Shake it out

The formidable Mont Blanc, as seen from 12,600 feet at Aiguille du Midi. 

I've had a tough time starting a pre-race blog post, clouded as my mind is in a fluctuating haze of anxiety and awe. I feel peaceful and content when I go into the mountains, and less so when I wander through the crowded streets of town or sort through a growing mountain of gear that I want to pack with me in UTMB. The weather forecast has progressively deteriorated from ominous to downright apocalyptic. The race is expected to launch under steady rain and temperatures around 5C (41F), turning to snow on the first pass around 1,800 meters, and throughout the night the higher elevations on the course are expected to receive about 5 cm of snow, temperatures around -5C (23F) and 45 kph winds. So, basically, we're going to get soaked at the start and then climb into snow and subfreezing temperatures with flash-freezing winds, then slip and slide down the wet snow until the ice crusted to our clothing melts and we can be soaked anew at lower elevations. Having experienced long endurance efforts in temperatures down to 40 below, blizzards, and similarly wet and cold conditions at shorter intervals, I feel like I can express with some authority that this could potentially be as bad as weather can be for such an endeavor. The UTMB is well supported with water and a somewhat limited selection of European food, but we must carry all of our other gear. The fear has set in and I've exchange my formally large backpack for an even larger one. My friend Martina lectured me about its weight but I was undeterred. I would drag my Susitna sled if I thought that was at all possible. 

In memory, the coldest I've ever been — the deepest I've descended into hypothermia — happened about three years ago in Juneau, during a climb up Mount Jumbo in an October storm. I planned to hike hard so I packed fairly light, although I still had quite a bit of gear — Gortex jacket, rain pants, gloves, hat. I ascended soaked to the bone, hit snowline, and kept ascending, feeling slightly chilled but not really thinking about what that meant for the descent. On the ridge I was blasted with wind until my jacket froze, stupidly decided to still tag the peak, and was fully shivering by the time I started down. My traction in the wet snow was so bad, and a fall so potentially treacherous, that I moved painfully slow on the descent. My body stopped making heat, and I reached a point where I couldn't feel my feet, face, or my arms, at all. My teeth stopped chattering and my heart started murmuring in the way that it does when survival instinct tells me that something is really wrong. I made it down, but the experience shook me up so much that I didn't even really talk about it at the time. That was the weather. The weather we're supposed to see this weekend. For a hundred some freaking miles. 

I'd be lying if I put my game face on and pretended to be optimistic. I'm not. That's not to say I'm not excited. I'm going to show up at the start, as prepared as possible, ready and anxious for a grand adventure. Beat has been out there since Monday night. I've only received a few short text updates, so I'm not sure exactly how he's dealing with these conditions. But he's still pushing through it, and if he can, I can. Hopefully fast enough to stay in the race. But I'm not willing to take any big chances. So there it is. Tomorrow I'll post another update with links to where you can follow UTMB online, and hopefully a slightly more positive outlook. 

Gondola to Le Brevent

That's not to say I haven't been loving my time in Chamonix. The weather for the first two days was fantastic and I took advantage of it by visiting popular spots around town, and that includes cafes and restaurants. But of course what everyone comes her for are the mountains. Martina and I set out for a walk on Tuesday, and I predictably got carried away and climbed 5,500 feet to to the base of the cliffs of Aiguilles Rouges. But it was okay, because just a mile away was a gondola that carried me all the way down to the valley. It's not considered breaking your taper if you don't run downhill. On Wednesday Martina, her friend Sandra, and I purchased a gondola pass and visited La Brevet on one side of the valley and Aiguille du Midi on the other, then took the train to Mer de Glace. The train broke down so we ended up having to run 2,500 feet down the trail to town. I guess that's what I get for cheating. But the places those gondolas reach are breathtaking. Simply unbelievable. I was all kinds of happy on Wednesday, despite the ominous clouds looming on the horizon. I'm hoping for the same in UTMB.

I'm still working through my process of accepting what UTMB means to me. I don't have near the time I need to even start writing it out (before the soul-crushing reality of the race unravels all of it), but did think of (another) Florence and the Machine song whose lyrics approach my own thoughts. I know, it's annoying when bloggers post lyrics of songs verbatim. But it's part of my process, which I need right now to calm the roiling panic that threatens to bubble to the surface. So here are photographs of some of the places I visited on Wednesday, and "Shake It Out" by Florence and the Machine.

View toward Rochers des Fiz

Regrets collect like old friends.
Here to relive your darkest moments.
I can see no way, I can see no way,
And all of the ghouls come out to play.

Massif des Aiguilles Rouges

And every demon wants his pound of flesh,
But I like to keep some things to myself.
I like to keep my issues drawn.
It's always darkest before the dawn.

The Chamonix Valley and Mont Blanc as seen from Le Brevent

And I've been a fool and I've been blind.
I can never leave the past behind.
I can see no way, I can see no way.

Dent du Geant (Tooth of the Giant)

I'm always dragging that horse around,
And our love is pastured such a mournful sound.
Tonight I'm going to bury that horse in the ground.
So I like to keep my issues drawn.
It's always darkest before the dawn.

Glacier des Bossons

Shake it out, shake it out ...
And it's hard to dance with the devil on your back,
So shake him off.

The Aiguille du Midi station, built into a pinnacle at 12,000 feet before the invention of helicopters

I am done with my graceless heart,
So tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart.
Cause I like to keep my issues drawn.
It's always darkest before the dawn.

Climbers ascend the final ridge to Aiguille du Midi

And given half a chance, would I take any of it back?
It's a fine romance but it's left me so undone.
It's always darkest before the dawn.

Glacier du Geant

And I'm damned if I do, and I'm damned if I don't,
So here's to drinks in the dark at the end of my road.
And I'm ready to suffer, and I'm ready to hope.
It's a shot in the dark right at my throat,

Aig le Verte

Cause looking for heaven, found the devil in me.
Looking for heaven, found the devil in me.
Well what the hell, I'm gonna let it happen to me.

Chamonix

The town center is crowded and the backdrop is jaw-dropping — but there's a surreal tint to Chamonix that I haven't experienced in the similarly set national parks of North America. Maybe it's hints of old-world culture, European richness, or the simple fact that, crowds notwithstanding, the Alps have to be one of the most ruggedly beautiful mountain ranges in the world. The Himalayas, no contest; the Andes and Cordillera Blanca, of course; the Canadian Rockies and the Alaska Range, my personal favorites— but the Alps, the Alps have this way of extracting tears of joy amid cries of pain; a haven of pinnacles both inaccessible and endlessly inviting. I can't wait to attempt to hike and jog for a hundred miles in the shadow of Mont Blanc.

I'm writing a quick blog post while Beat packs up for La Petite Trotte a Leon, which starts today (Monday) at 10 p.m. Chamonix time (1 p.m. PDT.) PTL is 290 kilometers of trail with some 22,000 meters of elevation gain. Some of the steep ascents and descents are on class-four and even low class-five terrain assisted by fixed ropes and cables — essentially climbing routes without the harness, called via ferrata. UTMB is likely going to be the toughest single-effort physical challenge I've ever taken on, but PTL is at least three times as difficult. Beat told me he will be carrying a tracker and I am hoping to follow him on the PTL map page. There is also a "Live Page" that may have updates.

Meanwhile, I have the fear firmly planted in my heart, and so I am going to make every effort to approach Friday as well-rested and healthy as possible. I plan to get out for a few short hikes in the next three days, but it's honestly going to be a mental battle to refrain from binging heavily on these beautiful mountains before my race begins Friday evening. I keep telling myself I'll have plenty of exposure to the Alps this weekend, but the Chamonix backdrop makes it hard to sit still. The rest of the plan includes lots of sleeping, eating pasta and bread, and watching Beat's updates as he makes his way through these amazing mountains.

Edit: The tracking site is located here, showing a Google Earth image of the course and the racers' locations. Beat and Daniel's team is "Too Dumb To Quit." Our friends Steve and Harry also are racing PTL, and their team is "Quit Is A Four-Letter Word." 

Switzerland

Beat and I have spent the past few days visiting Beat's family in Switzerland. Thursday was Beat's brother Andy's fiftieth birthday. We traveled to Interlaken, a idyllic little village in the foothills of the Bernese Alps, where Andy and his wife went skydiving in the morning. We had previously declined an invitation to join them, citing nervousness about injuries before our big races (About seven years ago, I went on a tandem skydive where the instructor misjudged the landing and put us down extremely hard, bruising my tailbone. I was unable to walk normally for a week after that.) Of course, as soon as I saw those parachutes sailing through the clear blue sky amid glacier-capped peaks, I regretted passing up the opportunity. I'm not even an adrenaline junkie (I'm an endorphin junkie, and there's a huge difference.) But I can only imagine what the views were like from those heights, in free-fall.

We did get a glimpse of the views, minus the free-fall, when we took a helicopter ride from Interlaken back to Andy's house, where it landed in a farm field next door. A thick haze had moved in before we took off, so I wasn't able to capture a good aerial photograph. But it was my first time in a helicopter, and also an opportunity to see rural Switzerland from the sky. Even the "flat" region is a continuous ripple of hills covered in a patchwork of forest, green fields, and clusters of villages woven together by veins of roads. Besides the the airborne adventures, there has been a steady stream of awesome food — pizza, cheese, cake, crusty bread, salad, cheese (the Swiss love their cheese. This love is completely justified.) I don't have to worry about showing up for UTMB without ample calorie reserves.


I've also been able to do a few taper runs. I try to keep them to ninety minutes or less, but it's been difficult to restrain myself since I found a scenic network of logging roads a couple of miles from Andy's house. Despite generally low energy levels (I always struggle with jet lag, and even after three days I still haven't been able to sleep through a night), all I want to do is explore these hills all day long. It's a beautiful region full of adorable farmhouses, narrow roads, green hillsides, lush forests, and old churches. I've really enjoyed my runs here, and we haven't even gotten into the real mountains yet.

We leave Sunday morning for Chamonix. Beat's race, La Petite Trot a Leon, starts Monday evening. My race doesn't start until Friday evening, so I'll have a bit more time to fret before the big hurt begins. I'll probably write blog posts about the gear in my huge backpack and how I plan to ration my limited supply of peanut butter cups to pass the nervous time. I finally packed up all of my gear today and the verdict — nine pounds without water, but including food. I'm going to try to think about ways to pare that down as best I can without sacrificing too much of my "safe" food (I'd hate to time out of UTMB because I can't eat anything.) On to France. 

Packing up

This weekend has been a frenzy of packing, shopping, and re-packing. We leave for Switzerland on Tuesday, so I need to have everything ready to go before then. Beat hoisted my UTMB pack and proclaimed, "There's way too much stuff in there. You need to get rid of some of that."

"I can't," I protested. "That's just the required gear. I don't even have any food in there yet, and except for some meds and batteries, it's all obligatory." I'm not yet willing to rely entirely on fontina cheese and dried meats for the duration of a hundred-mile foot race, so I will be packing my own supply of gummy candies. This backpack is heavy. I try to put it in perspective, remind myself of my Susitna sled, of all the water I carried on my back during the Stagecoach 400, but that doesn't make me feel much better. The backpack is my first tangible dose of truth — this thing is about to get real.

So what is UTMB? It occurred to me that I've never really explained this whole endeavor. UTMB stands for Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, and it's a 166-kilometer foot race on a route that begins in Chamonix, France, and circumnavigates the highest mountain in the Alps, the 4,808-meter (15,774-foot) Mont Blanc. The Trail du Mont Blanc travels through France, Switzerland, and Italy, ascending and descending a series of cols (passes) and ridge traverses for a total of 9,500 meters (31,168 feet) of climbing. The raw numbers rival the Hardrock 100 and UTMB is regarded as one of the toughest ~100-mile-distance foot races out there.

It's also undoubtedly the largest race of this distance, drawing a limit of 2,000 runners. It's a big crowd. I have little knowledge about who's lining up for the 2012 race. I do know an overwhelming majority of them are European men. In 2011, out of about 2,000 starters, 1,133 finished. Of those 1,133 finishers, only 72 were women. The first man, trail-running legend Kilian Jornet, finished in 20 hours and 36 minutes. The first woman, Elisabeth Hawker, finished in 25 hours and 2 minutes. A sub-36-hour finish would have landed a man in the top 175, and a woman in the top ten. Nearly 700 of the finishers needed more than 40 hours to return to Chamonix. Forty-seven of the 72 women had 40-plus-hour finishes. Everyone in the race is given 46 hours to complete the distance. Those who fall behind the pace are stopped by checkpoint cut-offs.

Yes, numbers show that this is a prohibitively difficult race. So how did I get involved in this? It started about a year ago, when I timed out at the Tahoe Rim Trail 100, because of slowness caused by disruptive foot pain. I decried the TRT100 for being too "runnable" and declared that a hiker like myself might actually fare better in a tough mountain hundred where solid climbing ability paired with persistence can make up for less-than-stellar running skills. Plus, I love the idea of a long-distance endurance hike, which is why I've had so much enthusiasm and relative success in the foot division of the Susitna 100. I didn't choose UTMB because it's one of the "hardest" races, I chose it because it matches both my desires (long trip through beautiful mountains) and my abilities (endurance, persistence, and climbing.) But it's still a really, really hard race.

Today I did my last run up Black Mountain before we leave for Europe. Black Mountain has become a go-to training route — the trail is a five-mile, 3,000-foot climb of variable steepness that requires some walking even at max effort, followed by a fun five-mile descent. For my birthday, Beat bought me a new pair of Hoka Mafate shoes that I'm loving, as well as a pair of Salomon calf sleeves to help support my weak shins and also so I will fit in with the Euro runners. I'm in taper mode right now and feeling strong, so I logged a good time for the ten-mile run today: 2:00:01 with stops. It was fairly effortless (no hard pushing because of taper mode and also self-preservation on the descent), so I was feeling a bit smug at the bottom. "Ha, Black Mountain was easy today. It's basically a tenth of UTMB. I just need to add a lot more technical terrain, at higher elevations, over two nights, with potentially awful weather, times ten." Yeah, that shut my smugness up real quick.

Panic will resume soon enough. But I genuinely am excited for all of it. I'm excited to travel a hundred miles through three different countries on my own two feet, to gaze up at the stunning profile of Mont Blanc, to try to decipher French at aid stations, to experience the grandeur of the Alps and the energy of 2,000 racers. Friends have asked me why I would even want to participate in a mountain event with so many people, but to me, that's all part of the experience — the crowds, the glaciers, the cheese and dried meat, the unbelievable vistas, the soaring highs and emotional breakdowns, and the crushing, crushing foot pain.

Everyone who attempts these hundred-mile foot races has their own reasons. I've described my motivation as a desire "to paint the canvas of my memories with bold red brush strokes." If this were purely about the beauty of the Alps, I would backpack the route over eight days like a normal person. And if it were purely about ego, honestly, I would probably be attempting something decidedly more suited to my actual talents. The UTMB project is about paring down all the complicated facets of myself to a stark minimum, to silence the excess noise and embrace the bare thoughts and emotions that remain. To be alone in a crowd of 2,000. To feel the energy of 2,000 people when I feel alone. To fight for every hour and surrender my ego to the beauty. As Florence and the Machine sings: "Leave all your loving and your longing behind; you can't carry it with you if you want to survive." ("Dog Days" is becoming my UTMB training theme song.)

But that's still a week and a half away. For now I'm just trying to quell panic and maybe get in one last pre-UTMB bike ride on my birthday, which is today (Monday.) 

The consequences of experience

I don't have any of my own photos of Michael Popov, only a few from the day I met him, during my first ultramarathon, the Rodeo Beach 50K in December 2010. 

One week ago, a man who is well-known in the Northern California trail-running community died from complications of heat stroke in Death Valley. Like many do in this social media age, I learned of his death through vaguely worded Facebook posts and wondered what could have possibly happened. Michael Popov was an experienced endurance athlete, a formidably built Russian with a long resume of adventure racing and self-supported fastpacking treks. When initial reports said he ran out of water during a recreational, six-mile traverse between two parallel roads, I thought "that doesn't sound right." Today, Outside Magazine published a more detailed account of what happened during a "routine run" in one of the most extreme environments in North America. The story is enough to bring pause to anyone who considers themselves an adventure athlete — the experience we take for granted, and the decisions we make every day.

Although I didn't know Michael well, his death resonated deeply. He and I were about the same age, and shared many of the same passions. He was co-director for Pacific Coast Trail Runs before that venture closed its doors earlier this summer, so my memories of him are from chats after 50K trail races. Our conversations usually centered around endurance bikepacking, and he told me he wanted to ride the Colorado Trail Race in 2013. The last time I saw Michael was at the Diablo Marathon in June. He handed me a coaster for winning the race and teased me about showing up in Banff the following week for the Tour Divide. "Who knows?" I replied. "Maybe I will. What's your next big adventure?" He just shrugged and broke into a disarming smile. "Maybe see you at Tour Divide?" he joked. From others' accounts of Michael, this seemed to be a big part of his personality — lightheartedness, but with an underlying focus and intensity.

Michael's last run was a spur-of-the-moment decision to travel cross-country between West Side and Badwater roads in Death Valley. He estimated the distance would be about ten kilometers, and likely thought the run across flat terrain would take about an hour. His partner was set to pick him up on the other side of the traverse. He packed four bottles of water, and only a cell phone as an emergency measure. It was approximately 2 p.m. and the temperature was 123 degrees. Two and a half hours later, passersby found him lying on the side of the road. He was conscious but delusional and combative. After emergency crews were summoned, he lost consciousness, and died during resuscitation efforts. The doctor who performed the autopsy speculated that Michael likely encountered subsurface moisture beneath a thin crust layer, which can make footing extremely difficult. If he had to find a way around it, his route would have been significantly lengthened. His water bottles were empty when he was found.

Those of us who don't know Michael well can only wonder what he was thinking when he decided to embark on his run, as well as what went through his mind when he realized he was in much deeper than he anticipated. Michael, who has completed the 135-mile Badwater ultramarathon, probably had good reason to believe that his relatively light kit was more than enough for conditions he had dealt with before. His experience rightfully gave him confidence, and still a stark misjudgment occurred. It's a sobering lesson for anyone drawn to these extreme environments, where the margin for error is so thin.

On Monday, our friend Daniel came to visit from Colorado and we went for a run on Black Mountain. He told me he had been reading my book "Ghost Trails" and was curious about the incident during the 2008 Iditarod race when I dropped my bike in an open stream in the Dalzell Gorge at 20 below, and soaked my leg as I retrieved it. What he didn't understand, he said, is why I didn't get frostbite when that happened, but did in a similar incident the following year.

"Well, it's interesting," I replied. "I realize now how many poor decisions I made after I went through the ice on Flathorn Lake in 2009. But at the time, that incident in the Dalzell Gorge was still fresh in my mind. The year before, I completely soaked my boot in temperatures far below zero, and proceeded to push my bike to Rohn over the next eight hours with no consequences. So you see, there was that precedent that made me think I'd be okay."

Only the second time around, I wasn't as lucky. I was still lucky that I was able to walk away with moderate frostbite and not something much worse, but still, I sometimes wonder — what was so different about conditions in 2009 that my foot froze in eight hours? Was it because it was a few degrees colder? Was it because of wind? Was it because I both pedaled and pushed my bike, where in 2008 I walked the entire way? What will I do if I encounter similar conditions again? I love the frozen Alaska tundra more than any other landscape I've experienced, and I'm not going to stay away. Instead, I want to be prepared. I want to be alert. I want to make good decisions.

Still, I recognize that I can gather all the experience and knowledge possible, and still make a disastrous mistake in a relatively routine situation. It's even more likely to happen if experience gives my mind precedent to believe that a particular situation is okay. But of course, situations can change stunningly fast. And when conditions shift outside one's experience, even small miscalculations can turn deadly. Michael's final run has been a sobering reminder of that reality.