rosset at 3am, the moment in my life where I have been more scared. Marseille downtown at 1am..

I wrote about this feeling once before, the first time I ran De Mar a Mar, without knowing I’d end up back inside it years later in a completely different range of mountains.

There’s a Murakami line I keep returning to, about a sandstorm that isn’t really weather. This storm is you. At some point in a race like this your body stops letting you perform anything. The tiredness gets too total for that. You just are whatever you actually are, and so is everyone next to you.

Trail races have changed something in me. The 100k in Chihuahua changed something deeper. Even Pawnee Buchanan, on a hard week in Boulder that I thought had cracked something open at the time, was nothing next to this.

I don’t have a clean way to rank it except to say this went deeper than all of it, and I didn’t think there was a deeper left to go…

Sitting in the vans while I wasn’t running I started typing notes into my phone so I wouldn’t lose them.

What do you actually know about someone until you’ve watched them stripped down to that, no performance left, just the person?

How much of what I call my own character is something I’ve only shown people who were comfortable, well-fed, or dry?

I don’t think you get to know someone like that by choosing to. You get shown it, usually somewhere neither of you would pick, and you either look away or you don’t.

I have been writing pages about this the entire flight home and I’m still here doing it, and to be honest, I still feel a little dazed by the whole thing, like life changed completely and I’m the only one who’s noticed yet.

I hope the words I find these coming days will be worthy of this experience.

📷 @de.linas

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🦬🫈🫎🌳🤙🏼

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TSP CHX-MRS: Day 2
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@thespeedproject photos by @de.linas

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TSP CHX-MRS 2026: DAY 1
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@thespeedproject photos by @de.linas

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Thin air, red dirt, good company. Cheers!! 🥂 🇺🇸

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