Mexican indigenous runner Candelaria Rivas Ramos won a 63km ultramarathon in 7 hours, 34 minutes?

Rivas is a member of the Rarámuri, an indigenous group known for traditional long-distance running.

In early August 2025, posts on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and X spread claiming that an indigenous Mexican runner, Candelaria Rivas Ramos, had "stunned the world" by winning the 63-kilometer "2025 Canyon Ultra Marathon" in 7 hours, 34 minutes.

Snopes readers wrote in and searched the site asking us to check the claim.

We found the result was correct — Rivas did win the women's division of the 63-kilometer "Ultra Maratón de los Cañones 2025" race held in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. That distance is just over 39 miles, equivalent to 1 1/2 marathons.

The Mexican newspaper El Universal reported that the ultramarathon was Rivas' first race, and that she wanted to dedicate the win to her family. That information matched with a post-race interview Rivas gave to Mexican sports channel TVC Deportes through a translator. El Universal also reported, without providing proof, that Rivas walked 14 hours from Guadalupe y Calvo to Guachochi, the city where the race was held, in order to compete. Snopes could not confirm that claim.

Snopes found a flyer for the race on the website of Guachochi, a city in Chihuahua. The flyer, printed solely in Spanish, explained that sign-ups had to be done through a website called "CronoMex." Looking at that website, we were able to find results ("resultados" in Spanish) for the race. Searching for the 63-kilometer distance ("Carrera/Distancia") and women's general classification ("Categoría/Premiación"), Rivas' name appeared first, with a time of 7 hours, 34 minutes and 56 seconds.

According to a race-results announcement published July 5, 2025, on the Chihuahua state government website, Rivas is a member of the Rarámuri, an indigenous group local to the region whose traditions involve long-distance foot races and persistence hunting, a style of hunting involving simply driving prey to exhaustion over a long period of time.

For much of history, the Rarámuri's long-distance running resulted in them being stereotyped as "athletic savages" with a superhuman tolerance for pain. A 2021 article in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, about Harvard anthropologist Daniel E. Lieberman's research with the Rarámuri, said that some of those stereotypes could even be found in the bestselling 2009 book about the group by journalist Christopher McDougall, "Born to Run."

The Sapiens article explained that the Rarámuri people's long-distance running, done in traditional sandals called huaraches, is tightly connected with their religion. Lieberman described Rarámuri runners coping with the immense physical exertion by entering a "trancelike" state. "For them, this is spiritual," he told Sapiens.