UTMB into the day

In the same mile I made it my goal to "run faster," I met the full brunt of the M.U.D. (Most Unwelcome Difficulty.) I like my challenges to be challenging, to a level that for me is just a few notches below impossible. Even at a hundred kilometers, a mountain running event like UTMB is close enough to impossible for me that I need a fair amount of luck just to finish. I like this level of uncertainty. But it does mean there's plenty of frustration and angst whenever I meet inevitable setbacks, and the sticky, slippery substance coating the trail was about to send me way back.


In an eight-kilometer section beyond Les Contamines, there were two long, steep climbs, gaining a combined 4,100 feet in five miles. With nearly eleven hours on my feet, this part of the course would have been a tough challenge dry, but the trail had been consumed by the seventh level of M.U.D. For the first climb, it was like a horribly rendered mousse, with a slimy chocolate film coating a morass of sticky paste. With every footfall, I could never tell if my shoe was going to slip sideways or disappear beneath the film and stop me in my tracks. As the trail steepened, I started hoping my shoe would disappear into the muck; otherwise I slid farther backward than I'd climbed. The conga line of runners had predictably backed up, and because we didn't synchronize our slipping, I occasionally had to dodge a shoe as it swung dangerously close to my face. Some runners' entire backsides were slicked in mud; others had slime smeared across their faces. The whole scene was ridiculous enough to be a comical farce, a Laurel and Hardy skit about trail running. But it was six in the morning, my feet were soaked and sore, and I wasn't laughing.


On the second climb, the trampled mud was more shoe-sucking than slippery. I was grateful not to be falling all over myself anymore, despite the increased resistance that made me work at least twice as hard for every step. It occurred to be that only the back half of the pack had it this bad. I'd run trails in the Alps during rainstorms; they usually seem to drain well enough to provide hero-dirt traction. But send a couple thousand runners through while it's still raining, and there's no preventing churning up a shin-deep soup of chocolate milk and clay. I wanted out of the mud and out of the conga line, so I began aggressively passing other runners, until I dropped into an unseen trench and twisted my left knee painfully to the side. "Arrrrgh!" I cried out, loud enough that a man in front of me turned around and looked startled. I stepped off to the side of the trail to calm my throbbing knee. The initial pain was alarming, and I panicked with the conviction that I had sprained it or worse. Sitting in the grass, I rolled up my tights and scanned for injury. The joint looked slightly swollen, but it probably looked this way before I fell. There was nothing I could do about it anyway besides limp to Les Houches.


The top of the Bellevue ridge provided the best views of the race, and this temporarily brightened my mood. Snow-covered peaks stabbed into the clouds above a carpet of fog, and fireweed fields provided the slightest hit of color. My knee hurt but it had become apparent that it wasn't badly injured, and I crossed my fingers that the descent would be a nice dirt road that I could actually run to shake out my cramping calf muscles.

It wasn't. The backside of Bellevue brought the steepest, muddiest descent yet, punctured with knee-deep trenches and headwalls that the more timid among us had no choice but to crawl down backward. Some runners in front of me were extremely slow doing this; others behind me were even more impatient. They jostled for gaps in the group and even shoulder-slammed those who didn't move over fast enough. I watched one man leap over a woman who had fallen to her hands and knees at the bottom of a headwall. It was a terrifying free-for-all; our silly little Laurel and Hardy skit had morphed into extreme mud wrestling.

By the time I reached the paved road to Les Houches, I was shaken and upset. This morass of runners and mud was definitely not what I came to the Alps to experience. I knew the numbers going into the event, but I never conceptualized what that really meant for crowding. That fast runners get the space, and more than 1,500 of us were wedged within a few hours of the cut-offs, jostling for position for a full hundred kilometers. My left knee throbbed and I fantasized about joining the river trail and running the wide-open five miles back to Chamonix. "Hell," I thought. "I can get on a bus. Be asleep by noon." But all that time, I knew I wasn't really going to quit UTMB. After all, I did come to the Alps to face crushing challenges head-on. These weren't the challenges I'd been expecting, but in a way, that made them all the more meaningful.

Just before Les Houches, I savored my last peanut butter cup. Food had been one of the areas I thought I could trim some weight, given the aid stations along the course, but even then I brought what I was thought was a generous 2,000 calories of sugary energy. Still, cold weather makes me hungry, and I plowed through my food with uncharacteristic voracity. The aid stations themselves were too crowded to be useful. The food tables were blocked rows deep and it usually took five minutes or more just to get a cup of soup, so I rarely bothered with much else. The result was, at mile 45, my food was all but gone; I had one more serving of Nutella and two small cereal bars. Now that I'd have to rely on aid station food, I found Les Houches decidedly lacking. I was able to grab a few cut-up granola bars, some cubes of cheese, and slices of bread, which I stuffed into a Ziplock bag. My course notes, now rendered almost illegible by the night's soaking, indicated it was fourteen kilometers to the next aid station. Of course I didn't write whether it was stocked with food or not. But I had peanut butter cup energy surging through my blood, and I figured I had consumed plenty of reserves for a longer haul.

The course climbed and dropped steeply for two hours; I munched on most of my aid station food and started to feel rumbles in my stomach. When my always-reliable GPS indicated I'd traveled 53 miles, I reached a small aid station that was practically in the town of Chamonix. They had water but only a few small bowls of sweet bread as food. I didn't want to be greedy so I ate two tiny pieces and continued up the trail. The edge of my notepaper was torn and I could no longer decipher the last of my course notes, but I did remember there was one more aid station and this race was supposed to be 104 kilometers, so that meant about ten more miles total. "Bah, that's nothing," I thought, and continued jogging happily along the drying trail.

Wisps of sunlight broke through the clouds, and my mood had swung entirely around to a peaceful, content rhythm. My feet hurt, probably from skin maceration caused by being soaked for so many hours; my knee was sore and I was definitely hungry. But all things considered, I felt pretty darn good. We passed a sign for Argentiere and a bridge across the river. I thought we would cross it and enter the home stretch — six more rolling miles back to town. Instead, a crowd of cheering spectators directed me to the left, when the trail launched up a veritable wall.

It wasn't just a diversion. In a matter of minutes, I had climbed high enough that I could see the whole valley, and the steep trail showed no sign of veering back down the mountain. I glanced at my GPS. 59.4 miles. "GPS has never let me down like this before," I thought. "But it's without a doubt a lot more than four miles to the finish." I devoured my Nutella because at this point, I had no concept of rationing. After 1,500 vertical feet of trudging, I saw a course marshal standing on a rock. "English?" I asked. He nodded. "Is the aid station up there?" He just shrugged. But I was desperate, so I persisted. "Are we going to La Flegere?" I said loudly, adopting that annoying American assumption that volume will result in understanding. "Is the aid station at the top? Or control? Is the control at the top?"

"Is about twenty more minutes to top," he said. "Then about five more kilometers to Argentiere, where you can have water and eat food." Then he smiled. "This is the good way."

Five more kilometers? GPS might have made a few miscalculations, but this course was undoubtedly well over a hundred kilometers. If my memory was correct and there were six miles after the last checkpoint, it was actually going to be closer to 112. But what could I do? "UTMB was supposed to be a lot harder," I reminded myself. "You're getting off easy anyway. Don't complain."

After the "top," the trail started along a rolling traverse that steeply lost and then regained elevation.  I was glad I had hoarded two liters of water in Les Houches; being out of food when energy reserves are completely depleted is one thing, but running out of water late in a race really sucks. Still, I quickly felt more and more bonky, becoming dizzy whenever the trail trended upward, and unable to run at all, even downhill. I felt icky, but I was still surprised by the carnage I passed along those five kilometers into Argentiere: runners sitting down in the middle of the singletrack; runners reclining on rocks; runners hunched over their trekking poles, wretching; a runner laying on the grass, wrapped in a space blanket while another fed him a gel; and still another wrapped in a blanket surrounded by rescue personnel. Although that last one was probably injured, it seemed like many of the others, like me, had likely misjudged the distance between resupply points.

As I finally approached Argentiere, I swore I could see the valley spinning. It didn't matter that I was only six miles from the finish; I believed I wouldn't make it a block unless I took adequate time to attend to my bonk. For the first time in the race, I pushed into the resupply tent and fought through the crowds. I filled my bladder with what turned out to be carbonated mineral water, then went to work on a large plate of pound cake. It came from a generic looking box but had to be the best pound cake ever baked. Others shoved around me but I held my ground. I was learning the ways of UTMB.

Thanks for the finish-line photo, Martina

I spent another five minutes drinking a cup of noodle soup before I waddled like a fed pig into the sunlight. There was only the homestretch left but I wasn't terribly excited for the last six miles; I alternated walking and shuffling until I decided that I was bored and my legs felt fine, and ran the rest of the way in despite macerated hurty feet. My friend Martina met me about a mile from the finish and ran with me all the way back to Chamonix. The course routed through the center of town, which was lined with people several rows deep for a quarter mile. Children reached out to slap my dirt-caked hands and cheering spectators looked at my bib and called out, "Go Jill!" as though I were the first runner into the gate, not the 1,615th. Despite all of my angst about the crowding in UTMB, this finish-line spectacle was truly enjoyable.

My finishing time was 22 hours and 57 minutes. Could I have run that course faster? Yes, but probably not much. Could I have run longer? Without a doubt. I really do wish I had a chance at the full distance.

I'll write some post-race thoughts soon. I can't say I got everything I was hoping for out of UTMB, but it was a intriguing experience nonetheless. And I can't complain about a long run in the Alps. Even with the weather and that monstrous mud, it was a beautiful course. 

UTMB through the night

I was climbing in a cloud, as thick and featureless as the snow covering the ground. The light beam from my headlamp slammed into a blinding wall of fog, so I turned it off. Two thousand sets of footprints had cut a muddy track through the snow, and the black trench was the only thing distinguishing the sky from the mountain from the end of the universe. Hard wind pushed against my side as sleet stung my cheeks. When I stopped to fish a balaclava out of my backpack, my eyelashes froze. Pausing for even a second brought a deep chill to my core. I guessed the temperature was about 25 degrees, and a quick glance at my whistle/compass/thermometer confirmed that it was several degrees below freezing. It wasn't terribly cold for the veritable snow suit I was wearing, but fully saturated in rain and sweat as I was, it didn't take long before the sharp wind cut through my armor.

But no matter, I was warm as long as I was marching, and perfectly content to keep doing this. I didn't know how long I had been moving. I didn't know exactly how many miles I had marched. I didn't have a clue where I was. I couldn't even tell whether it was day or night, and had lost too much track of the time to be sure either way. I knew I was far from alone on the mountain, and yet the blindness of fog and silencing effect of the wind masked even my own existence. The chill cut deeper so I quickened my pace. I passed a man wrapped in his space blanket, jogging through the slush as his metallic cape flapped wildly in the wind. He had turned his headlamp off as well. When we briefly turned to face each other, I only saw a gray shadow pierced by the black of his eyes, as bottomless as the trench we were marching through. We pushed through a brief break in the fog, and for a few seconds I could look below and see what must have literally been hundreds of lights streaming up the mountain. It was all so surreal, so bizarre. Sometimes I fool myself into believing I'm unique in my weird desires to be out in uninhabitable and uninviting places such as this in the small morning hours, and yet here I was, just another blank face among thousands.

The night fog muddled my view, the chill numbed my emotions, and even with a growing number of miles behind me, the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc had yet to take shape in my mind. In my view, all of life is a story, and I had spent months drafting an outline for the 2012 UTMB. I imagined the beautiful vistas I would see, the rocky trails I would climb, the gear I would use, the specific way in which my feet would hurt, and the number of times I'd likely break down bawling, both for frustration and beauty. I looked forward to all of it, until eight hours before the race began, when reality took my well-crafted outline and ripped it to shreds.

A wet winter storm had buried most of the high passes of the Trail du Mont Blanc in snow, and steady rain continued to fall at lower elevations. Trail conditions would be treacherously slippery either way, and with overnight lows forecasted down to five below and even ten below zero Celsius at high elevations, a sprained ankle could quickly turn deadly for the even remotely underprepared. The race organization didn't want to send 2,500 runners into those conditions, and I didn't blame them. But their alternative route was considerably less inspiring than the original course. Instead of circumnavigating Mont Blanc on high alpine trails, we would be circumnavigating the Chamonix Valley on muddy trails beneath a canopy of trees. Instead of a hundred miles, the revised route was just over a hundred kilometers, and rarely climbed above 2,000 meters. Instead of 46 hours, the timeline was cut to 26. There was still a lot of climbing on the new course — officially over 6,000 meters — and it was still sure to be a big challenge. But it wasn't what I signed up to do.

I appreciated that the UTMB organization still wanted to put on a race, but it wasn't my race. For several hours on Friday afternoon, I indulged in defiant dreams. I didn't need a sanctioned event, I declared to myself. I was prepared to handle the winter conditions, and I wanted to wait until the following morning and attempt to run the Trail du Mont Blanc on my own. But as reality set in, I realized that I wasn't actually prepared to run TMB completely self-supported, especially in these tough conditions, and I didn't even have enough time to do so even if I was. It was revised UTMB, or nothing. The experience wouldn't be the same, but there's something to be said about accepting setbacks and embracing change.

Beat was still racing the PTL and Martina had gone to Courmayeur race the CCC, so I walked to the starting line alone. I shouldered my way through the thickening crowd as I scanned the course notes, which I copied onto a ripped piece of paper in pencil. There were the names of the new checkpoints, their altitudes and cut-off times, and distances in kilometers. I'd neglected to draw the new elevation profile or even scrawled the overall climbing. I didn't record which checkpoints would have food or water. The French names of the places we'd travel to had already slipped from my memory like shoes on ice. We would run the first forty kilometers of the Trail du Mont Blanc, and after that, everything was a complete unknown.

Downtown Chamonix hummed with white noise as thousands of racers and spectators wedged shoulder-to-shoulder along a narrow street. I had expected a huge spectacle at the start of the race, but the scale still startled me. After all, this was just a trail run that started at 7 p.m. in a small mountain town in France — and yet crowd reminded me of the time I spent New Year's Eve 1999 on the Las Vegas Strip. A sea of runners clad in brightly colored microfibers waved and jumped in place as row upon row of spectators cheered and snapped a thousand flash photos. A barrage of French words screamed through the loudspeakers as videos of runners in rugged mountain settings played on a large screen. It was actually pretty humorous, this Olympic-like celebration. But as I scanned the crowd, all I could see were the faces of strangers. It struck me that no one I loved was anywhere near this place, and I felt a surge of loneliness. Amid the culture shock of the starting line spectacle and my disappointment about the new course, a tear managed to escape from the game face I'd been struggling to form. "This isn't me," I thought. "This isn't me at all."

A few minutes after 7 p.m., a countdown appeared on the screen, and I could only guess that the race was just about to launch. I was positioned near the back of the pack, and it took me a full five minutes just to creep past the starting line. From there was another ten minutes of slowly walking out of town before the crowd broke up enough to run. I was still trying to put my heart back into the endeavor, and didn't feel motivated to sprint out of the gate. I jogged along with a woman who had a pronounced limp and a man wearing a knitted Rastafarian cap. According to the race organization, 2,485 runners lined up to start the event. I figured only about eleven or twelve of those were still behind me.

Five miles passed in about an hour, and I arrived in the town of Les Houches just as the gray shade of evening was descending into a darker shade of dusk.  Crowds still lined the streets and an aid station was giving out cups of water, so I stopped to savor a few sips and drink in a shift in my perspective. Amid the hour of running along the river, endorphins had returned to my system and renewed my excitement for the long night in front of me. "This is nothing more than what I make of it," I thought. "It's only going to suck if I let myself believe that."

After Les Houches, the trail launched skyward into a swirling sleet storm. I passed dozens of runners who had stopped to pull on extra layers. I was wearing only a thin rain jacket over my T-shirt, wind tights, and a fleece hat — but this early in the race with plenty of energy to burn, these layers were more than warm enough. I knew that as the night deepened, the steady precipitation would soak through my clothing, sleep deprivation and hurty feet would slow me down, and my calorie reserves would be depleted. Staying warm would require more external assistance, which is why I had a fleece jacket, balaclava, winter mittens, spare socks, and rain pants packed away in my backpack.

We dropped down to Saint Gervais on muddy singletrack, trampled to shoe-sucking oblivion by the two thousand runners in front of me. I was still far enough toward the back of the pack that everyone was mostly patient and courteous as we waited in an endless conga line to get through the steeper sections of slippery trail. I still fell on my butt twice and once just decided to keep sliding because it was easier than getting up, until I nearly slammed into another woman trying to pull her leg out of a shin-deep mudhole. Down in town, it was well after 10 p.m. and the crowds were still riotous. The aid station was its own convention, with booths of sponsors hawking gear and separate stations for sparkling water and still water. Discomfort trickled back into my system. Up on the sleet-soaked mountain, I felt more in my element than I did down here.

We ran up a long valley to another town, Les Contamines, where little old French ladies stood in a group ringing cowbells and volunteers served salty soup and Coca Cola. It was here that the night began to lose definition for me. The weather was becoming progressively colder and wetter, and I felt sleepy and, admittedly, a little bit bored. It was dark and foggy, and there was nothing to see. The ongoing line of runners marched in silence, maybe because we all assumed no one around us spoke the same language.

I thought about pushing harder, but there was no room to do so. I would either have to aggressively fight my way through the crowds, or assume the position I had landed in. Somewhere along this section, we climbed above snowline, and the frigid wind renewed my sense of intrigue. We ran along a high ridge and passed a ski hut where the race organization had set up a medical station. Dozens of runners were huddled inside, but I felt great. For the first time all night, the high fog began to lift. I could see a stream of lights in a valley far below. I thought it was a highway, but as I snaked down the mountain myself, I realized the lights were runners on the trail.

We looped back to Les Contamines, where the bored sleepiness predictably returned. According to my GPS, we had run 35 miles and climbed 10,000 feet so far. Ten and a half hours had passed, and it was nearly morning. It had rained or snowed consistently through the night, but it seemed like the precipitation might be tapering. I hadn't yet seen, well, anything ... and it seemed strange that the UTMB was now half over. My legs felt too strong for UTMB to be half over. I think I had been running this race as though it were a hundred all along ... part of me couldn't let go of that storyline. Daytime was coming and I vowed to push myself harder. What did I have to lose?

... to be continued.

UTMB

I apologize to friends and family for neglecting to post a pre-race update with links. Friday quickly became overwhelmed with concern and then angst as I woke up to a full winter storm and scattered rumors that the race organization was going to reroute the course and change the start time. I spent the rest of the day bouncing between Internet cafes and race headquarters, trying to figure out what the new course entailed, learning the disappointing truth, spending two hours convinced that I wouldn't start the revised race, finally deciding to "just do it," and then scrambling to learn as much as I could about the new course and repacking my backpack before the 7 p.m. start.

The short explanation is that nearly a foot of new snow on the higher passes, compounded by spectacularly wet conditions at lower elevations, presented too much of a risk for a race organization who would have to deal with the fallout in a field of 2,500 runners. The passes dividing France, Italy, and Switzerland were determined to be impassable, so they rerouted the whole course to lower elevation trails in France. We ran the first forty kilometers of the Trail du Mont Blanc, followed by a loop on secondary trails above the Chamonix Valley. The official stats for the new course were 103 kilometers (so quite a bit shorter than 168K) and 6,000 meters of climbing. I carried a Garmin eTrex and recorded 69.8 miles and 19,600 feet of climbing (so it was still a long and stout 100K.)

I admit I was fairly devastated by the reality of the reroute. I understand why it had to happen, but like the other 2,500 UTMB runners, I really wanted to run the full circuit. I had little interest in racing for the sake of racing. I felt like I had to trade my grand personal adventure for a hard workout — still a tough challenge, and still an amazing run in the beautiful Alps. The race organization handled the last-minute massive changes really well — I'm really impressed with the whole event. And I don't fault them at all; I didn't necessarily want to go up to those high passes with 2,500 other people, many who were likely unprepared. And of course I know I can plan my own run of the course someday. I'm not complaining; just stating my disappointment, which lingers despite the fact I did enjoy the experience. I finished the revised UTMB 2012 in 22 hours and 57 minutes.

Of course I'll write a full report soon. I just wanted to make a quick post to let said friends and family know that I survived. I really appreciate all of the messages and e-mails of support. Thank you.