Onto the Tor des Geants

Beat and I spent the past week in Germany visiting his mom. It was a quiet five days of refueling with delicious German bread and yogurt, and getting the tiniest bit of work done. Beat's feet were shredded after the PTL — the entire pad of his right foot was a giant blister — so he refrained from even walking down the street. I felt good after UTMB; as soon as I caught up on sleep and the soreness in my left knee subsided, I would go so far as to say I felt the same as I did before the race. It's strange, because when I ran the Laurel Highlands 70-miler in June, I felt so much more muscle soreness and overall fatigue. UTMB was undoubtedly tougher than that, and yet I emerged from it as though I'd just gone out for a casual weekend run. I think it's a statement about how much my mind is directing this little hobby of mine, and my body is simply along for the ride. Because I braced myself for 45 hours at the limits of my abilities, 23 hours of mud management felt relatively minimal.

So while Beat soaked his feet, I got in a few hours of trail running on the Hermannsweg in Bielefeld. This trail system reminds me of lush forest paths in the eastern United States, and makes for relaxing and enjoyable running. Although I tried to keep it dialed back and lower intensity in the interest of remaining healthy for the following week, I still logged 33 miles over four days. On Thursday I did one harder (for me) twelve-mile run (9:45-minute-mile pace on a route with 2,300 feet of climbing.) While I was blissfully loping through the forest, I hardly noticed the effort. But as soon as I set foot back in the house, all of my UTMB fatigue came flooding back into my bloodstream in a rush of lactic acid and light-headedness. I was shattered for the rest of the day; I couldn't even focus on an article I was working on. It seems my body has a say in this after all.

On Saturday, we returned to the Alps for part two of Beat's glorious mountain beat-down. There isn't time in this blog post to go into the analysis of why he's like this, but he loves look for the next hardest challenge in organized events. When he found out the PTL (290 kilometers, 22,000 meters of climbing) was just one week before the Tor des Geants (330 kilometers, 24,000 meters of climbing) he just had to do them both. Oy. Although he was genuinely excited about the soul-crushing fatigue of such a challenge, I don't think he was expecting PTL to wreck his feet the way it had. He fretted about it all week in Germany, but decided to start the TDG anyway.

Beat at the starting line in the town center of Courmayeur, Italy, just before 10 a.m. Sunday. He doesn't normally like to wear Hoka One Ones (the padded clown shoes that I love) but decided his feet needed all the help they could get. He packed his gear loosely in a Raidlight 30-liter pack because it helped alleviate some tension on his shoulders and back. He was surprisingly calm all day Saturday and Sunday morning; his lack of angst revealed the ways in which his heart just isn't in it this year. But we both agreed that all he's doing is going to spend some time in the mountains until he doesn't feel like doing that anymore, and then he'll stop. Time will tell whether his stubbornness sees this sentiment through to the finish.

The race start was fun and exciting, as traditional Italian dancers pranced down the streets of Courmayeur, remote-control helicopters with cameras buzzed around, and a crowd 600 runners and hundreds more spectators hummed with nervous energy. Six hundred is still a lot of runners, but it just feels like a more appropriate scale for such an event than UTMB. It's large enough to be a grand exit, but still intimate enough that you feel like you're a part of it, rather than a distant spectator squinting at a screen.

I was planning to meet Beat at the first life base and 50-kilometer mark later that evening. After getting some errands done, I figured I had four hours to complete a hike of my own. I'd forgotten just how much time crewing for TDG demands; last year I had to go hard to squeeze in a few hours to myself during the day. It seems this year will be no exception.

I picked the Col Licony trail because it's a place in Courmayeur that I never visited last year. The trail was runnable in the marginal way a trail that gains an average of 1,200 feet per mile can be runnable — that is to say, it's still faster for a person like me to power-hike. My legs kept a great pace until mile four or so, when I started to experience sharp cramps in my calves. Beat, unsurprisingly, has been enduring even worse cramping in the TDG. My determination had to surrender to my tired muscles, and I slowed my pace. Still, the last two miles were comically steep, in such a way that I was often using my hands to scramble up the rock steps along the trail. Even at 30-minute-mile pace, I began seeing stars.

What I appreciate about trail signs in the Alps is that they never tell you how far away something is, only how long it will take to get there. This is probably because most hikers would see three kilometers and not expect that it would take them more than an hour to cover that distance. So these signs tell the hard truth, but it's also fun to see how well I can beat the projected times. I can sometimes halve them when hiking hard uphill, but my downhill times are usually closer to projections.

The trail took me all the way to Bivacco Pascal, a stone hut at a point on the ridge at 9,630 feet elevation. Even though it had been 28 degrees C in Courmayeur, a chilled wind blew along the high ridge and it felt significantly colder. All of the sweat I generated from hiking in the heat seemed to flash-freeze to my skin. This is a good place for a mountain shelter.

The views from Bivacco Pascal. It certainly wouldn't be a bad place to spend a night. 

Courmayeur is such a great mountain town. The village is relatively small, the food is wonderful (mmm, Italian) and the mountain access is almost unparalleled. It's always fun to walk out of a hotel room and score 6,000 feet of vertical relief in an afternoon. The views of the Aosta Valley, more the a vertical mile below, were stunning.

Courmayuer to Bivacco Pascal, distance round-trip: 12.5 miles
Total climbing: 6,643 feet
Time: 4:14

I'm stoked to be back in these mountains. 

Little Leon Trot

Eight hours after completing Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, I returned to the finishing chute. With a pronounced limp in my sore left knee, I took stiff steps, zombie-like, down the empty corridor. Half-detached banners fluttered in the wind, adding a ghostly ambiance to the quiet streets of downtown Chamonix. It was 2:16 a.m. I rounded the corner to the finish line — brightly lit and deserted, as though a crowd of party-goers left in a hurry and forgot to turn out the lights. I leaned against a street lamp and eventually slid to the sidewalk, too exhausted to stand.

Fifteen minutes passed in this trance-like state, the eerie ghost-town silence, and the wind amplifying the 38-degree temperature. Finally, two figures approached — one wearing a dim headlamp, the other with a familiar profile also strolling with a pronounced limp. I pulled myself to my feet and waved my arms weakly as Daniel and Beat rounded the final corner. Just eight hours earlier, when I finished my 110-kilometer, 23-hour run of UTMB, thousands stood in the square to cheer for runners. There were hundreds of waving banners, live images on a huge screen, and motivational slogans shouted over loudspeakers. Now, after 290 kilometers and 125 hours of La Petite Trotte Leon, I was the only person left to cheer for team "Too Dumb To Quit." After they crossed the finish line, I held up my camera and Beat turned to face me with a glazed smile. Given the places they'd traveled, the challenges they faced, and the mountains they'd climbed in the past five days, it seemed fitting that their event should end so quietly. If UTMB is the charismatic star of European trail running, PTL is the genius older brother who goes about inventing mad schemes in the attic — brilliantly brutal schemes.

Beat is working on typing his own story about PTL, so I won't blather too much about it here. But I do need to admit a little lingering jealousy about their experience. When I saw photos of the mountain vistas they saw, the refuges they visited, the vertigo-inducing ridges they traversed, the streams they crossed, and they snowy peaks they tracked over, I believe my first words were "I picked the wrong race!" Not that I'm a strong enough "runner" for the PTL, not yet. I believe it would take at least a couple more years of building my base, toughening my feet, and improving my technical skills before I can even dream about tackling a challenge like the PTL, which is unsupported, full of class-four and even class-five scrambling, and includes 22,000 meters of overall climbing to boot. Beat and Daniel, and also our Bay-area friends Steve and Harry, completed the course this year. I'm in awe.

This brings me to some final thoughts about UTMB. It was an event unlike anything I've experienced, and that was exactly my aim in participating. As much as I admittedly envied the quiet mountain run Beat and Daniel experienced, that's certainly not what I was expecting from UTMB. I knew it would be a crowded, loud affair. I knew, based on weather-related changes and cancellations in past years, that there was a strong chance the event would be disrupted. I knew my chances of finishing (the full event) were fairly slim. My journey to UTMB started out as a bit of a light-hearted joke when I threw my name into the lottery in January. I was shocked to learn I even qualified, and since Beat was planning to race PTL anyway, I figured I had nothing to lose. I didn't even tell Beat I was entering the UTMB lottery. I was embarrassed, admittedly — not only because I felt vastly underqualified, but because I also knew UTMB wasn't really "my kind of event." Lots of people. Lots of hype. Lots of running.

So I didn't belong. But that, in a way, was its own appeal. As a runner, I'm undoubtedly still a beginner. I still feel awkward and uncomfortable in my movements any time I exceed eight-minute miles on pavement. All through UTMB, my left elbow throbbed with pain — a reminder of the two silly crashes in routine training situations that happened just weeks earlier. I have remnants of shin splints that cropped up while I was hiking. And UTMB is effectively the World Cup of trail running.  What beginner wouldn't be excited about an invitation to an event like that? I felt like a Little League kid invited to step up to the plate at the World Series. And while I certainly didn't smack the ball out of the park, I feel like I landed a solid base hit. Who wouldn't be thrilled about that? Who wouldn't feel encouraged to continue pursuing this worthy hobby?

As for experience itself, I think my race report made it sound more unfun than it actually was. I had my frustrations that I wrote about, but for much of the time I truly was enjoying myself, especially the parts when we were higher on the mountains at night (my favorite parts of the race tended to be others' least favorite, go figure.) There were a few genuine jerks on the trail, especially that guy who simply jumped over the woman who fell into the mud (I offered a hand when I approached, but she was standing by that point.) But a large majority of the two thousand runners on the trail were courteous, which was good for me, as my pace rarely matches those around me. Alongside others who are moving my "speed," I tend to be faster uphill and much slower downhill, and this results in my trying to pass others during climbs and subsequently getting passed a lot while I'm moving downhill. Most people are likely able to maintain a more even paceline. So my experiences with "jostling for position" were likely more pronounced than others'. Even still, many people actually moved over for me while climbing or waited for an opening to pass on the descents. So yes, there were a lot of people, and yes, the trail felt overcrowded — but really, that's all part of the "UTMB experience." It was intriguing and motivating in its own way.

I think the mistake I made in my own mindset was getting too hung up on the "mountain adventure" before the race. It set me up for huge disappointment when the plans changed, even though I do believe these changes were necessary given the scale and liability involved. "Mountain adventures" are self-contained, and races are races. I should have accepted that I was at the "World Cup of Ultrarunning" and focused on that aspect of the experience. I should have run the first half harder. :)

Would I go back to UTMB? It's tough to say. I think it's a grand stage, but I'd rather wait until I am a stronger and more assured runner, should that day ever come. I would love to circumnavigate the Tour du Mont Blanc independently, and I might get my chance just yet. Until then, I wanted to post a few of Beat's pictures from the grand mountain adventure of the PTL.

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.