Mountain Adventure Holidays
Milly and Charlie crossing the finish line at the PTL
Milly Young, a 34-year-old Australian endurance athlete, recently made history by becoming the second woman ever to finish in the top three of the PTL (La Petite Trotte à Léon) during UTMB. Known for her adventurous spirit, Milly’s journey through this grueling 330-kilometer race around Mont Blanc tested her mountaineering skills, self-reliance, and team dynamics alongside her brother, Charlie. Her passion for technical challenges and exploration made the PTL a natural fit for her, and her remarkable performance solidified her as a trailblazer for women in ultra-endurance sports.
Milly: It’s been difficult to fully grasp the experience. The recovery process has taken some time and for a while my brain wasn’t in a state for reflection. We had so little sleep during the race that for a long time, the PTL was a mixture of distorted memories.
Now that my brain has come down back to earth, it’s been great to reflect with Charlie on everything that happened - the high and lows, the sunsets and sunrises and all the great new friends we made along the way.
The experience of the PTL is difficult to explain but I think I can say it was the most fun I’ve had in 4.5 days.
Milly: It was the adventurous nature of the PTL that captured our attention. Last year, Charlie and I were watching the last finishers of UTMB when a PTL team came up the chute, looking like they’d been on a wild adventure. A race like UTMB has never really been on my radar, but the PTL definitely piqued my interest because of its length and technicality. It seemed like a unique combination of ultra-running and mountaineering and a real adventure.
Milly: It was really beautiful to experience this adventure with him. We have been partners in the mountains for many years now - climbing, mountain biking, running and more recently learning to paraglide together. Our partnership started when I used to change his nappies but it really solidified when we spent 3 months living in a car together in Canada in 2018 on a climbing and mountain biking trip.
Running the PTL strengthened our bond even more. We knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses and could push each other when it mattered. We played games when our minds needed distraction, we knew what to say to each other to bring the spirits up. We had moments where we didn’t even need to speak—we just knew how to support each other.
It’s hard to explain our bond with words - I think it’s a deep love, respect and care for each other and a combined love for the mountains and for pushing ourselves to find out how far we can go. Charlie is my best adventure partner, and the fact that we got to experience 114 hours in the pain cave side-by-side is something that makes my eyes well up just thinking about ;)
Milly: Climbing was my first love. I started climbing almost a decade ago and it quickly took over my life. Like so many people, I found running during the COVID years. When the pandemic hit, I moved back to my parents’ farm in rural Western Australia. I had no partners to climb with and, because of restrictions, nowhere to climb. So, I started running and I quickly fell in love with the unfettered nature of it. All you need is a pair of shoes! Running gave me a new way to explore the mountains—faster and further.
Milly: It’s really exciting and quite unexpected. We [Charlie and I] were out there to have an adventure together so to finish top 3 was some delicious icing on the cake! But yeh, it’s awesome to be a woman finishing on the podium! I think there’s still so much more female potential to be unlocked. I hope we continue to see more and more women in these kinds of races.
Milly: It’s inspiring to see these accomplishments—it proves we’re capable of so much. But there’s still work to do. After the first 50k of the PTL, I only saw one other woman (the amazing Isabelle Ost), and even at UTMB, women were just ~25%.
The way to change this is through coverage. You can’t be what you can’t see! The more visibility we have of women in mountain sports, the more we’ll see participation of women increase. The media and brands have a huge role to play in highlighting the incredible things women are doing in mountain and endurance sports to keep this momentum going.
Milly: I’ve always enjoyed testing my limits, but with the PTL, I had to get creative—especially after tearing my MCL just 5 months before. Instead of focusing on what I couldn’t do, I leaned into what I could. Our approach for the race was heavily focused on FUN! We kept it flexible, with no structured training plan. We mainly spent long days in the mountains climbing and running and creating micro multi-sport adventures around the Chamomix valley. It was all about keeping it loose and trusting (or hoping!) that we’d be ready when the race came. I think that approach worked for us because we weren’t burnt out by the time race week came - if anything we were a little undercooked which was perfect for a long race like the PTL.
Milly: Before the race, we went out for a 3-day recce on the 2023 PTL course. This gave us an idea of the kind of terrain to expect in the race and at what paces we would be moving at. From this information we drew up a ‘race plan’ which turned out to be pretty accurate. We ended up finishing just 2 hours after our plan!
Gear wise we have a lot to improve on. Our gear was heavier than ideal—our packs were 10kg, while the winning team carried ~5kg each. There’s so much mandatory gear: helmets, harnesses, crampons, and all-weather kits plus water and food. Optimizing that is a puzzle we’re working on.
Milly: We definitely carried too much food. We weren’t short on supplies, but the act of eating became tough. We forced down meals at stops but really struggled to eat much in between. Hydration, on the other hand, went smoothly—we filled up at streams and stayed on top of it.
Milly: There were so many amazing moments, but one that stands out was the first night, scrambling above Col de Balme. We could see a cloud inversion with head torches from the teams behind us coming down Mont Buet. That view was incredible—surreal even. It’s hard to describe, but it was one of those ephemeral moments where you just need to pause and take it all in.
Milly: Day 3 was indeed a hard day. My knee made every descent painful and both Charlie and I were very low on energy. We got through it by playing games like ‘guess who’, singing to our PTL playlist (yes, we took a speaker!), trying to find joy in the pain and remembering that ‘hard’ was what we signed up for.
We also sent a call-out to friends and family to send us Whatsapp voice notes to keep us going. Hearing messages from friends and family really helped lift the morale and kept entertained for hours.
As is always the case in ultra running, and in life, lows make way for highs and the suffering passes.
Milly: Crossing the line was a mix of stoke and a strange melancholy. Stoke that we’d finished the loop and didn’t have to move anymore and sadness…that we didn’t have to move anymore! For the last 4 days we’d existed in our own little world of simplicity where all that mattered was eating, sleeping as little as possible and putting one foot in front of the other to move as fast as we could. Crossing the finish line was an abrupt re-entry into the world we’d left behind.
We had hoped to come into a roaring crowd in the late evening but we ended up crossing the line at 2:30am! It was a bit anticlimactic without the typical UTMB week crowds but we had a group of amazing friends who were there to celebrate. Anyway, it wasn’t about the finish line, it was about what happened out there.
Milly: Don’t focus on all the reasons that you can’t do it. Just commit, try (really hard) and see what happens!
