ULTRIBE PADERU [5 & 6 Dec 26, Paderu, Andhra Pradesh]

The Paderu highlands have been home to the Kondh and Savara tribes for thousands of years, long before any road reached this part of the Eastern Ghats. The Kondh — one of the largest tribal communities in India — shaped these hills through cultivation, ritual, and seasonal movement. Their turmeric and pepper routes crossed ridgelines that would take a runner's breath away not because of the beauty, but because of the gradient.

​

The trails you will run on race day were not built for sport. They were built by people who had no other way through. Salt traders, medicine carriers, messengers between hilltop villages — all of them walked the same laterite soil, the same root-web descents, the same mist-soaked corridors above 1,000 metres.

When VTRA created Ultribe, the name itself was a gesture: a contraction of Ultra and Tribe. The Kondh and Savara communities are the original inhabitants of this terrain. Running here is not conquest — it is participation in a landscape that has always demanded something real from the people who cross it.

​

"The forest doesn't know what year it is. The altitude doesn't care about your training plan. You are a runner — and that means you belong here."