Aspiring aeronautical engineer and student-athlete places fourth in international mountain race

Milaina Almonte ’27 couldn’t see the finish line. Cloud cover had swallowed the top of the course, and somewhere above her, invisible, was the summit of Washeshu Peak—2,840 feet above the valley floor at Palisades Tahoe. She had no idea how much farther she had to go. So she just kept running.

“It just felt like I was on top of the world,” she recalls. Not knowing how much course was left didn’t rattle her. It sped her up.

By the time she broke through, Almonte had run herself into fourth place at the 2026 Broken Arrow Skyrace Ascent, a mountain race that draws elite international fields as a stop on the WMRA Mountain Running World Cup. She ascended in 45 minutes, 59 seconds, chasing down professional runners from Kenya and France on a course most competitors train for full-time. Almonte is still a full-time student.

That instinct to keep reaching past the point where she can see the outcome has also been a throughline of Almonte’s time at Santa Clara University. A rising senior, mechanical engineering major, and standout on the cross-country and track teams, Almonte is also chasing dreams of becoming an aeronautical engineer.

She’s spent the last two summers working with Eagle Aviators, a youth aviation program in her native Colorado, helping build biplanes and logging flight hours toward her pilot’s license—a hobby she says strengthens her understanding of aerodynamics.

“It’s an unreal feeling. I feel like I’m soaring,” she explains, minutes after her third flight ever. “That release, and adrenaline, too... It’s very much like trail running, getting to see so much of the world in a new way.”

Almonte grew up in Edwards, Colorado, ten minutes from Vail, in a family where the mountains weren’t window dressing—they were her whole world. Her parents met on their college cross country team, and her mother later coached her in middle school; running was simply what the Almontes did. It wasn’t until high school that she started taking it seriously, and not until an official visit to Santa Clara that she knew where she wanted to keep doing it. What sold Almonte was the closeness of the team.

“I could tell everyone cared about everyone, knew everyone, and actually talked to everyone,” she says. “That's just not the case on every team.”

That closeness extended to the wraparound support she’s found from coaches she trusts enough to be candid with, a sports psychologist she meets with regularly, a nutritionist who builds daily meal plans around her training schedule, and professors in small classes who know her well enough to work with her when travel and racing collide with her course load.

Freshman year, she admits, the balancing act nearly buried her. It took time to find a rhythm that worked, and fortunately she had help. Now rocking a 3.8 GPA, she’s one of many academic standouts among her fellow student-athletes at Santa Clara.

Almonte describes herself as someone who came to college shy and uncertain of her own abilities. That began to shift as she found a growing trust in her training, which now shows up in how she talks about the steeplechase, one of track’s most technical events.

Steeplechase is a 3000-meter obstacle course in which runners have to navigate large barriers and water pits. Not the most coordinated, Almonte’s first attempt at the water jump ended in a face-plant.

“It really called for so much more presence and focus,” Almonte explains, comparing it to the way she might puzzle through an engineering problem. “I had to really think about the precision of my footwork and body mechanics.”

By this year’s NCAA Championships, she’d posted the second-fastest steeplechase time in Santa Clara history and become only the fourth Santa Clara woman to qualify for the NCAA West First Round in the event.

“I just got less terrified each race,” she notes.

None of it, she’s quick to point out, happened in isolation—not the running, not the flying. It’s the same instinct pointed in two directions: the engineer who wants to know exactly how a barrier works before she clears it, and the athlete who’s learned to run straight into the clouds without knowing what’s on the other side.

Heading into her senior year with plans to start her master’s coursework and a shot at a conference title with her team, Almonte’s goal is simple, if not small: don’t plateau.

“Leaving high school, I wasn't even sure I’d keep running into college,” she said. “Now I’m realizing there’s no limit to what I can keep chasing—I just have to choose to do what I love. And I’ve found that to be running.”