Tor des Geants, day four

Just before noon Wednesday, Beat arrived in Gressoney, kilometer 200, in a sour mood. Despite the near-30C-temperatures in Donnas just a day ago, the weather had taken a sharp turn for the worse. Rain throughout the night had slicked the rocks on the trail, making for sketchy and slow descending. He grabbed a big plate of rigatoni with tomato sauce and tuna, the standard (and only) dish served for the duration of the Tor des Geants. I'd taken a cue from the race food and mostly eaten this kind of fare myself. Rigatoni with tuna was an easy thing to store and cook up fast, and bread and jam was something I could keep in my car. Rural Italian grocery stores only seem to be open about six hours a day, and restaurants were never fast enough and also not open at convenient-for-me times (early and late.) Still, at this point I'd mostly run out of groceries and was down to a few candy bars and crackers that were left of my once-giant bag of UTMB trail food. I eyed Beat's lunch greedily. 

 Like last year, I tagged along with him out of Gressoney along the river valley. The weather was still drizzly and cool, and the wind had picked up since he arrived in town. It seemed like the clouds were beginning to clear, but the wind was fierce and temperatures were dropping. I was only going to follow him as far as the next rifugio and then go to the pass on my own. He checked out of Gressoney with a Russian runner named Dmitry, and they traveled together out of town.

 The steep, grassy slopes surrounding Rif. Alpenzu were populated by goats and a herd of cattle. Just after I left Beat and Dmitry in Alpenzu, I encountered the cattle just as the driver was herding them down the mountain. Dozens of cows came tearing around a large rock outcropping, mooing loudly and crashing into each other as they stampeded down the narrow switch-backing trail. I saw them coming and reacted with a completely instinctual flight response, jumping off the trail and darting straight up the mountain like a frightened cat as stampeding cattle streamed around me. They scared me all the way up to the rock outcropping, and then I had nowhere left to go. So I stood and waited, realizing that the slope I had just climbed was steep enough that I wasn't going to have an easy time getting down. Beat and Dmitry reached this point while I was waiting, and also cut directly up the slope to avoid the cattle (they were still running but the back of the herd had mostly calmed down by this point.) By the time the trail was cow-free, Beat, Dmitry and I were grouped up again. I know they're just cows, but that was one of the more frightening animal encounters I've had on a trail. The most scary was a pit bull that attacked me in Maine ten years ago. I have to say, wild animals are usually more polite than domesticated ones.

 Beat and Dmitry were moving up the mountain at a solid clip. I could barely hold their pace, let alone exceed it, even though I was relatively rested. It may have helped that the wind was driving a fierce chill. Beat didn't want to put on his jacket just yet because the steep climbing made him sweat, but it was difficult to stay warm unless we climbed hard.

 The wind reached gale force at Col Pinter, elevation 9,107 feet. Beat and I barely managed three words before he and Dmitry began the sprint down the mountain. Despite his extremely sore feet and now deeply fatigued legs, he was able to break into a solid run. Amazing what survival instinct enables us to accomplish. I spent a few minutes at the Col, huddled in the wind shelter of a rock as I devoured a couple packets of Nutella. (I was fairly bonked, and I was literally and comically out of available food.) In less than five minutes, ice had already formed in my Camelback valve — it was really cold.

 On the way back to Gressoney, I made friends with a goat. I didn't mean to, but he was so cute that I couldn't help but sneak up to shoot a photo. After I did this, he followed me for at least three quarters of a mile down the trail to Alpenzu, his little bell jingling the entire way. I'm not sure what he wanted from me. In the past, I've seen mountain goats shadow hikers because they want to lick the salt off their skin. Perhaps this goat wanted the same. He was adorable, though I admit after ten minutes of stalking I felt uneasy. He stood half as tall as me and had giant horns — he could have easily rammed me off the mountain if he wanted too.

I barely made it back to Gressoney by dark and decided to wait for a while at that checkpoint to see if my other friends came through, before swinging around to Valtournenche to intercept Beat again. I'd hoped to grab a pizza or really anything in town, but it was after 8 p.m. in the off season and I didn't find anything open except for a bar. The bar may have had food, but it was quite crowded and I was feeling shy (Italians are so friendly, but it's a bit overwhelming for an introvert like me who doesn't speak the language.) Of course it was my fault for being shy and not being better prepared, but I had to settle for a miserable little dinner of stale breadsticks and big spoonfuls of jam from the car.

I just barely missed Ana when she arrived at 9:30 p.m., and she went straight in the back to sleep. Although I was hoping to grab a nap of my own in the car before Beat arrived in Valtournenche, I decided to stay in Gressoney as long as I could to warn Ana about the cold. It was already near freezing in town, still windy, and I was worried about what was going on at 9,000 feet. Ana's a tough woman who can take care of herself, but she's also from the coast of Spain where it hit 50C just a few weeks ago. If she didn't have big warm mittens or a balaclava, I wanted to give her mine.

During my wait I also ran into Gabi, a friend of Beat's who lives in Zurich. Gabi is a tiny Swiss woman who ran all of race so far wearing big dangling earrings and a tiara, like an actual jewel-encrusted tiara. Her voice was nearly gone and her throat made horrible gurgling noises as she breathed, indicating a serious respiratory infection. She guessed she had bronchitis and was distraught. The Gressoney cut-off was in less than two hours, so she had to go back out that night if she went out at all. I hated to see Gabi give up on something she wanted so badly, but I felt compelled to emphasize just how cold and windy it was on Col Pinter. Personally, I would have felt nervous about going up there in the middle of the night being rested and healthy, let alone as sick as she seemed. Doctors took her temperature and made the decision for her, forcibly pulling her from the race and instructing her to seek medical attention immediately as she likely had pneumonia. Poor Gabi. It was heart-wrenching to be there as she accepted this.

Ana was well-dressed but extremely tired when she woke up at 11:30. At that point I really had to go to catch Beat, so we only exchanged a few brief sentences after I made my case for the cold on the pass. She's still plugging away out there — amazingly tough, that woman. I admire her greatly.

Gressoney to Col Pinter, 12.4 miles round trip
Total climbing: 5,214 feet
Total time: 5:03

Tor des Geants, day three

The town of Donnas Pont St. Martin sits at the threshold of the Aosta Valley, the gateway to the Alps from the flatlands to the south. Its low elevation (1,080 feet) puts it in a different climate zone than most of the other villages of the Tor des Geants. Donnas reminded me of the hills above San Jose in California, with small broad-leaf trees and vineyards lining the streets. It was also nearly 30 degrees C when I went to meet Beat at noon Tuesday.

He seemed relatively limber and alert given he had been out all night and just descended more than 8,000 feet from the mountains. He took an hour-long nap and worked on taping his feet while I went to look for hazelnut gelato. In my experience, feet usually feel a lot worse than they look, and I have to say that his feet look pretty bad. The skin on his heel is almost entirely gone on his bad foot, and he has a large heel blister on his good foot. He's begun taping every one of his toes, but the abrasions that bother him the most are just above the ball of his big toe joint. He claims the pain is manageable, but tends to welcome any other challenge that will distract him from his feet — the tougher the better. The only time he really has trouble, he told me, is during flat, easy sections of road. Luckily, these sections are few and far between in the Tor des Geants.

I've been choosing my daily hikes on the fly, and the timing on this day put me in a good position to climb the first pass beyond Donnas, starting about eight kilometers beyond the checkpoint. Non-racing companions are discouraged in the TDG, so I try not to shadow Beat too closely but I still love seeing him on the course. So I drove around to the town of Perloz and began the long, hot ascent from 2,000 feet to 7,500 feet altitude. Just another pass in the Tor des Geants.

It was very cool to travel this far down the Aosta Valley and see a new face of the Alps. Just as the climate reminded me of California, the mountains also had a decidedly Sierras-like look and feel.

Because the trail was at a lower elevation, most of the climbing was below timberline on steep, grassy slopes populated by hemlock trees and cattle. But the emphasis is on steep. In the first mile out of Perloz, I gained more than 1,700 feet of altitude —  a pattern that showed no sign of slowing. The afternoon sun beat down. I was pouring sweat, regularly blinded by it, and huffing just as loudly as the racers who had 160 kilometers on their legs.

The trail topped out on a col and continued up the ridge. To the southeast, I could see the open plain at the end of the Alps. Somewhere out there is the city of Torino, host of the 2006 Winter Olympics. I was a little disappointed that it was too hazy to see much definition, but it was cool to look into what appeared to be a vast void.

I turned around just beyond Rifugio Coda, having taken two and a half hours to climb just over five miles. There was a technical boulder field for a half mile before the pass, and I'm sure there will be many more to come. I had to pick my way across this boulder field at a pace of about 1.5 miles per hour. Although there are no more big climbs on this section of the TDG, friends who have raced it have told me this is the toughest section, because of the rocks.

Just as I hoped, I caught Beat on the way back down. He still looked so cheery, maybe because there was enough heat and steepness to take his mind off his feet. In a way, I get it. You have to alter your mindset in order to adapt. Suffering, for the most part, is optional.


Perloz to Rifugio Coda, round trip: 10.4 miles
Total climbing: 5,954
Total time: 4:37

Tor des Geants, day two

Beat all but told me that he didn't expect to make it beyond kilometer fifty in the Tor des Geants, so I packed his flip flops and a change of clothes before I drove out to meet him at Valgrisenche. He arrived twelve hours into the race, just after 10 p.m., with a slight hobble and a despondent look on his face. "Just say the word," I said without adding any sugar-coated but ultimately empty words of encouragement. "You don't have to do this." 

As lightning streaked through the night sky, he paused for several seconds and gazed resolutely toward a black wall of mountains. "I can probably do one more section."

 Beat told me if I did anything in the Aosta Valley this week, I should climb Col Loson from the west slope. I intended to start in Eaux Rousses before he reached the village and stay ahead of him, but I slept too late. It sounds lazy next to what Beat is doing, but I discovered amid crewing this race that there will usually be time for hiking, but sleeping will be more rare. I sometimes have to meet him at checkpoints at odd hours, and they're all at least an hour of driving away, some nearly two, even between each other. Driving in the Aosta Valley is an endurance sport of its own — all of the roads are nearly too narrow for two cars to pass, marked with warnings I don't understand, are surrounded either by stone walls or sheer drop-offs, are sometimes incredibly steep, and are crowded with local Italian drivers who tear down the winding pavement at breathtaking speeds. I can't adequately convey just how much driving in the Aosta Valley stresses me out. The driving here is more physically taxing than the hiking. Perhaps I would feel differently if I had to hike 330 kilometers — but three to four hours of driving per day, plus two to three hours of crewing, plus five to seven hours of hiking, equals one tired Jill. But I can't complain, because it's not like I'm racing the Tor des Geants.

 Anyway, Beat checked out of Eaux Rousses started up Col Loson about an hour before I did. I knew I'd need to go hard to bank enough time to climb to the top and back, then drive around to the next life base, Conge (32 kilometers by foot, 75 minutes by car.) I made the mistake of dressing too much like a "runner" (gray running skirt, UTMB tech shirt, and Salomon calf sleeves), which resulted in looks of surprise and suspicion as I passed TDG racers. From now on I'm going to try to dress more like a "hiker" so already demoralized runners know that I'm fresh and rested and not playing a fair game. It is a fun way to watch the race, though. I get to meet and cheer on dozens of runners.

But already these runners have been going so hard, for so long, that they're largely desensitized to all but their most basic functions and immediate surroundings. This makes them do funny and awkward things, like collapse on a grassy slope with their head downhill and their limbs splayed out. Should I check to make sure he's still breathing? If this were the normal world, I would, but this is the Tor des Geants. Eh, he's fine.

 Beat was right about the valley below Col Loson — simply amazing.

I caught up to Beat near the base of Col. I expected to see him in much worse shape, but he was climbing strong and smiling. He said his feet still hurt, but the cramping in his legs had mostly subsided. And the fact was, he was making good time — only a few hours behind where he was at that point last year. He excitedly told stories about his night as we marched up the rocky trail.

 He was in a surprisingly good mood. Beat does love Col Loson.

 The trail to this pass just climbs and climbs and climbs. The village of Eaux Rousses is down at 5,400 feet and the col is 10,830. So for a single pass, he had to log a vertical mile not even factoring multiple drops and climbs along the mountainside. Near the top, the wind was brisk and fresh snow covered the rocks. We saw a couple of racers who were suffering from altitude sickness.

 At the col, we shared a brief goodbye before Beat began the endless descent to Cogne. The Tor des Geants has so many huge passes that they just have to take them all in stride.

 On my way back to Eaux Rousses, I encountered my friend Ana Sebastian, a Spanish runner who I met last year in Nepal. Ana planned to run UTMB last week, but couldn't start because of a grade three sprained ankle. I had lunch in Chamonix with her the day before the race, and she was still having trouble walking down the street. We joked about me taking her bib and giving TDG a shot if only I could fool the passport checkers into believing I was a Spanish woman with short brown hair. But Ana, being the kind of person who signs up for races like the Tor des Geants one week after UTMB, decided to start anyway. Interestingly, her ankle wasn't giving her too many problems, but her knees were sore and swollen. I could tell she was in pain and torturing herself in the same ways Beat has been, but I was still terribly excited to see her there. Ana is the kind of person I feel closely connected to, even though we don't know each other well and struggle to communicate with each other (although her English is fairly good, it's limited, and my Spanish is nonexistent.) Still, there are some people you just "get." If she finishes the race, I promised Ana I'll eat a liter of gelato with her at a place in Courmayeur that serves gelato by the liter. I really hope she finishes.

I did a fair bit of running down to Eaux Rousses to make up for lost time, but my shins were unhappy and I had a strange tweak in my right knee. I can already tell I'm going to be managing some post-UTMB stuff until I take a proper rest. But I think it's manageable, and I'll stop if it increases. Still, I hate to waste any opportunity to go into these mountains. And it's not like I'm running the TDG or anything.

Eaux Rousse to Col Loson, round trip: 16.5 miles.
Total climbing: 6,434 feet
Total time: 5:54

 It's worth it. It seems Beat would agree. He's still going.

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.