Octember was really something and I would recommend to anybody that you do this:

once a year take something that you love doing, add the challenge of aiming to do it in a way that you never have before – whether by intensity, duration, volume, or venue, and use everything you know to get it done. As long as the outcome is unknowable and the challenge actually feels challenging and at the last moment possibly even scary, you’re in for an adventure and you’d better not back down.

I was going to write some thank you messages at the end but by the time you get there you will all be too knackered to read them so I am cheekily sticking them here:

Thank you to the race directors, their event teams, and the volunteers who make our good hurting possible: Andy Hewat and the Great Ocean Walk 100 crew – such a beautiful and punishing run should be on every trail runner’s Must List, Peter Fitzpatrick and Warwick Hull and the Hume and Hovell 100 crew – awesome race and certainly one that should swell in the years to come because everyone who loves a cracking trail and wants to know what they can really do on a gorgeous 100km course should do it at least once, Justin & Sharon Scholz and the Ned Kelly Chase Gang – Australia needs more proper road ultramarathons and the design of this race is uniquely fun and inclusive.

Thank you to the healers, people who every ultrarunner needs in their network if we’re going to do what we love doing in whatever way we love doing it, but especially when backing up – thank you to the exceptional Lisa Rollo, a great supporter and brilliant sports physio who made sure everything was back in the right place each week so I could go out and do it all again; thank you to my pilates instructor Kellina Stewart who has helped me put the body back into action after a giant 2012 and a 2013 that started with me downsizing from the 100 at TNF100 to the 50 because I doubted my ability to go the distance; thank you to Allan Bolton (exT1D) for being a dependable friend and reliable mentor when it comes to managing the challenges of being a type 1 on the properly long run; thank you to my mate Geoff Ward, cranio-sacral osteopath and master of the subtle adjustment; thank you to my shiatsu teacher, practitioner and dear friend Anne McDermott who put that last 90 minutes of hurt on me just before The Big One; thank you Andy Dubois for some of the practical tools I needed to keep running – even if it got slow and ugly; and a big special thank you Graham for your positive ferocity – you know that’s what you’ve got, don’t you?

Hoka’s not just great gear, it’s great people. But for now, here’s a shot of some great gear

Thank you to my work colleagues and friends , Trudy, Rob, and Ian at Hoka OneOne Australia for support on a bunch of levels – from putting up with runner’s brain on a Monday to making sure I’ve got the awesome gear I need on a Friday and a whole bunch of good stuff in between. When your work aligns with your passion, it’s a wonderful thing. Hoka has been growing like crazy in Australia ever since it got here. It’s a great running shoe and we’ve got great supporters, which is part of the reason why, but there’s also an awesome team behind Hoka OneOne here and without their commitment and attitude, most people reading this now wouldn’t even know what a Hoka is. Many more runners in Australia are about to find out in 2014, thanks to this tight crew.

Niggl Rd. Yes, Jess and I actually hit Niggl Rd on the third and final day of our 190+km run/powerhike from Bendigo to Ballarat in August this year. That’s a run writeup that’s long overdue too, by the way. Don’t worry, you have almost made it to the final chapter of the race report you’re currently waiting for.

And thank you to my closest network, family. Jess, I don’t know how runners whose lovers don’t support their dreams do it. You inspire, support, and awe me xx Julie, superstar sister-in-law, thanks for being part of the inspiration to ever run a marathon in the first place. And Mum & Dad, our idea of fun would be a lot harder to live without you guys being the best dogsitters in the world – it’s a precious responsibility and Kitty thanks you for it. For that, and the chicken, that is. If I’d been 100% certain I’d make it through GNW, it was a race I wanted to dedicate to you guys. I wasn’t, so you’ll have to be happy one day with something shorter

Thank you, finally, to the race director and vollies who made Octember the challenge it really became. Dave Byrnes, you threw down in the biggest possible way, with a 70% DNF rate and a 100-miler that will always be a mighty monster but might never be the same again if it does move to the less incendiary month of September. Let’s finish this story.

I don’t know what time it was,

I don’t wear a watch.

Queens of the Stone Age, My God is the Sun

Music has played a massive part of Octember in its entirety. Vitamin M blasting from tiny, sometimes sweat-damaged little headphones which occasionally got put in backwards (which really helps them sound even more like complete sh_t) has been there for me about 284km out of 474. The rule has more or less been no tunes for at least the first 30km of each run because you’re all bunched up, it’s a good time to chat before everybody disappears, and like caffeine, if you don’t wait at least a little while for it, you don’t properly appreciate its effect on your head and legs.

Queens of the Stone Age have rocked out particularly, as have Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Pendulum, Tool, Kate Bush, Macklemore, Immortal Technique, Iron Maiden, Helmet, Sepultura, Florence & the Machine, Foo Fighters, Skrillex, NIN, LMFAO (yes, trashy pop), and System of a Down to name a few.

The reason that particular lyric stands out for me is because that track, My God is the Sun

1. Totally rocks and usually results in sky-flung fist pumps however crap you felt 30 seconds ago, as you suddenly feel right in the world and pick up your pace, even if only for three and a half minutes.
2. Always makes me laugh because I’m usually wearing a stupidly big bl__dy watch.
3. Pays homage to the very spirit of ultrarunning, simply because Queens of the Stone Age used to be sludge-metal legends, Kyuss. Jamming loud and live in desert canyons, powered by portable generators under the wild night sky, can there be any doubt that these guys had some sense of what we love about the immersion of trail ultramarathon, especially when the next lyric is

So good to be an ant who crawls,

atop a spinning rock.

Is there any question that we are just that?

And, of course, for the final instalment of the Great North Walk Race Report That Has Gone For Longer Than The Run Itself, the concept of time, although slippery to grasp, did have a special significance for me and my Superpacer, Jess.

Coming into Mooney Mooney with Supercrew Graham. Superpacer Jess is probably out of shot doing hill repeats while waiting for us to get going again. Pic courtesy of Terrigal Trotters.

Hitting the last manned checkpoint, Mooney Mooney at 12:10 on Sunday afternoon, everything was still on the line. With 50 minutes to go before cutoff we had made up time out of Somersby and now needed to break the course’s neck by hitting the unmanned water stop – the final threat of expulsion before the hallowed Finish Line – before 3pm. Feeling amped and hungry to be finished I played one last game of What Didn’t You Bring From The Car with legendary crew Graham. Somehow, no matter how many different kinds of gel, electrolyte, soft drink, or food Graham had ready and waiting at each checkpoint, I would manage to ask for the one thing that hadn’t been deemed worth bringing. It was a game that seemed to keep all involved pretty entertained every 3 to 6 hours or so.

I don’t even remember whether we played one final round or not. Mooney Mooney was a blur of weighing scales, chips, excited volunteers and runners leaving and arriving. Jess and I had a ridiculously serious discussion about the merits of drinking a can of Red Bull. She was in favour, but based on the gastric misadventure of the preceding day’s cola binge, I was against. For about a minute.

I slammed it down, we excitedly said goodbye to people we’d just met as though we’d known them forever as Graham called out that he’d see us on Patonga and off we flew, sort of.

A burst of excited bravado nearly killed me. As if my running legs had grown back, I sprinted down the pathway that begins the final deceptively simple 26km. What’s simple about it? You just have to get to the end. What’s deceptive about it? It’s not so simple.

The seemingly endless (we’ve already run 150km by this point, remember, leaving a ruin of dehydrated and unhappy, dazed, battered bodies in our wake) final mega-wobble of twists and turns manages to take in sunbaked sandstone ridges, irregular and cruel stairways, a subtropical rainforest, a lagoon and a waterfall and a firetrail that never ends. As if this isn’t challenge enough, some muppet feeling temporarily superhuman sprints the first 50 metres until he feels his right hamstring get played like Hendrix’s Fender – twang!

Bugger.

Jess caught up to me and we geared back down to the zombie shuffle.

Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.

In my head, in the lead up to GNW, I had rehearsed how I would handle the big climbs on crutches if I happened to go off a cliff mid-race and break an ankle or leg. I was going to finish at any physical cost. It just wasn’t meant to be self-inflicted or so utterly inglorious as this.

Bugger.

Pat Farmer joined us last year for lunch in Centennial Park as we were preparing to head to the 4 Deserts Grand Slam as Team Born to Run. One of the many great bits of advice he gave us then was that the more you hurt in training, the less you hurt on race day.

In Atacama with Jess and the team. Our first desert hurt a hell of a lot less than running 174km on the Great North Walk, even in thin air, 46 degrees, and with an 11kg backpack.

But we all turn up expecting to hurt. However much hurt we might pile on in training, I think it ultimately lets us hurt even more on race day. Maybe, though, we feel it less. Maybe the more time you spend with pain, the more it becomes a comfort. Or maybe I’d been awake for 32 hours and the little voice in my head was talking crap again.

No longer just slow, the zombie stomp had become lopsided. Lurching up the first of the last remaining nasty little climbs, all that mattered was getting to the unmanned water stop before 3:00. We had left Mooney Mooney with the advice of the checkpoint captain ringing in our ears, ’10 kays to the unmanned water stop’. 10 kays at amputee snail pace, 2 hours, in and out by 2:30, no problem.

Surely…

My stupidly sprinted hammy wasn’t the only niggle. 10 kays? Wishful thinking said yes, long and lonely reality said no. It was just us against the clock. Last time I’d come through here had been GNW 2011, my first miler, and hadn’t that been a thrill. I pulled the best bit of long running I’d ever done right out of my arse and caught up to runners I’d expected would have finished long ago. They looked as surprised as I did. Each time that I passed somebody, I felt stronger and stronger. It was an incredible experience simply for its uniqueness in my brief time running. And obviously, it was the PB that I began this race thinking about. But I’d have been passed out in the car by now back then, rather than stumbling against the clock like I was now.

The thought was fleeting, thankfully. Such thoughts are weakening, unless sprinkled with a good dash of irony. How hilarious that Totally Inexperienced Roger had kicked Veteran Roger’s butt so completely. There. That’s worth at least a wry grin.

I’m not Christian but definitely had some added strength on board thanks to this sage quote from Pat Farmer at Big Red Run earlier in the year.

As we hit a more neatly cleared sandy path, the excitement level picked up – for me, at least, unlike for Jess who had actually revisited this part of the track recently, such is the commitment of the Superpacer.

Clearly, we were about to hit the waterfall and the last properly rude sandstone climb before evading cutoff. Psyched!

Nuh.

It was the false hope of a similarly rock-carved lagoon. The pre-waterfall.

Time was marching on relentlessly. Where the hell was the water stop? How could this not be 10 kays already? What was it? 6? 3? How far did we still really need to go? Surely I could zombie lurch faster?

The wishful thinker in my head was being slowly choked to death by the cold realist from maths class. The water stop would not be 10km. We would not be safely skating through at 2:30 then skipping hand in hand, carefree and bushy-tailed to Patonga.

F_ck.

Jess was awesome through this stage. She never verballed me to go faster. I think she knew that as sloth as I was, it was about as much as I could maintain. Every now and again though, as patient as she had been through all the plod of the night before, she would just edge slightly further ahead, holding a steady pace that I’d have to work just a bit harder to match.

The last 60km of the Great North Walk miler. Scenic soul destruction. LOVE IT! Sort of…

With almost no discussion, we knew that we were running on the ragged edge of crisis. Between us, we still weren’t a million per cent sure how far the water stop and the salvation beyond it lay. There were things we could change, and things we couldn’t. We couldn’t stop the clock, we couldn’t make the forecast of 10kms reality, we couldn’t push the cutoff time to 3:15. All we could do was go as quick as I could possibly let us and make sure it would be enough to get through.

As much as doing this final harder-than-all-before-it run at the end of a month of ultras probably meant I could have hit the starting line a bit fresher than I did, so what? Everybody – EVERYBODY – brings unknown issues to a race. Maybe they’re ill, maybe they’re tired from long working weeks, maybe their partner is unsupportive, maybe family issues are playing with their heart. If you’re on the starting line, your money’s on the table and your cards are dealt, just like everybody else’s. You toe the line, you’re all equal. There’s no handicap, and there’s no excuses.

In short, sh_t happens.

If anything, the month that had gone before was massive motivation. Letting it all finish by getting timed out would be like shrugging my shoulders, turning my back on the challenge and saying it was too hard as I walked away scuffing my feet with my head held low.

Seriously, once you’ve thrown down the week before and challenged a little red dude on Facebook the week before the race, you can’t back down, can you???

But now Jess was with me too, and Graham was out there somewhere waiting for us, and I was going as hard as I could fuelled by their commitment and the thought of all the messages of support I’d received from people over the past month and a half. Online or face to face, if you want to say ‘good luck’, or ‘go hard’, or ‘that’s crazy, smash it!’ to someone taking on a challenge whether it’s for a cause or not, just say it. They won’t regret it, and you probably won’t either.

Is this it? Is this it? The light at the end of the tunnel arrived suddenly as we broke from the bushes into the clearing of the open firetrail. Our exhilaration was witnessed by a tall skinny volunteer and a bunch of ragged water containers. It was a quarter to three. At 162km into a 175km race, we’d avoided getting disqualified by just 15 minutes. That could have been the 15-minute nap I didn’t take at Yarramalong. That could have been the 15-minute nap I didn’t take at the top of Bumble Hill. It could have been the 15-minute shoe change I didn’t make during the whole event. It might have been the 15-minutes I didn’t spend sitting beside the trail before getting to the Basin when I was wondering how it had all gone so completely to hell.

15 minutes.

Between all, and nothing.

But for now we were just manically happy. If we had burst into a magical grove of unicorns farting rainbows while playing Stairway to Heaven on flaming golden harps we couldn’t have been happier.

Yes. That happy.

Really.

What came next was kind of a blur. We caught up to a runner called Tay, but whenever I managed to use his name in conversation I would call him Tray, which I would also shout loudly when we later thought he had got lost again. If he hadn’t got lost in the first place, probably multiple times, we wouldn’t have run up Mt. Wondabyne with him. Dude was fast.

Jess chatted merrily, happy to have a conversation partner who could actually make conversation. My bravado returned as I put in what felt like a 3-minute kay downhill but was probably more like 3km/h, leaving them behind for just long enough to make us all wonder why I hadn’t run like that any time in the last 34 hours. But then it was a return to diesel-engine-clogged-with-sugar mode, as Beast Mode sputtered back out of existence.

my pace over the final 60km. Brendan Davies course record safe for another year

What really stands out from this final stretch, once Tay had accelerated and disappeared once more on his personal nav challenge, is just how utterly soul-destroying the almost-final part of the final stretch of the GNW miler can be. Relatively speaking, moments before hitting The Neverending Firetrail we had been doing cartwheels with Bambi while God and Buddha played Breakdance Twister and all was perfect in the world. Now, I was thinking about following my GPS  heading toward Patonga in a straight line, through seriously scratchy bushland, over unnecessary peaks and probably off cliffs.

For an easy-to-run road, that last bit before the final crossing and the final final stretch, just before you get to the final final final stretch with its ridiculous staircase, is AN OBNOXIOUS PUNCHLINE! It’s the final chuckle that RD Dave Byrnes has at our expense. He sends us on a 100-miler that keeps going long after Chris Turnbull has fallen asleep on an anthill because it’s 108 miles, and after even the most forest-loving runner has buckled and sent out a prayer for long, wide, non-technical packed firetrail, he gives us the frickin’ Magic Pudding of Firetrails. No matter how long you’ve been on it, no matter how many times you hit the last bend, no matter how many times you see it finally bending toward that last road crossing in the middle distance, it keeps going a bit further, bending one more time, looking like it’s almost over, then laughing at your expense. AAAARGH!

Then we make it. And like we’re fleeing a burning building we rush toward that last bit of gravelly open road.

And suddenly there’s excitement. Runners up ahead. A last competitive urge, I get some deep calming breaths in and prepare to rev the engine as we go past them. But what’s this? A pee break? Sightseeing?

Nope. With the little red man taunting them from just metres away, they look frantically in every direction but the one they’re meant to be taking.

We blast through between them, calling out ‘it’s this way, then down and right to Patonga, go, go’. Unless they’re on similar levels of caffeine, they’re probably hearing unintelligibly fast Esperanto, made harder still to comprehend by the Doppler Effect.

One last shout as an offering to the Gods of Sportsmanship and Mortal Combat:

“Over here! TRAAAAY!”

And then we’re gone. Fuelled once again by the excited energy of the baffling overtake, amused by the silliness of running once more up a hill to get to a beach, the interminably long winding section of single track before the interminably longer bounce and fly and stagger of the final uneven and twisting stair descent to the sacred sands.

My face is flapping around my ears from the sheer stupidity of my grin now, lungs and heartbeat don’t even matter here. It’s all about movement through space now. Jess feels it too, delirious thrill of the cowbell. Surely the only thing waiting on the beach for us by now will be a poorly timed birthday party for a local 5-year-old whose friends and family are going to halt their conversations and look on aghast as their pitch is invaded by sweat-monsters with deep black circles where their eyes used to be.

Nope.

It’s the beautiful, beautiful Trotters and a ragtag but surprisingly large bunch of runners, crew, finishers, DNFs, vollies, and the man himself, Big Dave Byrnes and his Neon Yellow Sports Vest.

But they’re a melange right now, a mess of recognisable and unrecognised faces, smiling widely themselves and cheering as we fight against the soft sand to get to our final goal.

That pole.

That little red man.

We’re racing each other. One last chance to run as hard as you can. Totally ridiculous and completely appropriate.

Feeling like kneeling in an amphitheatre, some Olympian Hall of Running, even though it’s actually the edge of a thin strip of sand across from a park and a pub somewhere on the Central Coast on a cloudy Sunday evening in the midst of an arc of cheering friends and curious passersby, I gratefully kiss that beautiful little red bastard’s exceptionally round head and feel nothing but the moment.

It’s an indescribable release.

It’s completion.

The moment. pic by Graham Doke

Jess is beside me, Dave is grinning like he just ran the whole damned thing himself, and a finisher’s medal has never felt so good. Graham, too humble to take well-earned credit holds back. And then the 3 of us are hugging and laughing like we’ve just broken the sound barrier, instead of running a race so slow I nearly got us kicked off the course.

Jess banging my head against the pole for keeping her and Graham up all weekend. Well, not really, but Graham took the photo and that’s the story he made to go with it.

When I ran Great Ocean Walk, the thought for the day was that at the end I would throw everything on the ground and race into the sea.

Nope.

Finished on top of a damned cliff.

Hume and Hovell 100, the last 50km took us along a gorgeous inland sea, it teased us in the heat of the day, always just out of reach. I promised I’d jump into its cool blue embrace at the end of the day.

Nope.

Finished at the bottom of the dam wall.

Ned Kelly 100 was in Wangaratta. It was a great day out, gorgeous views, fantastic race.

Not a venue known for its water features.

But this was it, finally. An epic month, a self-set challenge with the real chance of failure, an unknowable outcome, and the sweet, sweet shoreline.

Shoes and socks straight off, into the surging ocean with barely a minute’s delay. A delirious sense of satisfaction.

And then celebrating with everyone else as more runners with more stories of their own come straggling across the sand, heralded by The Cowbell of Victory.

Cold sea rolling against my legs, crushed shells and thick sand granules individually tormenting every single nerve ending I didn’t know I had in my feet, a small cluster of happiness and first-times barely visible as a dot from space, we shone.

One very long run, one very happy team.

Congratulations on reaching the end of my 100-miler race report. You are now ready to run one yourself, based solely on the endurance you have shown in reading this far. At some time in the not too distant future, I will post some of the useful practical things I have learnt during Octember about endurance running and recovery. The articles will be hosted here at http://www.runeatsleeprun.com, http://www.hokaoneoneaustralia.com, and, if they’re type-1-relevant enough, at the other blog that I host, http://www.type1ultra.com. As one final set of figures from this outing on the GNW, here are some numbers to consider – 50km Saturday morning in 8 hours, 37km Saturday afternoon in 10 hours, 70g carbohydrate in 6 hours, 175km in 35:18, 474 race kilometres in 4 ultramarathons within 30 days in roughly 75 hours and 46 minutes. Got it done.

An awesome surprise from Jess which she intelligently (and secretly) only ordered the day after we got GNW done and dusted. But that’s a story for another day…

In April this year, ultrahottie Jess Baker and I travelled to Japan for a three and a half week visit that took us everywhere, from Hiroshima to most of the way up Mt Fuji, to a sumo stable in Tokyo and the temples of Kyoto, but the inspiration and purpose of our visit was an incredibly special ultra marathon, its full title being the Sakura Michi Kokusai International Nature Run.

The finish line in 2013, pic by Diane Weaver while waiting for Paul Every to reach that extremely special final tree

One thing that draws many runners to ultramarathon is surely that this sport we love is so far from ordinary. Even most marathoners will never run 50km, so the experience of running a 100km race is an extremely special thing and should be treasured, because it is a feeling of struggle, achievement, satisfaction and life affirmation that many will never know.

So, within an already extraordinary sport, Sakura Michi is a truly extraordinary race. Why?

• single stage 250km road run
• close to 1,000 volunteers
• more than 40 aid stations
• crosses Japan, one of the few countries where endurance running is truly appreciated
• follows the path of over 2,000 cherry blossoms planted by a great man, Ryoji Sato, as they are blooming
• inspired and coordinated by some of the organisers of the original 420km Hiroshima to Nagasaki Peace Run

For any ultrarunner who isn’t aware of Japan’s depth in the sport, 2 out of the top 5 men and top 5 women for 100km on road in any one year are usually Japanese. There is a rich culture of running supported by serious inter-company competition with the ekiden and the blog Japan Running News is a good place to visit to start learning more about a running culture so deep that you might find yourself getting passed by grandmothers at the 190km mark on a Sunday morning if you ever make it to Japan for the incredible race I’m here to tell you about.

By the end of the weekend, all of these people would be superheroes, even if only one was wearing a cape. (L to R Super Thierry, Superwoman who is symbolic of all the fantastic volunteers and crew at Sakura Michi, and Jess Baker who is still aka The Terminator)

I would also say that in addition to Japan’s love of running being a fantastic element of Sakura Michi, the Japanese people and Japan’s general culture are also inherently attractive. We were treated with such kindness and hospitality, but also felt a real expectation that we would give our absolute best that we felt, ultimately, incredible support and a debt of gratitude. Just like training with faster runners, being surrounded by this attitude of aspiration and humility was positively challenging.

Before the race, we stayed with Ogo-san, the Race Director, at his beautiful and very welcoming home in the heart of a forested green mountainside as did the other guest internationals. Also, there was the wonderful Thierry who had completed Sakura Michi several times himself. This wasn’t just a great way to experience Japanese home life in a deeper and more patient way than travel typically allows, it was also a great opportunity to learn more about what we might face on the coming weekend … and get a little anxious about the potential for extreme cold and rain.

Much discussion of ultrarunning and the upcoming race would take place here over the coming days, over shared meals, during meetings, and less formally over warm sake with all our legs under one blanket. A flawless space, and simply beautiful.

Our home stay with its array of wonderful meals, new friendships, visits to the annual Takayama Festival, morning waterfall runs, and anxious drop bag preparation soon drew to a close. We were bussed to Nagoya for the Friday afternoon pre-race briefing and final coordination before one last short sleep and the Nagoya Castle starting line on Saturday morning. This route to Nagoya also gave us a view of part of the course, as well as a sense of the harmony between human life and environment in Japan, with massive roadways disappearing into mountains and out the other side through gigantic tunnels that almost blended into the landscape. In some places in Australia where such a roadway is needed, the solution is more likely to involve blowing the mountains apart rather than tunnelling through them.

The pre-race briefing for the international runners had already been conducted as most of the main briefing would be in Japanese with translators helping out. A highlight though was certainly the surprise request relayed by phone shortly before the meeting for Jess to speak on behalf of all visiting runners. Opposite the castle and several floors above where the briefing would take place, Jess’ thrill at preparing an unprepared speech filled our room and for the next 40 minutes we entirely forgot the pre-race anxiety that still had some hours left to brew.

Come on Jess, no pressure – teehee!

She did nail it, though, conveying our joint love of running, our excitement at being in Japan, how much we were looking forward to sharing the next day’s unique experience together from wherever we all might be on the route from Nagoya to Kanazawa, and a recognition that ultra marathon really is a movement and a force and a vibe that transcends anything as restrictive as nationalism or language barriers.

After a short break we got down to the serious business of drop bag placement, making sure the right set of gear would go to the right place, and that the right set of backup gear would also go to the right place before or after it on the course. Some runners, of course, had to drop off dragon onesies, in addition to their race nutrition and other such frivolities.

Bag drop – awesomely well organised, just like every element of the entire race.

Whether it’s a frog, or a dragon, or a green unicorn, you never know for sure whether you might need a onesie waiting for you at the 223km mark of the biggest run in your life. Be prepared!

Wanting to cut straight to the run itself, this is probably a good point to say to any aspiring runners that Sakura Michi must be one of the best supported races in the world. There are approximately 42 aid stations, which are broken down into small (S), medium (M) and – that’s right – LARGE. These are also referred to as ‘Hotels’. Small has water, sports drink, maybe some candy or fruit. Medium has sports drink, water, maybe cola and candy, maybe red bean buns and umeboshi plums, maybe coffee or soup. The LARGE have everything! There are about 13 of these on course and they have EVERYTHING. These are also the aid stations where you can send your drop bags as you try to anticipate what you will need and when.

Does anybody actually enjoy the game of drop bag chess we all play before a long run?

Will you be cold because of the weather, because of the time of day, or because of exposure as you begin the first juicy climb around the 100km mark? Wherever your clothes and torches are, you can begin to put them on while inhaling soup or noodles or sweetened oranges or beer or salted potatoes or having a massage or… are you getting the sense of what I’m saying here? Best. Aid. Stations. EVER!

The view of Nagoya Castle from our hotel room the night before. It just seemed to sit there demanding that we do our best the next day. Exciting!

The start from the gate of Nagoya Castle goes in waves 3 minutes apart. Basically, if you’re in Wave 6 like Jess was, it’s because your form rates you as very fast. Checkpoints on course are not checkpoints as we usually refer to them in races. Places on course where you get supplies are aid stations, whereas aid stations that are connected to one of a half dozen cutoff times are checkpoints. These cutoffs are times of day, so if you’re in Wave 5 as I was you more or less have a nice little 15-minute time penalty that can either play with your head or motivate you to go faster if things go wobbly as my race did on the first afternoon. More on that later though…

I really liked this Korean runner. He didn’t say much, he ran fast, and he only smiled when the job was done. Opposites attract :)

Back to the starting waves. Our friend Keith Hong was in Wave 2 on the basis of a slow ultramarathon time at Coast2Kosci (Australia’s longest race) a couple of years before. But having built up pumping quads of steel and knocked out some faster short course times – like 4:15 on the very climby 6 Foot Track 45km – we were expecting he’d have a solid race. Sure enough, as the waves departed and the timer counted down, he led his group from the start.

Where else would you possibly want to be? Wave 1 gets ready to run from Nagoya Castle gate as Waves 2-6 stand by.

Countdown. Fortunately, we had been inspired by a friend to do this race. Paul Every and his partner Diane Weaver who jointly are Race Director for Coast2Kosci have experienced Japan in a very full way, both as a destination and a place to live. Paul’s earliest description of the race made us want to travel to Japan for it, just as the article he had first read in an ultra magazine 18 years before had made him want to. He had helpfully said to me that even though we start at the castle, to get a view of it you actually need to walk an extra 100 metres or so past the starting line, which most people don’t do. As I snuck back to view the castle I smiled and thought of Paul and Diane, and felt like they were with us for this epic adventure in a very real way.

Nagoya Castle minutes before heading out on a 250km run across Japan. Everyone else is <— that way.

Back to the starting line, a few last big hugs, lots of adrenaline, a real sense of being in the right place at the right time in the right country for such a unique running challenge and GO.

The GO moment is when preparation ends and the run begins. If you have put the hurt into your legs, if you have eaten healthy, if you have tried to sort out the weaknesses that cause your niggles, and if – very importantly for anything 100 miles or longer – you have mentally prepared by imagining the weakness, the exhaustion, the fatigue, the pain, the shutdown, the physical resistance and what you’re going to do to handle them when they happen, then you’re as ready as you’re going to be and you welcome the end of the preparation.

You welcome the start of the run.

_______________________________

Given our status as welcome guests, the last thing we would ever do is treat our hosts with intentional disrespect. Whenever we didn’t honour a custom – easy to do with misplaced shoes or poorly pointed chopsticks – it was by accident and we would hopefully not make the same mistake twice. I think such faux pas were also seen in that light. On our way through the city of Nagoya, we discovered the custom of stopping at pedestrian crossings when the red man lit up, even if there were no cars in sight and the road to be crossed was only one lane wide.

The pedestrian crossings had a certain absurdity to them, but so does running 250km by choice. In a way, we were stopping to honour our hosts, and our competitors, and future races. I was okay with that. And half the time we stood there laughing while we waited for the awesome Green Man.

This did of course mean that any pack of runners functioned like an accordion, spreading out, then closing back together, then spreading out again only to regroup once more waiting for a red light to turn green. Running with a ‘must get through this’ mentality as my very prime directive, I could enjoy the novelty of this unusual in-race experience. But I was also thinking how somewhere behind me, much more capable and competitive, this could be working in Jess’ favour or against her.

The run out of town was exciting but relatively uneventful. The first aid stations would be roughly 10km apart and then get closer together once we hit the open countryside of Japan. Pedestrian crossings were funny. Our friends Tomotaka and Miho were amazing. A beautiful couple, we met Tomo through the Sahara Race when we took on the 4 Deserts Grand Slam in 2012.

Superfriends & superfood = perfect pre-race evening. L to R, with Keith, Jess, Tomo, and Miho.

Living near Nagoya and being a keen athlete, he had completed this race a number of times. Having dinner together the night before when they very kindly took us to a gorgeous local soba house that we would never have found ourselves, he said that they would come and cheer us at the race. The extent of their kindness toward us was as yet unimagined. The two of them would appear every 5km or so to start with, cheering and taking photos. There was great support on course from all the volunteers and passersby and spectators, but it was really nice to have friends smiling their support as we went by.

Woohoo! Pedestrian crossings bought me enough time to get a selfie with Jess. The next time I’d see her would be about 210km later.

They would cheer us for the whole weekend. Jess caught me around the 20km mark which meant I’d started faster and she’d started steadier than expected – again, we think this was a pedestrian crossing consequence. And as Jess would pull so far ahead of me over the course of the next day, they must have been driving 40km up to see her and then back to see me. We’re quite sure they drove at least twice as far as we ran, and we were so happy to have the two of them as part of our story.

The first aid station I’d sent any drop bag to was at the 49.9km mark. To make sure I didn’t have any annoying complications from managing my type 1 diabetes, I had sent a spare canula (the bit that goes into your skin allowing insulin from the very tiny pump on your waist to be delivered into your tissues by an extremely thin tube) ahead in 5 of my 9 drop bags so that should any complication arise, I would have the parts I needed to fix it. I was also carrying a spare canula in the very thin race pack I was wearing, along with a water bottle, glucose meter, iPhone, ultralight jacket, syringes, fast and slow acting insulin vials, and mix of gels and powders.

The aid stations were UNBELIEVABLE. As I arrived at the 49.9km mark, a volunteer was out front of it with my bag ready for me. We had already been blown away by the Shinkanzen – Japan’s superfast train, which always arrives on time, leaves on time, and even pulls up to the platform aligning numbered carriages and doors with the exact place they’re meant to be. But this was Next Level Aid Station. The volunteers had a chuckle when I tipped two cups of water over my head and I had a chuckle when I realised there was a bucket of cool water with a ladle at the end of the aid station for that exact purpose.

There was also a lot of this – incredible beauty and tough running, with the course taking runners past over 2,000 cherry blossoms in spring. Picture by Tomotaka Kamei featuring Jess Baker

There was a lot of chuckling on course, I must say. Constant high fives, constant gratitude and appreciation from the runners for the volunteers and the incredible way they looked after us, constant appreciation from the volunteers for the runners who they knew were taking on a mighty challenge, and constant appreciation and support from cars driving by with even young kids cheering and shouting ‘Ganbatte!’ which roughly means ‘Fight!’ or ‘Kudasai’ meaning ‘Give us your best!’ as they passed by. Fortunately, Paul had told us about ‘Ganbatte!’ before we left so we had it put on the front of our shirts in Japanese writing.

Did I mention the aid stations? This pic from Tomo’s blog sort of captures it, even without the massage tables being in view.

Normally I’ll wait 30km before putting headphones in and I’d have to say that Vitamin M, MUSIC, is a great ally on long runs. But even by 60km I had no interest in tunes, because I was absorbing the completely unusual environment and humans cape around me as we ran. I did unfortunately absorb something else – too much food! Getting into one aid station and realising that the nut butters I had decided to fuel on were just not working for me, I looked at what was on offer – red bean paste bun, watermelon, umeboshi (very salty and strongly pickled plums – magic for pulling you back together when you’re a bit scattered), and Yakult, that tasty little yogurt drink. So I ate it all. Mistake.

Catching up with Thierry at one of the aid stations, he warned me to keep cool, so I did. I wish he’d warned me to eat less tasty awesome food too! (as always though, entirely own fault – discipline is the key to ultra, even when you’re enjoying yourself!)

Eating any one of these things would probably fuel you nicely. But after perhaps 6 or 7 hours and feeling the first stage of a gradual slowdown kick in I decided to fuel and, frankly, everything looked tastily. So eating without any discipline or logic I threw in a bit of everything and my gut and I had a long unfriendly conversation over the next few hours as a result. But the conversation I didn’t expect to have was with Speedy Keith.

Not only had Keith brought quads of steel with him, ready to race, he had prepped with focus and INTENSITY.

At around the 70km mark I had a very distinct thought, wondering where Keith was in the race. By this point, we were out of the city and running in open country at the side of a wide 2-lane road, a rock wall to my right and a cement barrier bordering a drop off into a valley to my left. I crossed the road to run into the next aid station and Keith came rolling out. He looked at least as surprised at seeing me run in as I felt at seeing him run out. Shortly after that we caught up and shuffled together for a while.

His guts were messing with him too. Although the temperatures were only in the mid-20s, the day still felt warm to a number of the other runners. I also knew that Keith had set out running to an ambitious time target, which can hurt any one of us on race day. This was very much a turtle and the hare situation. After going out reasonably well, I knew that I was slowing and would have to maintain focus if I was going to get through the checkpoints with their strictly imposed cutoff times safely. Keith still had a fast walk, though. I knew he had 7-8km/h in those wheels of his even if he couldn’t fire up and run right now. Even though we ran together for a short while, all that I could leave him with were some words of encouragement and the advice to keep moving forward but absolutely not redline anything until his body came back online.

My main chunk of training for Sakura Michi had happened 6 months earlier, with Big Octember. Rolling 3 100km races and a 174km slaughterfest into one 30-day block had given me practise at feeling really weak and useless, but simultaneously pushing on because there was no other option.

Your body probably has a lot more variables to deal with than a typical car engine, but they both take time to start working again if you overheat them, and they’re also both much more likely once overheated to blow up. Managing the red line, getting up to it but not exceeding it is probably one of the most important skills the ultramarathon runner can develop in self-management.

On the other hand, if you live in constant fear of that line, you will never achieve your best, on race days or in training. There are definitely two schools of thought – pacing versus breaking through. Keith had certainly gone out with the intention to push hard. With his training and speed base, I might have had the confidence to do the same. Instead, my vague plan – other than getting to the finish line well within the 36-hour cutoff and giving as much appreciation to the volunteers along the way as possible – was to roll through the first 150km and then see what I had in the tank.

As I pulled away I hoped Keith could regroup and run me down later on, but he already looked decidedly unhappy about life in slow motion.

——– tune in next week for Part 2, running through the night, and into the light ———-

by Roger Hanney – with thanks as always to my workplace and insanity-enabler Hoka OneOne Australia - Hoka One One is the only running shoe with enough crazy genius for my liking.

Having already run for over 10 hours, thoughts turned to evening and the night, cold, and distance ahead. We had long put the city of Nagoya behind us, and although the increased steepness beyond the 100km mark wasn’t expected to be savage, the sustained gradual climb of the last few hours had definitely been getting into all the places you’d expect – hips, glutes, head!

Running through the rolling green beauty of Japan, dotted with towns and villages that seemed to live so comfortably within their natural setting, it was hard not to feel both blessed by the moment and intrigued by the prospect of what lay ahead. Any ultramarathon is a landscape in its own right. A familiar landscape seen and experienced through a different lens after an unusually long time on feet or in an atypical physical or emotional landscape is an almost entirely different place than usual, a place that defies simple cartography or contours, and can’t be shared through anything as neutral as a camera.

Within the realm of exultation and fatigue, all flavours and colours take on an emotional electricity. Maybe the runners who don’t experience that change too deeply have an advantage over those who seek it, or perhaps the opposite is true.

2,000 cherry blossoms, 1,000 awesome volunteers, and 250km of friendly road going from one side of Japan to the other. What’s not to smile about 100km in?

Which ever may be the case, this was amazing. Every cherry blossom exploding in the slowly lowering sunlight was a personal message from Ryoji Sato, the humble bus driver who had personally planted each tree more than four decades before. Each one was a promise that the next 150+ kilometres would hold incredible beauty to balance the pain that must surely come soon. Each cheered ‘Kudasai!’, and although they didn’t yet implore me to keep going I expected that the struggle would begin in the deep dark. It doesn’t mean anything to run the first 50km of a 250km race well. Anybody can do that, and in fact the inexperienced runner like me is more likely to do that. But to run the last 50km of a 250km run well, that’s the elusive goal.

At this point, there was an awareness that cutoff times must be met. The next major one was 14 hours for 107km, the checkpoint where most runners would be sending their night gear and anything they felt would keep them feeling good on the climb. Not a fan of crowds or dropbag enclaves I had sent my main gear to the 97km mark. With a high quality vest, thermal sleeves, and super light head torch my plan was to blow through the major aid station at Shirotori and deal with any need for severe cold protection later on the course. The Hotel at 107km was the one that most runners, realistically or not, expected to hit before the sun had gone, and sounded to me like Cherry Tree being said quickly in a Japanese accent.

One of the defining moments of the whole run for me did happen at roughly the 100km mark. Having collected my basic night gear and begun the steady roll from the flatter open lands of the afternoon toward the ominous range of peaks that now loomed close enough to think about, I was passing a large corrugated warehouse-style shed. With a couple of colourful little tricycles in the large opening where the roller door would surely come down during the night, it was clearly a family dwelling. A strip of flowerbed, just one plant deep and maybe fifteen feet long extended between the front wall and the pathway as I motored on.

An older woman, maybe the grandmother of the family, was squatted low tending the flowerbed, her soft brimmed hat now almost redundant as dusk settled across the valley. Attention turning to the motion in her periphery, she partially twisted toward me and looked up. A warm smile spread from her cheeks to her eyes, “Ganbatte ne!” she insisted warmly and immediately. This was the spirit of the run, the spirit of Sakura Michi. We had no previous connection, just this moment, and in this moment everything was what it should be. She was gardening, I was running, we were doing these things however briefly right next to each other, and it was cool. I was impressed by her garden and ability to squat, she wanted me to run with all my determination, and we were cheering for each other. Did we need anything more?

This passing interaction really stayed with me, reinforced by the cheers of small children from the back of a passing car just moments later. How wonderful to live in a place where commitment and effort weren’t necessarily valued above speed and form, but were valued similarly nonetheless. To be cheered equally by an older local and young kids zooming by, to me at least marked a culture deeply comfortable with its values. And I couldn’t help but think that these passersby – who could have given me nothing, who could have just ignored or even derided me – were frickin’ awesome.

Buddhist artworks in the nearby village of Takayama depict what it feels like to fluff your nutrition strategy on a decently long run.

Back to the chase, the constant battle in any ultramarathon, the slowly escalating dispute between time and flesh. After a moment of indecision at an intersection followed by the usual bout of walking that is readily blamed on navigational uncertainty, the 107km checkpoint approached with a feeling not unlike Christmas morning.

Here I fell in love with salt and hot water. The salt was on my food, the hot water went into the bidon that was replaced in the chest pocket of my running vest. It was a thrill to see Tomo and Miho and get a quick report on how Jess was going. Although it was now pitch dark and cold enough to know that it was going to get a lot colder, based on what our friends had to say I pictured her blasting through here when it was still sunny. Despite the warm inner glow this produced I chucked on a fleece and beanie and got moving as quickly as I could throw in noodles and thank everybody for their help and support of the runners.

New Trick 1: Hot water might not sound like rocket science, but WOW! Having that hot 600mL against my chest slowed the onset of cold, both from night falling and from the pause to collect it and eat and dress more warmly was unexpectedly game-changing. By the time I was thirsty again, it had cooled to warm and again lifted my spirits as I sipped it on the run. Rather than the usual shift in focus from sweet to savoury, it was almost enough just to change temperature of inputs.

With Holland’s very strong Leonie (centre) and Jess at the start of the first day.

Over the next 35km, things got weird – good weird, but weird nonetheless. The run climbed and rolled back down into the treelined darkness of a slick road contouring its way into the heart of a mountain range that promised the uncertainty of future surprises but maintained an even temper. The temperature was about 5 degrees celsius by midnight, and with any pause of even a minute would begin to creep into the skin, and the breath, the lungs, and slowly crawl across smouldering muscle groups.

My GPS watch had hit the outer limits of standard deviation. This was to be expected with its communication to the satellite limited to one ping per minute rather than thirty, a measure intended to conserve battery life on long runs like this although 250km is a distance more typically covered on a multiday rather than single day race.

This street sign may have come to mind when digestion and technology conspired against me…

This meant that my calculations were out. I knew that I was slightly ahead of the distances that it was giving me, but running slowly I tried to not figure that into my estimates. It’s nicer to find out you’re closer to the finish than you thought, than that you haven’t covered ground you thought already behind you.

So when I ran into a major checkpoint and found the very highly tuned Leonie from the Netherlands sitting by a heater in a corner, all context changed. I wasn’t running with a focus on my own race and thinking in short bursts about how Jess might be doing far ahead of me. Suddenly, I was thinking all about Jess out near the front of the female pack in the dark and on her own, with the runner most expected to challenge her no longer in the mix. This, of course, highlights both the distraction and protection that Leonie had given in the lead up to the event.

Jess had always been focused on getting to the finish line and never expected that she would be able to run Sakura Michi the way that she had run Coast2Kosci. For Coast2Kosci, she had been able to focus on her first 200+ km race. There were many questions for her going into that run, but she also knew most of the field personally and although she had been focussed on the distance and the sheer bloody challenge she had also known that as a support team we would be with her the whole way, like an acrobat’s safety net.

Sakura Michi, though, presented a sea of unknowns. What would it be like to run without a dedicated crew? What would the other runners bring to the challenge? Who would go for it early and who would hold their cards close to their chest, perhaps laying down a handful of trumps at dawn?

Leonie was bold, strong, and well prepared. The internet had announced that her weekly mileage in preparation for this event had exceeded 200km consistently, and she wasn’t shy about her make or break ambitions. Hitting the pace hard from early in the day, she unfortunately broke. Two hours of digestive rebellion took too big a toll and now she was on the sideline waiting for it all to be over.

I ran out of the checkpoint on a higher high than usual. Yes it’s wrong to glory in the disappointment of others, and I was sorry for Leonie’s misfortune, and I had been looking forward to seeing what debris, carnage, and glory might arise from highly tuned front enders thrashing each other the whole way to the finish line. But I also was super stoked for Jess, knowing that Keith’s reports of Leonie’s race readiness must have played on Jess’ mind and that now, whether by good fortune or great gameplay, her night was wide open.

Keith fights on. Pic by Tomotaka Kamei

Of course, running in Japan and against some of the world’s best endurance runners within a culture where the sacrifice of the sport is properly understood, this viewpoint lay somewhere between naivety and ignorance. But perhaps that was a better place to be than full awareness, because to know the quality of runners in this field and understand properly just how many of the women could not only win, but win well, might have been paralysing.

It occurred to me some time later that I had run out of this checkpoint on such a high that I had not even asked for my dropbag. The plan to have a ‘B’ drop and ‘A’ drop had paid off, because even though I hadn’t collected my warmest gloves, most breathable shell, and brightest light, I could keep going through the night with what I had as long as I kept up a tempo. Or so I thought.

Remember what I said about my GPS being slightly off kilter? Turns out I had overestimated both its off-kilterness and my own running-smoothly-ness.

At the next Hotel styled checkpoint, with its soup and sticks of cheese and big heaters and barstools, one of the many fantastic volunteers brought out my dropbag, with torch and Tailwind (sports drink) and awesome night gear and so forth. So I sucked down a miso soup, telling myself that the bacon-looking bit that floated to the top when I was halfway through was some kind of strangely sliced yam, threw on the clothes that I had been hoping for but thought long gone, and ran out into the night. With no Vespa and almost no carbohydrate.

Quick explanation why that sucked:

1. Vespa is an amino acid derived from the activity of industrial strength wasps and my own experience is that it seems to support more efficient burning of body fat and therefore energy production and reduced carbohydrate consumption on the long stuff, so when you try it and find it works for you and figure it’s an essential part of your race arsenal, it’s not something you want to leave behind
2. Not just as an ultramarathon runner but as a type 1 diabetic, I depend on both the type and quantity of carbohydrate that I am going to consume on a long run. To leave my favourite sports drink behind when I don’t have another dropbag waiting for me until roughly 50km or six to seven hours further along the course, it’s just not part of the plan. If I can’t fuel, the potential consequences are worse than just reduced cadence

Jess hitting an aid station somewhere past the 100km mark. Note the abundance of daylight. Pic by Tomotaka Kamei

Having run out of the aid station, once again high-5ing everyone and Gozimassing, I returned to grab the stuff I needed. Realistically though, the extra 800 metres or so that I ran by having to turn around would have taken far less out of me than switching my nutrition on the fly or continuing with my ‘B’ torch – a very light but not so bright Black Diamond used for desert races which involved very little night running – rather than a ballistically bright AyUp head torch which would act like strap-on caffeine until sunlight returned.

Together with our awesome Superfriends Tomo & Miho at the wall of Nagoya Castle before the race.

With a reasonable buffer between my pace and the pace needed to stay ahead of cutoff, I made it into the 143km aid station needing to answer the call of nature. Everything went just a bit south here. The night was neither wet nor windy but it was still deeply chilling. Stopping had consequences. Worse still, though, so did squatting. Needing to answer nature’s call, I followed the directions to the nearest toilet. Unfortunately it was traditional.

Gearing up for the cold of night at the same aid station but already close to 30km behind Jess. Pic by Tomotaka Kamei

Ironically, the action of squatting painfully over a ceramic hole in the ground interfered directly with the need to squat in the first place. Hanging from the door handle of a Japanese public toilet I realised that I was cold, that my prayers were not going to be answered, and that time was relentlessly getting away from me. Mission abandoned, I hobbled back to the heater that the checkpoint was built around, grabbed coffee, checked my provisions, and escaped by a narrow margin. Just as the nausea of the afternoon had put me in the Danger Box earlier, the fumbling inefficiency of this stop once again put my race at risk.

But if we wanted to play it safe, we probably wouldn’t run ultra. We would more likely stay at home with a hot cocoa and a comfy chair and occasionally rock out with a deck of cards or lottery ticket.

Motivation – a sensation familiar to anyone with competitive blood pumping however subtly through their veins – fuelled me for some time after this. The sustained break, perhaps, and the lack of hard running earlier, maybe even the realignment of nutritional needs and fuelling strategies all combined until all of a sudden I was running. I wasn’t just running, but running hungry. I pounced on any light ahead of me as a reason to push through. I would consolidate my breathing and leg turnover perhaps fifty metres before each stranger that appeared ahead of me and burn past them, shouting ‘Ganbatte!’ and meaning it.

I wondered where this feeling had been and looked forward to it continuing for the next 100km, I felt like everything was going to be apples from now on, that I might just run faster for the next ten hours than I had for the preceding twenty, and I think I even ran into a checkpoint singing along loudly and high 5ing once more to Eye of the Tiger.

Cue the sound of power to a turntable being cut. Barely an hour later, just like that, the ‘oomph’ evaporated. If I hadn’t jumped on the wave of energy that I felt, perhaps I couldn’t have ridden it for as long as it felt like I did. But of course if I had let it wash over me instead of keeping pace with it, maybe it would have just been the first of many.

As I reverted to mere mortality, swiftly flying legs a memory, many runners I’d recently bounced past began to steadily grind by me once more. Order was restored, the world turned beneath our feet and the night sky lingered overhead, considering when it might once more shuffle over any one of many horizons and leave us to the mercy of the Sun.

But the return of daylight would not be immediately cruel. Instead, I would soon be inexplicably moved by the dawn.

Whether it is a function of distance run, fatigue, or some deeper sense of complete displacement, there is a massive gap between the expected experience of a day spent running and shuffling and striding and the actual experience of doing these things until there is no longer any need to do them. My internal conversation at dawn was driven by the simple knowledge that I would probably be moving forward until daylight was once again at the point of fading. To simply do this thing – that is, to simply forget everything but the next step forward and run/ shuffle/ stagger – carried less weight of fatigue than the thought of doing it. That’s a valuable lesson.

The stunning pre-dawn landscape begins a slow reveal.

As the day broke, I passed one more friendly aid station and headed slightly down to the right, away from the main road and into a misty valley. With the steadily building light of first morning and the passing of mist, a village revealed itself and suddenly everything moved for me. The night before had been unique in my experience of ultramarathon. The sleep monsters hadn’t appeared at all. There was no drowsiness, no zigzagging across the roadway, at least not that I know of. There had been no desire to prop against a tree and rest the eyes or lie under a blanket ‘just for five minutes’. Holding out to put my headphones in somewhere well past a hundred kays and most likely because of the absolute newness of Japan, senses had remained engaged throughout and, consequently, so had consciousness.

But now, first light in all its misty revelations, this was something else. This was the World Heritage listed UNESCO site of Shirakawago, an utterly traditional village whose inhabitants still slept and where the authentically ancient half-metre-thick thatched roves of successive whitewashed huts, cottages and halls broke the skyline even as the sun’s first fingers rapidly caressed the snowcaps of the mountain range that ringed the village from behind me.

Photos couldn’t do it justice, but chasing a runner ahead of me, gasping in literal awe at the sights revealing themselves all around me, and feeling in that moment like I had never seen anything so beautiful and most probably never would again, I pulled out my fruit-branded smartphone for the first time in perhaps 12 hours and clicked away on the run, like a blurry moron.

Day breaks over Shirakawago, snowcapped mountains behind me, peaks and ridge lines above, crystal stream and a giant eagle in the canyon below. Uniquely moving.

Cherry blossoms here reached tall, extending their cheerful pink above houses even underneath the weight of morning dew and cold haze. As the road led out of town, a Japanese crane flew high above and to the front of me, landing two-thirds of the way up some giant tree backgrounded by a cliff face topped by another ancient building – an instant silk print if ever there was one. I just couldn’t believe that such a moment had happened. I was stunned. And then, in almost the same breath, as the road led me more sharply away from Shirakawago a giant eagle flew out from underneath the bridge I was crossing. It circled the crystalline waters of the stream far beneath us both, looking for fish or any other mindless prey I thought, and then drifted slowly but deliberately back to its perch, metres beneath my feet and out of sight under the structure I was now running across.

If I had still had the camera in my hands, I should have rightly cast it into those same waters for the sense of hopelessness that any such moment could possibly be captured and recreated ever in any medium. Maybe it was the 180km run speaking, but this was a moment of incomparable sensation and wonder.

Onward! Ever onward. The sun was starting to rise now but soon it would once again be gone, and before that happened I’d better be in Kanazawa – the GOAL!

During the night I’d run with a discarded glove in hand for at least an hour, thinking it might belong to some frozen runner up ahead of me before deciding that it must have belonged to an absentminded gardener and releasing it back into the wild. I’d chuckled when I saw that the official temperature was zero degrees celsius, thinking that it was actually warmer than expected. And I had felt the thrill and terror of mind-altering tunnels like I had never run through before, concrete and metal tubes bending their way through mountainsides and turning every building engine noise into a symphony of sonic and sensory confusion, until you could find the confidence to ignore your senses somewhat and give into the logic – although the wall of sound and air pressure building around might be coming from every direction, the car or truck creating it could only come from one of two. That was reassuring, like the certainty of death and the trust in our own birth.

Two big challenges now remained – the dreaded and supposedly body-hammering climb at the 200km mark, and the final 223km cutoff before the Finish Line. Once through these it would be all but over, surely…

So this is it, a week from today, 50 runners each with a support crew tagging along by car will pound out 240km on foot from the south-eastern shoreline of New South Wales to the top of Australia.

We have all subjected ourselves to different methods and levels of training. Some of us have raced a lot, some of us hardly at all. Some runners have made it down to do course-specific training, many of us have instead just tried to find the longest hilliest roads we can near our home locations.

Now it’s taper time. Even as the legs itch to go for a run, some of us worry that if we take even 6 days off running we’ll forget how to do it. Ironically, the other favourite activity now left to us is eating but with our favourite calorie-burning activity on hold, we’re on reduced rations for this kind of fun too.

Early morning training brings its own rewards

When training goes well, it reinforces a positive belief in the outcome of the race itself. We know who the top runners are, but many of us simply hope to reach an eventual placing somewhere in the midpack without any bones breaking or tissues tearing or organs collapsing. And if they do, well, we hope that training will still give us the strength we need to drag ourselves across the line before we get timed out.

Nutrition strategies are in place, timing plans set to dream, pragmatic, and parachute finishes have been worked out, I’m still thinking about which socks are going to get the thumbs up, and have obviously already made my shoe choices. Super crews are champing at the bit, ready to enforce hydration needs and keep runners on course at night when the sleepy zigzags set in anytime between 9pm and 5am.

The great thing about running 150 miles is that it’s always going to be a new experience. Even running 100km on the same course has a particular freshness to it each time you race, but with a race as long as Coast2Kosci anything can happen. It might be scorching heat, headwinds, dehydration, rain, extreme cold, poor visibility, injuries, blisters, nuclear chafing, nausea, fatigue, mental weakness, or any other factor that can slip beyond the runner’s control, but whatever it is, you know that your only choice will be to deal with it as efficiently as possible and bust on through, regardless. Running 240km is a massive challenge, no doubt, but the real challenge lies in how you deal with whatever happens during that 240km.

Seaman’s Hut at the 228km mark. Still some real work to do here, but you know you’re going to get there now.

To paraphrase half of the Race Director team, Paul Every, ‘ours is a sport where you don’t have the luxury of thinking about anything beyond your next step’.

Racing starts 5:30am, Friday December 5 Australian Eastern Standard Time – follow here. Messages of support welcome!

If I’m looking this happy on December 5th, my crew probably need to kick my ass a lot harder.

Writing race reports after properly long runs easily turns into an exercise in self-indulgence. Let’s face it, there’s a reason the whole world’s eyes turn to watch Usain Bolt run for 9.5 seconds but generally glaze over when runners talk about feeling a second or third wind at the second rising of the sun.

So, Coast2Kosci 2014, short version – ran smooth, hobbled a bit, got wet, how fun was that?!

Coast2Kosci 2014, longer version.

It would be fun to one time read a race report where somebody really complained about their crew. Something along the lines of, “these guys couldn’t tell a sports drink from a ginger biscuit. I called them Team Guantanamo because they frequently blasted loud noise at me and wouldn’t pass the water, choosing instead to leave me in uncomfortable positions when all I wanted to do was go to the toilet.” This is not that report.

Where else would you be at 5:30am on a Friday?

If you’re going to run 240km alongside 49 of the most committed endurance runners in Australia on the first weekend in December, it’s helpful to have at least one person on the crew who knows what that distance feels like. It’s even better if they’ve done the same race themselves. To have 3 such runners on your crew, and for each of them to be a great mate (or girlfriend… or course recordholder) is ridiculously fortunate.

Dave Clear, Rob Mason, Jess Baker – you legends, thank you.

Starting line, Boydtown Beach 5:30am Friday 5/12/14

Like a joke that’s only funny to a handful of people, you just had to be there. It’s like a family reunion for ultrarunners, in the middle of almost nowhere and before the sun has even had a coffee. Random.

Let’s just say that I was next to Andrew Tuckey before the countdown finished and it looked like he didn’t mean to be standing still again anytime soon.

As we cruised through the bush I found myself ticking it over next to Pam Muston which was a nice way to start the day. Pam’s tough as nails. I took a photo of her toe in 2011 when she podiumed and it looked like a big red beer can. She trains by cutting lawns… big ones. She dropped some wisdom bombs on me early and I happily absorbed their insightful goodness.

“Day’s too short to waste having a whinge,” she beamed. Okay, I’m paraphrasing. But it’s ultra. That I can even remember that we had a conversation is a healthy sign. I wondered how wasting a day having a whinge might later apply to running with exploded organs and made a small promise to have an ironic giggle if that happened.

Our strides went in different directions after a while but this would be the longest I’d run with someone for the whole race. Jumping aboard the Shabadabadoodoo-AdamConnor-Bendall Express, conversation took an early turn toward the weird and wonderful subject matter that distance runners come up with after hours in the wilderness. With barely 20km yet done we were ahead of schedule and the laughter was contagious.

There’s a couple of climbs on the course.

Justin Scholz declared his ambition to run the whole way from Jindabyne to Charlotte Pass and trotted off chirpily around this point too. Having previously managed that only in training on fresh legs myself, I suspected he’d do it after 184km, while quietly wishing the same for myself.

Big Jack, 56 – 63km, around 1pm

Big Jack’s the first proper marker for the day, a time to check in with your body and make sure everything’s still limber. If you can’t go comfortably up a long hill at this point in the run, you’re going to have an interesting weekend hereafter. We were still on the climb when the first rain started to kick in. It took the edge off the humidity. Even though the day hadn’t been too hot, the air had been thick with an expectation of storms. It was the kind of casual soup that has all your running gear wet in the first hour from sweat.

Heading up Big Jack with crewman Dave. In 2012 I ran most of Big Jack because I thought it was the strong thing to do, but I paid hard for it later. This year, we walk-beasted it.

There was an unhurried change from trail shoes (Challenger ATR) to Hoka OneOne Bondi 4s at the top of the hill. Barely 30 hours before the race, I’d arrived back in Sydney on a weather-delayed flight from Melbourne and driven a 200km round trip in the middle of the night to pick up a set of these newly arrived bad boys. Conveniently, crewman Rob had the same size feet as me and had broken them in while I was running – not that they needed it. The softness was like strapping on baby hovercraft made of panda. Headphones in, away we went again.

This section’s great with heaps of open running, plenty of rolling gravelly road that snakes its way over the next rise and off into the middle distance.

Grabbing a drink off Rob, in my box fresh baby pandas. Hoka! Hoka! Hoka! pic by Kieron Blackmore

The rain just got heavier and heavier over the next couple of hours. At about 80km, crossing the Monaro Highway, I got to see my mate Lisa Spink out on course at the road crossing as well as Race Director Paul Every, both there to keep us safe. We had a great chuckle, Lisa properly forecasting that the nastier conditions got the more fun I’d be having. It’s nice to feel understood!

Lisa was surrogate Diane this year, Diane being the other half of the RD team. This was the first C2K Di hadn’t been on course for and she was greatly missed. The team did an awesome job, though, and all the first-timers probably didn’t know what they were missing. Di, we hope you’re there in 2015! We all know it wouldn’t be Coast2Kosci without your work behind the scenes all year. And Lisa, you better be there again in 2015 too, running or event producing – great job!

Weather, rather than distance, became the guideline for courses of action at this point. Rather than going on to The Dead Tree, the next significant marker and perhaps 15km further on at 103km, we ran through the edge of the storm and then changed shoes and socks again.

This was because it was still early in the piece. The one thing that you can’t run without is good feet. Only on races of 15 hours or longer do you see how they can really come apart. The skin gets wet and wrinkles as it absorbs plain water that crosses the tissues, attracted by the body’s natural salts. If the skin dries out in a still wet environment, it stays wrinkled and twisted, deformed and inelastic. The sensation of running on these becomes like a burning torture with every step. Even when the guts and quads are good to go, this is a joy-crusher and best avoided.

Hopefully some newbie ultra runner is reading this and thinking “hmm, so footer is important”

Switching into dry socks and dry shoes, the plan was to let the skin dry out and properly treat it before hitting the next storm front. I also switched in a fresh canula for insulin delivery as the heavy downpour had made the current one begin to look for a way out.

Checking the weather maps as we continued to make good progress, the crew came back with news that sounded like we were in for a 10-hour deluge right through to Jindabyne overnight. It made me feel happy to know that we were all up for it. There wasn’t a sign of dread from the team.

A quick snap at The Dead Tree with the crew and some great mates – Jane & Blue Dog – we left Adam Connor behind making race weight in a ditch, which was a much more respectful body movement than the putz who peed on the tree. The Dead Tree is a monument to Aussie ultra, and to everyone who has fought the long fight. I’m not much for relics or religious symbols, but The Dead Tree’s definitely no place for an ignorant wiz. Crews, take note. And runners, school your support, please.

Gotta love the Dead Tree

Snowy River Way, 107km, about 6:30pm

Light was still good as we hit the long stretch of sealed road and headed left. We’d been getting updates from internet and other crews throughout the afternoon, and knew that Andrew Tuckey had gone through here with a solid lead over the front runners almost 4 hours earlier. Even knowing the guy’s a quality runner and committed to his training with form to burn, it was hard to imagine that someone could put away over 100km in 9 hours and still have a full tank for the 140km ahead. Just incredible.

Really stable blood sugars within a functional range were as important as good feet.

Keeping moving while the rain held off, we only made it another few km before the fat droplets started. The crew pulled off to the left and I crossed over. Ushering me into the back seat, they copped a drenching while I got stuck into the foot situation. Everything was healthy, the plan to run dry had worked perfectly, but now we were expecting a full night of rain through both the major checkpoints between here and the 200km mark.

Taping the balls of the feet with Leukoplast Athlete tape (recommended for anyone looking at footcare), I took the unusual step of spraying Blistop all over to set up a layer of artificial skin, then swiped Gurney Goo onto the toe webbings, tape, and most likely friction areas before socking up, lubing up, changing into the awesome European Hoka athlete top that had been a special gift from a friend, chucking on the AyUps and heading back into the filth. Poor crew were soaked by this point I’m sure but never mentioned it. They were just glad to get the smell of new shoes out of the car, as they’d been dedicatedly driving along with them in front of the car heater to get them dry for me. Legends.

There was a conga line of runners on the road ahead now, which was a good sign that the first few hours of night would definitely not get dull.

Making good steady pace and focussing on a quicker turnover rather than sliding into the ultra shuffle, time and kms ticked over. Soon it was 8:30 and time for a pacer to join the fun. Jess jumped into the mix and as we ran together we put together some time goals. Dalgety – the 147km mark – by 12:30 seemed a reasonable goal. Coast2Kosci laughs at plans. There’s absolutely no point fixating on time goals early on because they’ll thrill or disappoint without any real value. The run is long enough with that much still to happen that running to feel is key for the first 100-150km. A ballpark time for major markers is handy, but everything really happens after Dalgety, and most of that after Jindabyne.

Another legend of Australian ultramarathon, both as a runner and race director, Andy Hewat, aka Whippet, had checked in with me in his role as both race medic and friend as we ran past Rocky Hall, 6 hours in at the 50km mark.

His parting words then were, “it’s all about the night”. As we ran now into the proper black darkness, I hoped that the sleep disruption practise of staying awake and sleeping little in San Francisco 3 weeks before, caffeine resensitisation detox, and generally juicy feeling I had now would all work in our favour over the unpredictable hours ahead.

Deb Nicholl! Should have mentioned her by now too, another badass ultra legend, but she’s so speedy I don’t think I even saw her at the start. Vrroom.

Seeing the short documentary of crewman Rob’s race the previous year had also been a good gee-up. Astoundingly, Rob had hit Dalgety as night fell at just before 9pm, on his way to a ballistic 28:21 finish. Watching Rob’s video, it was amazing to see just how well he kept moving for almost the entirety of his race. I’d had the same inspiration pacing Jess the year before with Nikolay Nikolaev, the Bulgarian Painkiller, when she had set the women’s course record by moving smoothly and running consistently well for almost the entire run.

Running through a full 24-hour day and beyond, whatever the distance, is daunting. That’s a given. It’s only when you let that sense of dread or anxiety creep in and displace that sense of why you’re doing it in the first place – because it’s extreme, awesome, challenging and exciting fun with good mates – that the idea of the distance, rather than just the physical impact of the distance itself, becomes an additionally fatiguing weight to try to carry on an increasingly brittle body. Long story short – no brain, less pain!

Before we knew it, we were in amongst it. We seemed to be passing someone new every half hour. Rob had been packed into the back seat with instructions to sleep but decided that if he wasn’t running water, Tailwind, or Red Bull across the road to us, then he should probably be cheering. As much as Dave Graham would have probably appreciated another offsider, with his own crewman working solo (unbelievable!), I was glad to have all 3 of my support in the mix. It was kind of funny to get a drive by every 20 minutes or so, with some big excited kid shouting, “woohoo, yeah! This is wi-cked!” When he gave up trying to sleep because he was too excited, he’d come leaping across the road bearing a torch and hydration and confer with Jess while I just ran on, trying to make her work a bit harder to catch me up each time. Catching me up is no effort for Jess, but the idea kept me entertained.

Brick went by. A good mate, he cheered “you’re flying”. I wanted to run with him but also knew that when the legs feel good, it’s time to go. Unbelievably, we soon ran up to Jo Blake too. This was surreal. Jo is an utter bloody ultra legend and set the longest standing course record on Coast2Kosci. Even as we ran briefly with him it was clear that he wasn’t having his best day, he said so himself. But it felt like passing Kilian. Even if Kilian was blindfolded and missing a leg, catching him on a run would still be an OMG moment. We ran by Annabel Hepworth next, another of Aussie ultra’s larger-than-life characters.

By now I’d asked Jess to handle communications. It felt like I was quickly losing the brain cell necessary to run and talk at all. Even between the two of us running together alone in the dark, if I couldn’t process conversation without it feeling like an effort, it all came down to one signifying word, “zone”. Shorthand for “in the zone” this meant, “thanks so much for sacrificing your weekend to be out here on this awesome adventure with me. I’m really sorry to ask for total silence but the simple act of listening or thinking about anything other than the next step or next mouthful right now is crippling my ability to stay IN THE ZONE”. I’m pretty sure at some point I was running with a big strand of drool out one side of my mouth but who cared – we were running.

Dalgety, 147km, in around 12:15, out about 10 minutes and a bunch of lube later.

At Dalgety it was great to again see our mates Graham and Marie. Her race had been scuttled by pneumonia so together they’d jumped on board as event support, simply magnifying the already brilliant event team.

Another surprise at Dalgety was Andrew Layson from Berowra Bushrunners. This guy has had a cracking year, putting on a tonne of pace and stamina and bagging himself a seriously strong Great North Walk 100-miler. Again, a runner I wouldn’t have expected to see much after Eden but like many, the wet conditions had probably caused a bit of chafing misery. Rob jumped in to pace me after Jess’ turbo section and we caught up to Andrew working uncomfortably a few km later.

Rob sprayed enthusiasm all over me as we ticked over more miles. It was hard not to smile, but at the same time his experience also told him when to run with me in silent solidarity. When are you ever in the middle of nowhere with a mate making sure you’re fed and watered as you run peacefully toward a distant unknowable goal under a stormy night sky? Love C2K!

The race – and it’s still really a race against the course, and a race to finish – starts at Dalgety. The rolling section to Jindabyne at the 184km mark is mostly downhill, but the next beasty climb is lying in wait at 162km, the bottom of the Biloka Range. We hit this beast just after 3:30am. Dave jumped out to go up with me and Jess and Rob drove to the top of the hill, only a few km but likely an hour away. This was also where the first proper batch of sleep monsters made their move. Suddenly you’re taking 15 minutes to travel one lousy kilometre, and you’re zigzagging enough that your pacer’s role isn’t just to lug your drinks, but to keep you from waltzing into the road.

There are definitely moments going up Biloka when it all feels a bit challenging. The angle of the climb and the weak progress of the feet collide, bringing the runner to a near-standstill. You hover, halfway into the next pace, thinking “I could just stop here”, before reminding yourself that this will only take a lot longer if you do. However badly time dragged on, eventually we were over the lip and moving with a bit less zombie. Rob jumped back in and we had a great moment or several.

“Rob, I reckon I should have a lie down. Just 10 minutes. What do you think?”

“Well, yeah, you could do that. What do you reckon 10 minutes is going to do for you?”

“(pause)…. F___ all?”

“Yeah.”

And that’s how he got me through the first great Should I Have A Liedown Crisis of C2K 2014. Thanks Rob!

As it does on long stuff, the Tired Crisis soon made way for the Heave Crisis. I’d made it close to 24 hours on just concentrated Tailwind flavourless sports drink and water, with regular packets of Vespa amino concentrate, a couple of gels, and some Red Bull. Everything had been perfect except for one earlier patch of belly slosh. Now, from the effort, time on feet, fatigue, I had that feeling that I might want a throw-up reset. The trouble with that is that you never know what’s on the other side. It may be a perfectly balanced stomach, ready to start afresh. Or it might just be more of the same, and that can be disastrous, especially with 70km still to go.

As I zigzagged off over the side of the road again, Rob went to have a chat to the crew and I nearly took care of business myself with a quickfire finger down the throat. Before I could act, Jess saved the day by yelling out “cheese & crackers!”

It’s not the leading edge of sports nutrition, it’s barely even food. I suspect they’ll survive a nuclear war, but damned if a Le Snak didn’t save my life. Thank you plastic cheese!

With something to work on other than itself, my stomach settled back down and we could get on with the business off feeling like Jindabyne was still a bloody long way away.

Carpark before Jindabyne checkpoint, 183km, about 6:40am

Wanted to share this view of Lake Jindy with the crew but wasn’t quick enough. Maybe next time…

Coming over the long hill down into Jindabyne, hopes of seeing sunrise from the other side of the lake had evaporated but without having been too attached to them it didn’t feel like any real loss. Instead we had a very short and underwhelming party at the top of the hill, acknowledging the beauty of the view laid out below us and feeling pretty good to be where we were by daybreak. Pounding down the hill, it was time for another toilet stop, the final lube (get it done!) and a shoe change.

Rob pulled out some unexpected surgical skills when I unsheathed an unexpected blister. A clear sack had formed around a callous of hardened skin under one little toe, like a nasty pearl around a grain of unwanted sand. I’d long since given up trying to exercise any judgment, with crew making the basic decisions around eating and drinking and now minor surgery. Like a speedy podiatrist, Rob had it drained and dressed in no time. We put it away under a fresh pair of socks and now the Cliftons. Superstitiously and practically, it was the same set of everything I’d had on my feet when I’d had my best training run of the year from this same location to Charlotte Pass, 38km away up 30km of hill climbing – exactly what we had to get done now.

We hit the checkpoint and headed downhill to Thredbo River. Jess ran with me while Rob and Dave went in search of hot chips. Even when you can only get about 10 of these down on a long run, it’s still a complete breakfast.

We crossed paths briefly with Trevor Allen, a multiple finisher and Australian rep known for his pacing. At least once, Trevor has won the first 50km only to later end up passed out in the street at Dalgety. But he can run. Not having seen him in action before, I thought his tactic of bursting about 80 metres ahead up a solid climb then dropping to a walk, and repeating, would bring him undone. But soon I forgot about whatever he was doing, needing to apply all my focus to my own progress. The only motivation now was the sporadic smell of extremely ripe roadkill, which only eases when you push on through and past it. Aussie roads are really rough on native wildlife, but hilly ones are worse. Don’t believe me? Hike from Jindy to Charlotte…

The climb to Perisher is tough on the legs, no doubting it. But it’s even tougher on the head if you’re not ready for its endlessness. Again, we stayed positive. There could have been more running on this section but we still put in good rundowns on the friendly inclines and a good bit of the flat. The climbs started to really add up, but it was the weather that smashed us again. Getting into Smiggins, the rain was coming down like buckets and bathtubs were being dumped on us. Rob rated the rain as pretty heavy once he could see it bouncing above knee level. I felt the temperature of my feet plunge close to freezing as tiny bullets of hail pelted us and the overall air temp seemed also to drop sharply.

Snapped from the simple focus of going forward, I looked up ahead to see Rob running back and forth across the flooding road in his shorts and big wet jacket, from the car to a roadside shelter and then to the building where a number of the support vehicles for the surrounding tourism industries were sheltered. He came running back and ushered us in to the building after finding out what gear I wanted. It was time for fleeces, gloves and Goretex, definitely.

The lobby we ducked into had a grill floor, like a ski locker. A woman named Sue (thank you Sue, you’re our hero) came out to make sure we were okay. As Jess and Dave told her what we were all doing – running 240km – her jaw dropped. As much as she thought we were frickin’ crazy to be running in this storm, she was in awe that runners were currently out on course and running such a long way.

As nice as it was to be inside and warm and dry, we also knew that time was passing and that the longer we were comfortable the harder it would be to get out again. Even the rainpants got deployed, mainly for the sake of keeping some body warmth. If you want to put on something that’s not conducive to running, try rainpants.

It would later turn out that we copped Perisher’s average monthly December rainfall in just one afternoon. This really was the one point in the run when I’m ashamed to admit that I thought, “I hope it’s the short course”. The Short Course is the version of Coast2Kosci where you get stopped at the Charlotte Pass carpark before you can ascend Mt Kosciuszko and return to the finish line, 9km each way. While 222km is still a long way, when you’ve come so far, nobody wants to be told it’s over before they have visited the summit.

As we crested the lip of Perisher Valley, a lightning bolt hit the top of Mt Perisher and seemed to dance across it for 3 seconds before fading sharply.

Going to the highest point on the landscape in this? Yeah baby!

I’d had a bit of a twanging right hamstring since 160km and even now with long gentle downhills, my lack of pace was getting on my nerves a bit. The camber of the road on C2K is actually pretty tough on the body. There are long sections where it’s almost impossible to find a flat line. If at the same time you’re trying to cycle through different muscle combinations by changing your gait slightly to rest the body parts that have worked hardest, even on a smooth rolling section of the course it can be hard to make constant progress. But steady progress and a finish is better than getting out of touch with what your body needs and smashing it to pieces. Finishers’ cars were coming back past us at this point. One way in, one way out, it’s a strange parade to the summit as the finishing times can spread across anything from 15 to 22 hours.

Now just a few km to Charlotte, Brendan Davies and his crew drove past us. After a gutsy sub-7 100 in Qatar just a couple of weeks beforehand, he’d taken his place on the start line and given it a crack but just not had the run of his life. Still, he’d gutsed it out and even with a 2-hour nap bagged a low 30-hour finish most ultrarunners would eat their shorts for, and done it with massive heart.

The procession continued as Charlotte got closer and closer until finally there were no more bends and we were there. Normally, this section of the race is an opportunity to appreciate fantastic Scottish scenery, with sparkling brooks and low-lying tundra, you half expect to see a whiskey distillery with a slowly turning waterwheel. But not this time. By virtue of pounding rain, it had been a pretty focussed affair. Now in the tent at the finish line, we regrouped and prepared for our final effort. Dave Graham had come in off the course having just finished and looked about as close to not smiling as I’ve ever seen him. “Yeah,” he confirmed Andy Hewat’s warnings just outside the medical tent, “it’s pretty cold up there”. Gratefully I borrowed a pair of Andy’s overpants, switched into trail shoes, and we were off and racing. Well, walking purposefully at least. It was just after 1:30 and we had less than 3 hours to hit our 35-hour time goal.

Charlotte Pass 222km, about 1:30 Saturday afternoon

I’d had a blood sugar of about 3.0 in the carpark which Jess took as an opportunity to feed me a 100mg caffeine gel. I’d been staying away from caffeine as I just didn’t want anything setting my guts off again, but this cunningly fired gel got me back in The Zone. Then she stuffed more cheese and potato chip sandwiches in my face. And another Red Bull.

My lack of food intake over the preceding 3-4 hours had my crew a little concerned, so they’d resorted to clever manoeuvres like walking beside me eating the food themselves, “Gee these chips are tasty. Wow these ginger snaps are great. This Red Bull’s so refreshing.” It was smart crewing – thanks guys.

As a mountain biker in full safety gear came the other way, I straightfaced asked, “Can we please borrow your bike?” Somewhat startled, he gurned us and blurted, “No!” He hurtled past us into the mist, never to be seen again, but for about 10 minutes we laughed our way through a series of questions that had only one answer.

“Excuse me, do you like monosyllabic words?”

“No!”

“The opposite of ‘off’ spelt backwards is…”

“No!”

“Do you think sarcasm is suitable for use in public?”

“No!”

Meanwhile Dave had blasted ahead of the pack, leading to his being named ‘Norman’. Oh yes, it was all very professional on our way to the summit.

This is what Seaman’s Hut, 3km from the summit, looks like when it’s visible from more than 15 metres away and isn’t full of hypothermic school kids.

When we’d come through here last year, a freak snowfall the night before had meant deep snowdrifts covering the trail 4km from the top amounted to 8km of thick snow to run through and across. There was none of that this year, just rain and cold and hearty adventurers like Phil Murphy coming past us on their final return looking like they’d been somewhat traumatised by the whole thing. Dave Graham not smiley? Spud looking tired? What the hell was going on up there?

Soon we saw Trevor again, on his way back down and looking strong, then Jared the American and Sam Weir, no longer rocking the trademark tri suit – or maybe he’d just had to throw survival gear over it.

One last chance for a major injury!

Boom, summit – yes! With just the 4 of us, we had to take turns being in the obligatory plinth photo. After sitting on it for the photo in 2012 I was determined to stand on it this time round. This was not as easy as it might have been, and I definitely had mental pictures of falling off it playing in my head, to an ironic laugh track and golf claps. Pulling off rainpants and passing them to the guys it was time to take whatever was left and run with it. Nikolay had sent the message that if I could still stand up at Charlotte then I hadn’t gone hard enough.

Squats are awesome if you’re into…um… squatting.

Even though it felt fast, I’m pretty sure we didn’t get much over 8km/h until the final couple of kilometres. Here, we turned 800m intervals into 400m intervals, then 200s, then who knows what. Rob kindly said he couldn’t keep up with me but I’m sure that’s just because I’d dumped all my gear on him to carry. Last year we’d raced down here with Jess and she’d blown me up on her way to chasing down Julia Fatton’s course record. I don’t know what I was chasing but I just wanted us to get there as soon as possible. Always one bend more, always a little further. Then a frickin’ 4-wheel drive sitting right up our butts, which would later turn out to be a hypothermia evacuee. Thanks Jane! A high 5 with the awesome Lisa Spink again and then wild animal noises as I tried to fire up for just a couple more minutes to hit that feted finish line.

Thanks for the finish line pics – Brett Saxon

Jess and Rob only told me later in the tent that it was a 34:48 finish – stoked! I’d wanted to go better than the 35:12 from Sakura Michi in April. Even though Sakura Michi is a 250km run, it doesn’t have the degree of climb or temperature variability that makes C2K a more physically tough run. Then again, C2K doesn’t have 2,000 cherry blossoms in bloom or 1,000 of the most awesome Japanese race volunteers you could ever meet :). I was bouncing off the walls just a bit with happiness, so much so that I didn’t realize the meeting I bounced into under the trunk of Brett Saxon’s van was a serious one, as Paul and the event team conferred over safety concerns and how best to manage the worsening conditions.

Coast2Kosci is Australia’s most audacious ultramarathon. In an age of social emasculation as The Lucky Country becomes The OH&S Country, with character and common sense being replaced by social conservatism and over-regulation, it’s not only wonderful but necessary that this race continues in its current form. It’s tough but proper that the race directors need to not only consider runner safety but event conservation when they make decisions to close the course, as they had to this year and as they have previously. Especially when there is a National Parks directive to follow – even though it never makes it easier on event staff or runners – there simply isn’t room for push and pull over what happens next. Michael Mcgrath and all the other event staff did a top job managing the event with the best possible outcomes in mind.

Congratulations to all runners and crews and especially, thank you to all of you – Paul, Diane, Lisa, Andrew, Keith, Brett, Nick, David, Michael, and everyone I’ve missed – your sacrificed time and effort throughout the year and especially closer to race time, makes our experience as runners and crew an incomparable one. We hope you all go away from Coast2Kosci with an indelible and unique experience that you can also rate as unquestionably worth it.

See you next year!

C2K Class of 2014: it’s all about the Akubras! pic courtesy of Dave Graham

I’ve been thinking about getting this blogging thing going again. On the one hand, friends who write well inspire you to get back into the practise. On the other, when they’re doing it so well, it’s good enough reason to share theirs instead :)

To be fair, on top of being a great host and a good friend (who I’ve now actually hung out with – yay!) Jill’s a published author whose books Be Brave, Be Strong, Ghost Trails, and 8,000 Miles Across Alaska are all quality reads for fans of adventure and extreme endurance.

So here’s Jill’s latest post from Jill Outside. She sums our weekend up nicely – except for the unsatisfied bit. To run again with my friend Beat, to finally meet Jill off the internet, to get sweaty biking then sweaty running, even with the race being cancelled on the Sunday with short notice – I had a blast. Thanks guys!

Jill tells it better here.

Fun was had

Tor Des Géants is a single-stage mountain run easily reduced to numbers – 330km, 24,000m D+, 200 miles, 80,000 feet, 850 starters, 6 life bases, time – but that is not the story of the Tor at all. It is a beautiful adventure, composed of a number of steep climbs, high passes, and sharp descents that will all quite happily break you if you’re not in The Zone.

With a field that at some points must have been spread across 150km, everyone’s experience must be sharply different, however much there may also be in common. With finishers being spread from 200km right to the finish line when this year’s race was ultimately shut down on the morning of the 4th day because of weather hazards, a 2015 ‘finish’ will mean different things for different people. For me, the 205km mark was not deep enough in at all, and I hope to return in 2016 for the full 200 miles.

Even with the premature closure of the race, it was still my longest time on feet and at 15,000m D+ it was also the greatest amount of climbing and descending I have yet done. But I wish we’d been able to finish what we started. Most of us were utterly psyched for it.

This is where it all started, the weekend in Utah in 2011 when I met Beat and he ruined my illusions that you could become a total badass by running just 100 miles, by telling me about the 200-miler he’d just done. Damn it.

I first heard about the TDG in 2011 when I met Swiss-American Beat Jegerlehner (pronounced ‘Dingle Manhammer’). A mutual friend put us together on a hire car booking from Salt Lake City to the Slick Rock Ultra a few hours away in the Moab Desert, as we were hitting the same airport just 5 minutes apart. Back then, as I prepared for my first 100-miler, the idea that people were running 200-milers filled me with awe and some envy. With such a focus on the distance I didn’t even tune into the elevation gain – a whopping 24,000 metres for an average gradient of 14% across the entire course – until finally entering the run of a lifetime earlier this year.

now THAT’s an elevation profile.

Since then, it has meant training based entirely in the pursuit of increasingly longer steep bits, repeated. 

Right up until one Sunday just 10 days ago when I stood in that starting group in the town of Courmayeur, alongside my speedy partner Jess Baker, my excellent friend Beat Jegerlehner, and about 840 other runners on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, waiting for what felt like the biggest starting line moment of my life.

At the starting line with Jess, and some umbrellas.

This is not going to be that ‘and then I ate a delicious gel’ kind of crappy write-up I hope. This is a broad overview with some details from my version of TDG 2015. Big picture is that this race through incredible alpine country takes you over about 18 passes for an average climb and descent of 1300 metres each BUT that doesn’t tell the story.

Where were we? Standing on the start line with two awesome friends, charging through the town to the clanging of cowbells and calls of ‘bravi, bravi!’. Hitting the first climb and wondering whether I could do this just long enough to remember I would just have to repeat the first climb – or its equivalent – 15 more times, once it was done. Newsflash: mud. Loads of it. For a bit over 3 hours we stomped in a zigzag up to the first pass, slopping and squelching. Over the lip and to the beginning of the first descent, perspective distorted completely. The ground seemed to bank uphill to the left and right and rise like a wall straight ahead, but runners were rapidly descending across all surfaces.

Photobombing Senatori Jegerlehner right at the start, my work here is done.

Adrenaline was master of ceremonies still but the brain was trying to get involved as well, with reminders to play the classic game – run the flats, don’t melt on the downhills, maintain progress uphill, get some food in, get some drink in, don’t make an inattentive mistake, don’t get stabbed with a pole, don’t fall over, repeat.

As we ran in the rain and slipped and slopped about a bit in the mud, the squelching resonated with my state of being. I’d taken Immodium just before the race started with my guts conveniently turning all brown river just the afternoon before. Perfect. This wasn’t to be fatal, but it would certainly be a dragged out theme I could have done without.

The next climb led to Rifugio Deffeyes, the mountain refuge at 2500m before Haut Pas, the first high climb of the race at 2850m. The Rifugio was where I’d stayed a couple of times in the preceding weeks, testing gear and picking up some local knowledge. Jess had also met the team there, Alessio the punk rocker, Sergio the house operator, and the cook whose HOKA Rapa Nui had done only 200km on trail but 300km in the kitchen – his awesome one-liner, not mine :)

Rifugio Deffeyes posse

It seems crazy to be happy with hitting the 23km mark in around 6 hours, but with the conga line running out of Courmayeur and successive steep climbs and over 300km still to go, we were really still just queueing to start. Alessio grabbed me some soup and gave me the news that Jess had been through almost an hour before. He showed me a photo of her looking typically happy and sorting out her water. I stopped here to eat properly because I felt like I had actually dipped into my legs a bit harder than I’d have wanted to. Energy levels might not have been completely divorced from digestive issues, but at least my blood sugar levels were in line with requirements and insulin was working fine even though it had also been on the road for a couple of weeks.

High 5s, excited whooping noises and all that usual stuff that happens when ultra-friends farewell each other, and off again into the mysterious mountains. Every climb past 2500m, I would feel like a 6-cylinder engine running on 4. But again, climbing up to Haut Pas I just reminded myself what I’d done in training. Find something that’s hard, do it the best you can without breaking, repeat. Soon, the pass would give way to a fast downhill across rubble and mud along a boulder-lined gully and into a wide open green valley. Giant sharply angled walls plunged dramatically down around us from the clouds above and with the sun now beginning to break through where there had only been rain, some stupid grinning now came not just from the fact that this was it and we were all actually running Tor Des Géants, but from the bonus fact that we were running through a postcard in a place only a few people would ever have seen for themselves.

The memorial to a Chinese runner who died in a freak accident in 2013. Reading this at dusk in the mist was an eerie experience.

Until I made it to Valgrisenche, the lifebase at 48km, the most remarkable thing about Valgrisenche had been the 5km of very runnable terrain beforehand. But when I got there, the even bigger, better surprise was that Majell Backhausen who I’d only met weeks before at UTMB (where he finished top 25, speedster!) was jumping in to help me out. He’d pulled up to me earlier at one of the checkpoints and grabbed me some water, but to help an endurance athlete sorting through night clothing, wet gear, food, batteries, and all that other crap we need to keep going for days on end is a big deal. And he knew what I needed to think about, which was a massive help.

Majell, legending it up at the first lifebase. Hilariously he even interrupted his spontaneous helping to offer to grab soup and drink for other runners coming in. Seriously nice guy.

Valgrisenche is a crazy life base. It’s totally crowded and it’s almost as though there is one onlooker for every runner in the entire race. The buzz is great, it’s exciting, but colour and movement is not what you need. You need to eat, drink, make sure you have all your good stuff for the night, and get out. Majell told me what we’d suspected, that there was snow on Fenetre – the next big pass. It made up my mind to ditch my light OMM shell for the heavier TNF Summit Series Gore-Tex. This was a good call, because the pleasantly grey and soggy conditions we were experiencing in the lowlands were no indication of what was to come.

The next time that I would spend more than half an hour at any kind of checkpoint wouldn’t be so glamorous but I thanked Majell and his fellow running journo Natalie and headed out again into the night. Nothing felt like too much effort as the trail climbed steadily away from town and back up into the surrounding mountainside. Not having really checked my map – the course marking is phenomenal – it was a nice surprise to see a glowing wooden cabin up ahead. Ducking out of the cold wet to grab a sweet tea and some water, I nearly walked out without my hiking poles. We all laughed at that one. Leaving your poles behind anywhere here would be a massive error.

And now things got interesting. It might have been around midnight on the first night. My feet and I had been anywhere from wet to soaked for the last 14 hours, and we were heading up the first of 3 gnarly climbs. From the 50km to the 100km mark at Tor Des Geants, there are 3 climbs with maximum elvations ranging from 2,850m to 3,300 and a cumulative ascent of roughly 6,000m. Partway up the first of those climbs in the middle of the night, things were only getting more extreme.

The clear days we had had in the lead to the Tor, with their million mile views, were nothing like what was to come. But at least we were expecting carnage, and ready for it. We thought.

Feeling the altitude start to kick in, I knew we were at least above 2,500m. It’s the special place where I find everything starts to get just a little bit harder. And then I felt an added bonus, a complete drop in energy levels. I wasn’t sure if it was just your standard runner depletion or an insulin-related blood sugar drop. But it was bloody cold, and I wasn’t going to waste effort pulling out either of my glucose meters to see what was happening. Besides, the air had just exploded in flashes of light and rolling banging as the sky above turned to lightning. I wasn’t even interested now whether the roaring sound all around was a flowing river, rising wind, or a low-flying jet. This just had to get done. Now. Up ahead I aimed for a rock beside the trail, parked my arse on it, and tried to get to my food.

Normally, with or without gloves, getting hold of a Snickers bar would be a task achievable by a child. But I had lost all feeling in my fingers. What I had were 10 lifeless neoprene-encased sausages without the power to grip anything. Shit was getting real. Knowing this chocolate bar would fuel me through whatever was about to happen I had to get hold of it somehow. With my head down, I used the back of my hand to push up against the bottom of my top pocket. Out came a small laminated map, which I grabbed between my teeth, dropped into a waiting palm, and scooped into my jacket pocket. First, though, I grabbed a finger and bit down on it hard. I didn’t feel the bite, I just tasted something cold and neoprene-flavoured. Next, a laminated timetable, teeth, palm, pocket. Finally, the Snickers. If you have never felt the threat of a total bonk or had a blood sugar lower than your ankles then you might not relate, but that was the best chocolate bar in the history of anything ever. Even though my custom-etched HOKA Mafate Speeds were trailrunning shoes woven from the pubic hair of angels, if they came back as chocolate bars, even they could not taste as good. Licking the last cold crumbs from my lips, I lurched off the rock and joined the stream of lemmings ahead of me. We were all headed for the same climb, the same storm, the same potential disaster. Game on.

Jess having so much fun that she’s dried up all the rain and brought the sunshine. Actually, this might have just been much later in the race, and during the daytime.

I thought briefly of Jess and assumed she was at least one mountain ahead of us on Col Entrelor at 3,000m, possibly even on Col Loson, at 3,300m. It occurred to me that even with the altitude and lightning all around her, she would have her race-face on, and it helped me to do what needed to be done – left foot, right foot.

Soon it started to hail, only it wasn’t hail – snow. Big fat flakes landing on my gloves, just a few at first, and then one ongoing diagonal flurry. All I was thinking was that once I got over the next pass, we would descend to warmer air, more oxygen, maybe even coffee. Just got to get this done first. In the dark, there were lights ahead and lights behind. Some weaving from the sleepy staggers but most now intent on getting the hell out of here, and there was only one way that would happen – climbing.

Every hill in TDG works pretty much the same – it begins to climb, then gets steep for a long time, then gets really, really steep, and then descends. My friend had given me this formula beforehand and it took a lot of the unpleasant surprise out of the race for me. So when the mountain tipped up even more, I felt good. We were actually moving forward. I had been through the whole, ‘how high? 2480m. Now how high? 2485m. Seriously? Now how high? 2486m.’ thing earlier on and was not going back into that unproductive space. We just had to get over this bastard and start descending. Shows how much I knew.

We got to the top, passing the cairn – a pile of rocks – with the name-plate and elevation on it. Nobody stopped for photos, nobody took a selfie. Everyone had a couple of inches of snow on their packs, it was insanely cold, the weather was still building, and it felt like we were keeping just out of reach of a survival situation. But now for the first big shock of the run – this is the descent?

If you want to see how fast Europeans can run down a mountain, throw a minus-10 blizzard at them. I went over the crest with about 20 runners spread over 200 metres. Within about 30 seconds, all I could see was rapidly disappearing torches glowing far away and almost directly beneath me at what seemed an impossible 60-degree incline. While I carefully placed each footfall on the narrow zig-zagging strip of slippery clay mud under my feet that had until recently been a trail, they simply made friends with gravity and fled like goats. The runner cresting near me called out ‘this is very dangerous’ in a French accent, while I half-whooped in celebration of the fact that we were at least now headed lower. But even as we got just a bit further below the apex, where the trail wasn’t slushy snow, it seemed to fill and flow like a newly born creek, growing as we got lower. Part of me thought to step over the edge and leap and slide from trail to trail, but there was a feeling that if momentum took hold at all, you’d be half a kilometre down the mountainside before you could even think of stopping.

This was the adventure we’d come for. This was extreme. And there was no turning back. There was only going forward, downward, out of this storm, as fast as possible. Every now and again, one of the lights getting further and further away below me would turn around to look briefly upward, then continue their rapid descent. ‘I’ll be that guy soon’ I told myself, even though every piece of progress felt so slow and inconsequential, with the sides of the mountain now gushing running water and the sound of its flow, and the wind all around.

With every moment stretched the time passed in a tangibly slow manner, even though it was all over in minutes and sure enough I was soon one of those lights looking back up the slope, to see that other lights were also steadily descending and in apparently good shape.

The long and switchbacked descent to Rhêmes-Notre-Dame (64.5km) took an age but when I got there it wasn’t yet 4am. As I filed into the room of what seemed a school hall with other soaked runners the volunteer ushering people threw the door asked me, ‘how was it?’.

It was a serious question, not casual, and I believe the organisation were asking all runners they could about the course conditions. We had been warned at the briefing the previous day to bring extra warm clothing because it would be ‘_____ing cold’ but I think everyone had been taken a bit by surprise in these conditions. When we were reunited, I would hear from Jess that the water which had collected inside her waterproof gloves had actually frozen hard enough that by the time she made it to her next checkpoint, helpers would pull her gloves off her hands, still literally frozen solid.

The scene at Rhêmes as we waited in wet unheated limbo.

‘It’s probably on its way to dangerous,’ I answered, ‘the river level is rising pretty quickly and parts of the track looked like washing out.’ He thanked me and moved on. Inside the room, some runners were grabbing food but mostly they were spread out around maybe eight long desks, seated on benches or with their heads resting on their hands. I moved toward one end of the room, looking for a bench after I’d smashed down some soup but a volunteer stepped across the door there, saying, ‘you can’t go out, the race is stopped for now’. I didn’t have any problem with not going out, I wanted to regroup a bit before I did anyway because I knew the next climb would be tougher. But the idea of the race being stopped was a shock. Edging my way into a seat, I pulled out my fleece – the one additional piece of warmth I had – and pulled it on over my wet thermal top and wet running shirt before throwing my wet jacket over the top and finishing the whole cold wet ensemble off with my new super-fleecy mildly hilarious HOKA beanie, with pom-pom. The French head office had sorted me out with some awesome gear generally reserved for real athletes, but I was just happy to be remotely warm right now.

The room murmured and grumbled about the race stoppage. Some runners looked relieved at the idea that this might be the end of their suffering. I could relate much more to those who looked deeply disturbed that this might all be over before it had even begun. Yes, we had more than 265km still to go. We hadn’t even got through the first 24 hours. And how ever long each of us might have trained for this, all of us had suffered very deliberately to get here. Nobody was throwing in the towel now.

Like the seated wet horde around me, I had also passed out on the table with my head on the back of my hands. This is an efficient way to sleep, in that it’s easily achieved and requires minimal preparation or tidy-up afterward. You don’t even have to do your shoes up. But that’s also a waste of a chance to dry. By the time a mate in Australia woke me with a phone call at close to 5:30 to ask what was happening, I had been sleeping in a shape like a kidney bean for nearly an hour, my feet and socks had been relatively wet for close to 20 hours, and I think half the blood in my body had stopped under the table at my knees. The call was a welcome distraction from the frustration and confusion of what was going on. It wasn’t a language barrier thing, I think even the Italian runners were a bit irritable. We had heard word of rockfalls and landslides out on course, but everything was still vague and there was not yet any word of when we might get going again, or even if we would.

Ancient ninja technique, Sleeping Hand.

Passing out again on my hands, trying not to waste the time available to sleep, I again awoke in a bit of a fuzz an hour later. Naturally, other runners roused as the first daylight crept into the cold room. And soon the announcement, ‘the race will begin again at 7 o’clock’. I looked at the screen of my Ambit. It was 7:02.

…continued from Part 1 of 3…

The room emptied in a quick if not fully sober fashion into the side alley and once again we were on the run, or hike. With an acute awareness that this might take another 100+ hours to get done, nobody was springing out of the blocks hard on cold legs. Even just a few minutes from where we’d spent the uncertain early hours of morning, we could look back and see the white-dusted mountains we had climbed and descended through the night before. In the first light of a blue-sky day, their calm beauty spoke little of the chaos and jeopardy just hours before.

The pass that nearly ate us.

Heading uphill once again it was time to stop and readjust layers, in the usual cycle of too cold to move – get moving – heat up too much – stop to shed layers – feel cold again – stuff it all in pack – get moving again. And of course the other cycle of stop another 80 metres up the track – dig around in bag – find lube – apply to chafed bits – stuff it back in bag – readjust to the left – get moving again.

Even at this early stage, a couple of entrants could be seen coming back down the track, looking like they’d forgotten something. Making eye contact to query what was up, their reply was just a shrug without slowing as they headed back to the checkpoint. To see people pulling out this early at the simple thought of a hill, or perhaps at the memory of rockfalls the night before, was a mixed moment. Yes, this is only going to get harder. There’s more of who-knows-what to come, and it’s a shame you’re not going to be there for it. But, then again, I’ve outlasted you. And even that gutless little coward of a voice, ‘do you wanna pull out?’. The reply was still pretty easy, ‘don’t be a dick, let’s go.’

As we came into a mountain-ringed valley there was some quick photo-taking. This was a stunningly beautiful morning. There was snow behind us, snow and two big climbs ahead of us, but we were here laughing in the sun after a night that exceeded expectations of ferocity, and it felt great.

Only once we hit this valley and turned left would we see what was ahead of us.

We were a conga line, runners stretched ahead and behind as the power hike revved its engine. Moving up a gentle slope contrary to the flow of the crystal river beside us, we tended left as the next valley revealed the joys it had in store for the morning. Col du Entrelor, a 3030m barrel of laughs we as yet had little idea about rose up in front of us, as similarly stunning snow-covered ridges moved behind us. Trudging a series of switchbacks, the day felt cold again as the wind steadily picked up and grey clouds moved in over the range behind us, soon to block the sun.

One of the remarkable things about alpine mountainscapes is how uniformly the snowline defines a particular altitude. We hit the straight edge of white at about 2400 metres, and shortly afterward the foot-and-a-half-wide trail we were moving along became sludge, then frosty sludge, and then more or less an inch-thick coating of ice with dirt and snow either side of it. We’d gone from Sound of Music to Mordor in under an hour. The higher you went, looking back every half hour or so to see how others were progressing, the less green or brown of grass would appear in your rear vision. Everything became white, grey, black.

Again, the oxygen depletion added to the challenge as the climb went higher, but the focus was on sure footing. As progress slowed and trains of runners came together to form one slow single file, a French runner heckled an Italian runner who was moving slowly just ahead of him. I interjected in a mess of French and English, encouraging him to be patient and let this other runner get across the slippery terrain. We’re all together in this and we would all get through it soon enough I told him. As we reached the final steepening of the climb, the shorter, chubbier French runner ducked around one side of the Italian and nimbly danced up an icy arrangement of overlaid rocks with a steep drop on one side. Meanwhile the Italian made his way slowly upward like a drunken grandma in shoes that had no grip whatsoever.

Looking back the way we’d come. Judge for yourself whether I was exaggerating when I said ‘steep’.

After about 5 minutes of queueing patiently behind this guy who’d come to a mountain race with no traction, we’d progressed maybe 50 metres to an area with room where the line of 8 of us might easily pass by. The option wasn’t offered. Instead he just spread his wobbling legs even wider. ‘It might be easier if we go by you here, hey?’ I suggested. ‘No,’ he replied, shuddering like a newborn baby giraffe in pink lycra capri, ‘is better you are all behind me in case I fall.’ Suddenly I understood the pissed-off Frenchman much better than I had just minutes before. Soon enough we picked our way across the last of the ascent, using dirt and snow for footholds where possible and ice when there was no other option.

The yellow pod has been helicopter-lifted up to the pass for the race. With 2,000 volunteers on course, runners spread across distances up to 150km, unpredictable alpine conditions, and support like this every 10-20km, Tor Des Géants has a lot of moving parts. Two big dudes with high level mountain skills hung out here in sub-zero conditions handing out tea. It’s the same shelter Jess had got to in the early hours of the night before, only to be told that the temperature was -15, as volunteers pulled her frozen-solid gloves from her hands.

An incredible sight appeared over the lip of the climb, a snow-ringed valley with even more jagged ridgelines defining the horizon. ‘That’s where we’re going, the highest one,’ said one runner as they passed next to me. Having the sense that at some time later today, we would be looking back to where we were now just as we were now looking forward to see where we would be gave me a fuzzy warm sense of Hakuna Matata. But let’s get out of here. Once again dropping past a helicopter-installed survival shelter with functioning stove, hardy Italian mountaineers, and a cauldron of hot, sweet fruit tea and icy cold Cokes, I was descending, ridiculing my optimism that these two badass climbs might be knocked over by lunchtime. Ha!

See that highest thing in the distance, the one closest to the left? That’s where we’re going.

There was still a natural sorting of the field to take place. Some of the runners either side of me had arrived a couple of hours into the last checkpoint after me, just as some had arrived an hour ahead. There’s no real point getting into conversation with someone who’s going to quickly pull away from you, or who might drag you back. The experience of the run was still the natural pacesetter, and descending when you don’t feel like you’re going to slide off the course and into space is a blast. Getting a bit of a trot on, it was easy to understand how runners might leave themselves useless by blowing the legs apart on the descending sections of Tor Des Géants. I pulled back, knowing that we’d get across these high altitude cow paddocks soon and have flatter trail to run and roll soon enough.

#colbaggers

And this was my next pleasant surprise. Once I could actually get any kind of running rhythm going, all I could feel was my lower guts shaking and lurching up, back, and forward like a half full bottle of cola on the run. European trail etiquette seemed to be all about not going directly on the trail, but at least – and using metric estimations – anywhere from 1 to 5 centimetres from where people might be walking or running. Gastric urgency was tempered by an ordinary degree of shyness, so it was another uncomfortable kilometre before I could drop duds and explode behind an apparently unused but certainly scenic traditional stone and tile building at the trailside. And yet some people seemingly won’t be happy until trailrunning is an Olympic sport. After a day and a half of Delhi belly, I already felt like I had five rings.

The descent continued, with an increasing amount of tall vegetation signalling that the turn upward must again come soon. This would be to the third of the three high passes, and shortly thereafter the 102km mark and our second life base. I could feel the soles of my feet moulding into a wrinkled asymmetry as they dried somewhat from the day before and the thought of fresh socks and shoes held an appeal that bordered on erotic, though not necessarily in any way that people outside endurance sports might hope to really understand.

Having already made a brief visit in clearer conditions, I was psyched to see more of the Grand Paradise.

We began to see the camouflaged rangers of the Gran Paradiso National Park which we were now running through. With their binoculars raised to their eyes and aimed in the direction we had come from, I wondered whether they were monitoring our extra-fecular activities and hoped that time penalties wouldn’t be leveraged against craps taken in protected areas. Otherwise, I might end up going way behind the 150 hours allowed for the race. Yep, it was that bad.

Concerns of poo-based-disqualification aside, the focus was now on what lay ahead – Col du Loson. After pumping cola, Hydralyte, bananas and other solid food into the body at Eaux Rousses and helping a dude tuck the speedlaces on his Stinson ATRs in a way that wouldn’t bounce – yeah baby, HOKA 24/7 – the climb began.

Sending some quick messages back to friends in Australia, I said that we were starting a climb with 900 metres of ice likely at the top. Boy was that the wrong call. Heading up and away from the town, the trail took us past mountain homesteads and into an unpopulated valley, ringed again by epic mountainsides and divided by a gorgeous river. My friend Jill, Beat’s partner, was coming back the other way and stopped to say hey and let me know how he and the race generally were going. When she asked how I was going I pretty much gave her a poo report before moving on. Having the benefit of reflecting on this exchange I reminded myself to focus on all the things that were going right, lest I dig myself an ultra moodhole. Sage advice.

Jill snapped a pic of me on the way up to Col du Loson. Will have to remember to hold my hiking poles like a real man next time, damn it.

Soon the real climb ahead became apparent, with a wide zigzag across the brown grasses of the lower plain rising up into sheer metallic-grey walls standing high above our approach and just a dusting of snow across the rugged roof we would soon be clambering over. At the edge of the trail at the threshold of my invisible 2500m Real Altitude Boundary, an Italian dude who looked like he knew what he was doing in high country stood, waiting to cheer us on. But as I approached he took on the aspect of one of the symbolic prophets from a David Lynch movie. His friendly applause gave way to something more compelling, and he leaned in toward me as I passed close by. ‘Be smart,’ he exhaled at me, on an angle. And then he was gone, drifting down the trail to inform/unnerve the shit out of the runner behind me.

It seemed fair enough. Fatigued runners of mixed experience, some only with feeble ultralight kit, heading to a high pass with thin air, steep drop-offs, and potentially icy and windy conditions – being smart wasn’t high on our list of priorities. After a bit more climbing I purged myself once more – unfortunately, I think, into a marmot hole – and suited up with waterproof pants and heavy jacket, ready for an alpine onslaught.

It never came. But I will say that doing a steep 800 metre climb in full protective gear in mild to warm conditions is at least as exhausting as fighting a heavy storm in a t-shirt, with the only bonus being that the fight against weather conditions fires the adrenal glands, whereas a 2-hour trudge in weather-protective gear absolutely doesn’t. What would have been smart would have been waiting until I was a bit cold or a bit wind-blown to put on said technical fabrics. But maybe they slowed me down enough that by the time I got to 3,000 metres, all of the ice I’d anticipated had melted in the sun, and now the only hard thing to deal with was the general lack of oxygen. I think the last 300 metres of climb genuinely took about 90 minutes – punctuated by swearing, staring at the ground feeling pointless, 20-metre sprints which ended in staring at the ground feeling pointless, more swearing, some dying-fish-style-gasping, and more often than not trudging. Whatever trick I could apply – walk for a count of 20, walk the next 3 corners before stopping again, it’s really not much farther, let’s get this done – the apathy of altitude won almost every round, until finally I was at the top, looking back to where we had come from, as originally forecast. It felt like a major milestone in the total scheme of things.

Rifugio Vittorio Sella is perched at 2500m in the lap of some pretty spectacular running country.

Beneath us and looking ahead, I could see Rifugio Sella, another hut I had stayed at prior to the event. It looked pretty close, and I began the rundown expecting to be there in about 15 minutes.

An hour of epic scenery later, I was finally at Sella, once again experiencing the wonder of a ceramic hole in the ground with footplates either side. Away from the smallest room in the rifugio, hot soup and tea and the usual assortment of cheeses, meats, biscuits, and Nutella was on offer. The day was winding down and I still had a hope of getting down to Navotney, the town directly below, without my headtorch – the true ultrarunner’s measure of passing time.

But then Beat showed up, so of course I was going to wait ten minutes. I was stoked to see him – this is the guy who planted the seed I was now harvesting, all the way back in 2011. This was the dude whose girlfriend gave me my first alternating fun and torture test riding a fatbike in the hills of Los Altos. Senatori Jegerlehner, finisher of every Tor Des Géants would make an awesome adventure companion. Although this same guy had also caught up at least 3 hours on me after being stopped at the shelter a whole mountain behind me the night before. I was going this slow now? Slow enough to get easily caught up by a dude who’d done an even tougher 200-miler at PTL just over a week ago? Really? Son of a bitch.

We both know that the only way to get through a 330km run is to be really, really sensible.

Headtorches locked and loaded we headed into the cold of dusk. His spirits seemed at 100% upness, as did mine, and it cheered me even further to hear that his feet were way worse now than mine would possibly be in a few days time when we finished this thing. It wasn’t schadenfreude that made me smile, though. It was recognition of the right attitude.

There is a way to do things, just as there is a way to not do things. To be negative, to be critical without good humour, to have thoughts that only inflect downward with a moaning or whining tone – this is not the way to do things, this is not the person to travel with, this is not the contagion that you want. But to find the funny side of suffering, to mock pain’s lack of power over decisionmaking, at the very least to acknowledge that something is totally shit and that is just the way that it is and then get on with it, this is what Lao Tzu would have called ‘the way’ if he had taken time out from writing poetic philosophy to go run some ultras and really get his Zen properly handed to him.

And so we ambled on. I was slightly perturbed that Beat’s long-striding walk was faster than my rolling ultra shuffle, but then I realised his lanky stride was also faster than his own ultra shuffle. Down the bottom of the long descent I mugged him for a couple of highly prized Wet Ones and we were soon on our way to Cogne and the wonders of a night-time lifebase.

It was good to see Jill and Majell again and Majell’s coach and mate Robbie Britton slung me a sweet ‘I f____ing love a good hill’ trucker’s lid. Apart from Robbie being a dude and an upfront guy – he’d written shortly after his ugly UTMB attempt about the psychology of a self-inflicted DNF – the hilarity of the word ‘hill’ in the midst of what we were doing was totally self-evident.

You can’t beat mountains, but you can play seriously with them.

The lifebase had the colour and noise of the Easter show, although in reality it was a giant white tent with a time-in/time-out zone, maybe 200 runners, supporters, volunteers, and media milling around, and a giant kitchen area where sweet Italian mamas served soup from pots so vast they couldn’t even see over the top of.

We grabbed our numbered orange bags from the helpers out the back and headed for food and a table. As I fumbled with my gear and pasta, Beat turned up with beer and tuna. Given that I was going to grab some sleep here – so far I’d had maybe 2 hours since the previous morning but was travelling pretty well – beer made a heap of sense. Optimising meals also meant getting protein in, so smashing tuna into the pasta was a good idea. In my drop bag, I also had a number of soft bottles with pre-mixed powders in. The main mixture I had was Naked Tailwind with glutathione (an amino for endurance support) and glutamine (for tissue repair, glycogen uptake, and immune support). I’d been contemplating how to best use this earlier in the run when I could feel elements of my body feeling a bit compromised. So I shook a big chunk of the powder into a cup and mixed it with mineral water for some variety. Then I injected insulin manually, straight into muscle rather than fatty tissue. Doing this means that the insulin acts twice as fast, but half as long. Because I was meaning to sleep for less than two hours, this would mean that the insulin’s active life would only be about 90 minutes and therefore not effect me or need further consideration when I got going again. Also, lying down and sleeping slows metabolism, and injecting into standard sites might therefore render little metabolic value at all, leaving me with a high blood sugar if anything, and instead waking up feeling dehydrated and sluggish. Adaptation is really the name of the game for anyone serious about endurance.

Putting various items I wanted to change into or take with me on the next leg into a light canvas shopping bag I had packed before the race, I took my running pack, swag of goodies, and orange bag into the mysterious sleeping quarters. Hilariously, the volunteer who was showing me where it was had run ahead before quickly remembering where he was, coming back, and doing the whole thing a lot more slowly.

It was like a large, dark gymnasium, filled with maybe eight or ten rows of single camp beds, with fifteen or twenty beds in each row. Finding an empty bed, I set to changing my running shorts, getting my shoes and socks off to let my feet dry while I slept, then packing my running bag with necessary food and warm clothing for the next leg. Beat and Jill had told me that the next section was mostly inside a gorge beside a river and really cold, and that on top of this the organisers had also announced that the night would again be really cold. With pack prepped (good advice from Ewan Horsburgh to Jess, to be prepared before you go to sleep during long stuff, so that you can just get up and go when you wake – hopefully with everything you need) I set my phone alarm, pulled my buff over my eyes, and went to sleep with anxious thoughts about sleeping through my alarm and getting caught by the cutoff. I slid my phone and the charger it was connected to closer to my head and passed out.

You’ve done a 200km mountain run in September, you’ve knocked out a 240km road run in December, there’s a 100km mountain run in New Zealand this weekend and it’s almost February already – what could possibly go wrong? Let’s just call the previous seven weeks of not running a committed recovery phase.

Seriously, it was Wednesday. I needed 3 more points to lock in a place for UTMB. March 19 for Northburn wasn’t looking good with two other reasons to be in Australia that weekend. The next and final option would be the Ultra-Trail Australia weekend in May, also problematic for work and travel reasons. Nice first world problems to have, but they meant that if I was going to do this I’d better do it ASAP. Only finding out that there was a 3-point opportunity in New Zealand with 3 days to go, at least training wouldn’t be the problem.

Grant Guise had temporarily hijacked The Ultra Easy’s facebook page – I didn’t mention that this was possibly the most cunningly named mountain race ever? How did that slip my mind? The sales pitch was equally deft: ‘Pick you up from the airport then?’

Nice try, Grant, but you already had me at Easy. Long story short, girl says ‘yes’, HOKA says ‘go’, Scotty Hawker says it’s a blast, entry & airfares get booked and I’m off to New Zealand for the What Are You Made Of Challenge 2016. Oh yes, I am that guy.

The only noteworthy exchange during Friday’s transit was with Border Control at Queenstown Airport. Kiwis easily match Aussies for smack talk and banter, which is one good reason to have at least a few Kiwi mates.

I can’t think of any others.

After the half hour shuffle to get to Customs, I asked ‘what’s with the long queue, I thought you liked Aussies?’ The tongue-in-cheek but telling reply nailed it: ‘We’re the friendly ones, remember. New Zealand doesn’t have a Christmas Island.’

BOOM. Thanks Aussie foreign policy. What can you say to that? ‘I didn’t vote for them,’ I mumbled off, recognizing that yes, there’s no comeback for what Australia is doing to refugees now, and even our nearest neighbour sees us that way.

Enough social commentary, let’s run.

By the time I arrived at the Albert Town Tavern, Wanaka, the evening race briefing had ended but it was good timing to catch up with some familiar faces, leave my 60km drop bag and get gear checked. No pressure, but Nolan’s superbadass and Hard Rock winner Anna Frost was casually Instagramming the area and even Bryon Powell was in the mix, ready to drink microbrews over fallen bodies. Then it was off to stay with friends, go through the final faff and grab a few hours sleep before the 3am start. What could possibly go wrong?

Okay, fine Sal – yes, I got told ‘goodnight’ 3 times before I finally crashed.

Some of these people may have a lust for life and even nav skills. Not sure about the guy in the hat though. L to R Matt Bixley as featured naked on the internet, Sally Law as featured crushing the Hillary solo, Mal High 5-0 Law, and an idiot from Australia

One thing you don’t necessarily want to be doing is asking a stranger for lube in the carpark outside a pub at 10 to 3 on a Saturday morning, but that was how I met Lance. This tough and most excellent bastard blew my mind – ‘sorry mate, haven’t got any. Never needed it – I’m bowlegged.’ I’m pretty sure Lance’s skeleton had adapted to accommodate his physiology. The tough old bugger dropped me pretty early but I really enjoyed his company along the way. And geez I wished I was bowlegged too.

Because nothing that starts in a pub carpark has ever ended badly. Ever. #whatcouldpossiblygowrong

When we hit the beginning of the first climb, my friend Sally’s question from the night before echoed clearly in my mind as it would continue to throughout the day, ‘are you mountain fit?’. Well, I’m sure we’ll find out, I thought with 97.5km to go.

By 97.4km I knew the answer was ‘not for sh*t.’ This was going to be a long day, better enjoy it!

The course is timed to give runners the thrill of sunrise from the summit of the first climb. The front end speedsters missed that by virtue of passing the first support staff while they themselves were still climbing to their positions. I was more polite, waiting until they were in position and the sun was well up before getting near the top of anything.

Sunrise boiling away misty herds of cloud over Lake Wanaka. #swoon

Speaking of extreme volunteers, Anna Frost chucked in a bonus peak-bag metres to the left of the path before giving awesome guidance, ‘it’s rolling to that next wee hill just in the cloud there’. Never believe a Kiwi when they say ‘wee hill’ or ‘just over there’ or ‘non-technical’. Their intentions are good, but their bloodlines run from Middle Earth and they forget we humans are made of pudding and weakness.

Mal and Sal (check out their incredible adventure here) meanwhile had pulled up a nice spot to catch the golden morning view. Mal couldn’t resist, ‘When you said you were going to take your time I didn’t know you meant this much time.’ Thanks buddy! See you back at the chateau!!

Grinding along a rolling ridgeline leading steadily and more steeply up through morning cloud, we came across something totally unexpected – free pies.

Yes, that’s right, mile high pies #randomestpastryever

That’s right, just over the summit of Roy’s Peak, at about 1600 metres, with no roads in sight, there was a drink stop with a generator, oven, and free Waka Pai pies for all. Surreal, but awesome. I skipped the pie but filled my bottle with electrolyte and ran on. 200 metres later, sucking on a dead hose I realised it would have been timely to pull out my bladder and fill up on water too. Whatever, it’s downhill from here to about 37km. How bad can it be?

Ha ha ha ha ah ha ha haaaa. Don’t ever ask that in an ultra.

There’s a special angle of downhill, where running, hiking, and walking all beat you up just as much, and this was mostly it. Finally in the valley after an extremely uncoordinated descent on packed dirt road, I scooped water from a stream that may or may not have traversed acres of cow poo. Taking small sips and tipping it on my head and neck, I figured dysentery shouldn’t hit for at least long enough to get the race finished. The upside would of course be weight loss. Everybody wins!

Almost missing the 38km aid station by following a fenceline instead of cutting across a field, I found out later that the turbo-boosted race leaders made the same mistake when they’d gone through several hours before. It must be hard running so fast that you miss turns and get through checkpoints before they’re even set up, poor guys.

Coffee, banana, electrolyte, banter, go. The next climb was the one I’d expected to be soul destroying. Fortunately, I had no soul left after the first climb so there was nothing more this one could do to me. And besides, big climbs are awesome. They hurt. They only take longer the slower you go. They’ve got all the time in the world. And they don’t tolerate excuses. About 20km later, after a sustained ascent of 1400 or so metres, fizzy cold black poison had never tasted so good. Can’t believe Coca Cola don’t want to use that tagline.

Somewhere around 50km, smashing in left over Red Bull Zero and liquorice because I’d forgotten to grab my own stuff, and I don’t know what this awesome vollie is thinking but it’s almost worth a caption contest… May have been something about neither of us doing our hair…

The Bob Lee Hut (I know, bobbly hut) checkpoint crew were all over it. Pete gave sage advice about sticking with my trail shoes for some of the bobbly (ha!) sections still to come. Catching up here with a few other runners and heading out again without too much delay, it also felt like a game again, rather than an epic survival challenge with a 20-hour cutoff that might just crush dreams and break hearts.

Running out from Bob Lee with a Kiwi Girl and Malaysian dude, we exchanged notes on the giant mystic rock up ahead. She’d been leaning toward koala, I was locked in on giant Buddha. On approach, we were both right, but as we drew level, it was just another giant rock. Thanks, caffeinated fatigue. You cloud our judgment and reshape our sore and sweaty world in entertaining ways.

Try telling me that’s not a Buddha.

And then things went off course. Literally.

All had been good. I’d got a burst of energy and picked up the pace from slow hiking to slow trotting. The other two runners were a couple of hundred metres behind. I knew this because every now and again I’d look over my shoulder for some misguided assurance that we were still on course. This long, sometimes winding open fire-road section didn’t feature any of the usual pink marking tape or orange tubed star-stakes, but I figured that whoever marked the course up this far had just run out of tubes and tape. So it made sense to follow the line of black star pickets, just like we had followed on earlier sections of the course.

Soon enough, there was a slight divide of the track. A wonky fluorescent pink arrow in the middle was tilted just a bit left, but up ahead and off to the right there was a renewed line of orange piping. If I had kept up and left, I would have seen the markers that continued straight ahead toward the 1900m summit of Pisa.

But no, I trusted the orange.

If I was going to have weird hallucinated fantasies starring Grant Guise, this would be the best time for them.

Like an evil pied piper I veered right and dropped down past a survival hut where the orange pipe ran out. Assuming that all was good in the hood and that some degree of randomness had again informed the course markings I followed the only obvious markers – more plain black star stakes. After about 4km of slight downhill alongside a creek, I’d now lost sight of the runners who’d been following behind me and come to a blue twine across the roadway. Stepping over it I looked for more star stakes and found some straight ahead. As I was jogging down to those and wondering whether the elevation marked on the course had been wrong or whether the route would again climb soon, the 60km checkpoint crew pulled up next to me in a Subaru stuffed with bodies and large drink containers.

Pete, driving, wound down the front passenger window and called out those special words that turn runners’ world upside down.

‘What are you doing here?’

We quickly worked out how I’d ended up in the wrong place. With access to a mapping app that could supposedly function even without mobile coverage, I really could have avoided this situation, but I hadn’t thought to use it for GPS-based navigation. I’d only used it as a reference point to check I was on the right track, and even then only sparingly. Now I’d just done about 4 extra kilometres and was off course behind the sweeper, or Tail End Charlie, as our Kiwi mates say.

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

‘About 2km back that way’. Pete said.

‘Well I’ll run back up to where he is.’

‘We can’t leave you behind the sweep.’

‘Well I’d better go now then.’

‘You’ll have to get in the car.’

‘I don’t want to get in the car. I’ll run up.’

‘We can’t leave you behind the sweep.’

This was going nowhere faster than I’d gone nowhere.

The front passenger and his mate jumped out. After making sure that jumping in the car to get back to the sweep and hopefully the place where I’d steered wrong wouldn’t necessarily mean a DQ or a DNF even though the RD could still make that call if he wanted to, I jumped in the front and we turned back around. Asking the guys who waited behind to keep eyes out for any sign of runners coming along the course from where I’d been, I felt like a totally evil stupid bastard. This was going to be knife edge stuff. Time was not at all in my favour. If the 2 runners who had been behind me hadn’t already self-corrected their own routes, or didn’t appear in the next couple of minutes, then following me was probably going to completely ruin their day.

Pete handed me off to the next vehicle. Driven by Kurt, this big grey four-wheel-drive was the Tail End Charlie I had somehow ended up behind. Negotiating some gnarly gullied roadway back to where I’d dropped down to the right, we could see the proliferation of evil orange poles that had made for confusion. I’d done extra mileage. We’d burned 28 minutes talking through it and getting back to where I’d left the course. Asking the injured runner in the front seat what I needed to knock out to get in under cutoff, he replied with ‘a 6-hour marathon.’ Even with a largely descending and rolling remainder to the course, it was going to be quicker than I’d managed all day – sad but true. Turning to Kurt, I said ‘I’ll totally ____ing do that, come on man, seriously.’ He hardly even thought about it, just saying, ‘ok, get out here then.’ Barely half an hour before, my heart had hit the floor via my stomach. But now there was hope. It was still going to be a tough push to get back in, but the clock was still going. ‘Right, game on.’ That one got a chuckle from Kurt as I headed out the door.

Before Terry took our innocence. Sorry, there just haven’t been any pictures in a while. I know some of you can’t read. I definitely can’t. Anything more than 80 characters, forget it.

Throwing my pack on, I got the hiking poles moving quick as possible. Kurt seemed like a patient guy but that probably wouldn’t last if I kept him driving at 5km/hr for the next 20km. Launching forward with heavy metal crashing in my ears, the adrenalin ramped up and we were all on the way to the summit of Pisa and whatever lay beyond.

Finally cresting, Kurt stayed behind with the next checkpoint crew, taking in the mindblowing mountainscape that ringed the horizon in every direction.

‘Alright, see you guys soon.’ Heading downhill and away, once out of view I pulled out my glucose meter for the first blood sugar check in nearly 3 hours. I hadn’t wanted to pull it out in front of Kurt in case it started him on the thought process of, ‘so this guy has gone slow, got lost, got behind the cutoff pace, aaaand he’s diabetic? F___ this.’

Sugars were good, legs were working, we were pointing downhill, it was do or die. Stabilisers and flexors seemed to have fatigued in their roles as motors so weaker, less efficient muscles like the hamstrings, quads, and gluten were finally recruited for running. I’d paused my Ambit during the lift with Pete and Kurt. Fumbling mental arithmetic said that with the timer saying an average pace of 11:48/km for 13 hours, and an estimated 5½ hours left for 33km, running at an average of 9:00/km is what it would take to get home, so to achieve that I now had to run against my watch until it might eventually say 11:00/km. And that was the new game.

For most of the day the game had been Let’s Finish This 100km Before It Finishes Us, but now the game was Get This Average Pace to 11:00/km. Sexy, huh?

And remember, if there’s a good chance you’re coming home empty-handed, at least grab a photo of yellow flowers for someone special who’ll appreciate them.

11:35/km. Finally, after pounding downhill for ages I caught the back of the field.

Nope, it’s a hiker.

Finally, after pounding downhill for even longer, I caught the back of the field.

We tic-tacked for the remainder of the 2,000-meter descent. Whatever way we played it, this was ugly. Remember those angles on hardened dirt road that hurt whatever way you do them? Yeah, lots of those. With the cutoff for the 87km aid station at the wool barn being 9pm, Stefan and I speculated that it might be 5 minutes away or half an hour. Either way, let’s just get there.

At this point, pushing against reason and what might be possible, on the verge of vomiting for the simple fact that it might break the monotony and couldn’t really make things worse, I thought about my partner Jess, the level that she runs at and the demons that she must face. And I thought ‘Holy S__t.’

11:21/km. Finally, as you do, we hit the last checkpoint with just over 20 minutes to spare. I’d put on afterburners and got in ahead of Stefan, only to crash in a chair and garble incoherently. Clearly the check crew were runners because this didn’t seem to faze them at all. They just provided – sound the celestial brass section – ginger beer and iced water. WIN. All I’d been wanting for the last hour was anything ginger and without royal blood. Thank you, wool shed crew!

Stefan blew through without stopping and five minutes later I was up again too. We’d been contesting the wooden spoon all day, and still neither of us wanted it. The new improved Tail End Charlie, Jo the adventure-racing physio, lobbed in with me as we headed into the final 13 or something kilometres.

Maths is cruel, especially in the final stages of any ultramarathon, and should be treated as a foe, not a friend. This means that however much time you think you have on hand, you have less. However close you think the finish line might be, it’s further. However fast you want to go, run faster. However quick you think you’re going, you’re slower.

One of the coolest heads in endurance is Andy Dubois. As my running counsellor – I feel like it makes him responsible for a slow undisciplined runner if I call him my coach – Andy has helped me prepare physically and mentally for some really fun ridiculousness over the last couple of years.

Two key insights he gave me before Ultra Easy were that once you can’t run the downhills, you’re on your way to losing a massive amount of time, and that hiking by choice early, rather than later on by default, would really be the way to get through this. The first piece of advice he’d actually given me was, ‘take yourself out this weekend for a 5-hour test run because… oh wait, you can’t, because you’re running 100km in New Zealand this weekend’.

In my internal dialogues throughout the day, these nuggets of advice kept surfacing. Whenever I caught myself wasting runnable descents, I would pick it back up as best I could. Whenever I felt like I was running into an exhausting space, I’d reassess and ease back long enough to know better. It wasn’t any kind of a stellar day out, despite being an exceptional experience – perhaps because it was such a constant barely-going-to-get-there grind in fact – but if I hadn’t been tuned in that way by Andy and his common sense approach, I wouldn’t have been able to out run the clock over the closing stages.

New Zealand’s version of ‘wee hills’

No more idea what per km. When I pulled up past Stefan, walking with his partner, Jo abandoned me for him and I called out that I thought it was about 9km to go. A calming inner voice told me that there was plenty of time to make it now and we could just cruise it in, but I’d been picturing 20:00:01 all day and was ready to gut myself.

A rolling stop-start run alongside the stunning turquoise waters as all colour leeched from the sky in the late Wanaka dusk, more awesome vollies, the surrender to pause and finally put on a headlamp, face encased in a nuclear pulse of riverside midgies, that typical running-in-a-dream feeling of time passing without any forward progress, an increasing sense of panic that everything was even further away than even worst predictions, a couple more turns and finally, red numbers hanging blurred in space.

Over the line, I was empty. Thanking Terry the Race Director for his contributions to sanity and failing to recognize our friend Sal on the first couple of attempts, two things dawned on me. Firstly, I had actually just made it with about ten minutes to spare. Secondly, the pub was shut.

Weird. The Finish line was way more crowded when the race started than when it ended…

At least the pub was open the next day.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Thanks homies!

The End.

The bucket list is an overused way to describe things that people really want to do but just aren’t going to get their shit together to do any time soon. So it’s appropriate to say that UTMB was a bucket list race for me. I’d seen the videos of Scott Jurek and Anton Krupicka and Marco Olmo all being handed their asses in various ways by this course, seen Krissy Moehl’s TED talk – essential viewing by the way – have a load of friends who have taken it on with varying degrees of success, and had the very special opportunity last year to go on the Ultra-Trail World Tour’s VIP tour of the course as the race was in progress, thanks to being support staff attached to Ultra-Trail Australia.

So when the unexpected opportunity to enter the world’s biggest 100-miler came along, and all I needed to do was bag the final eligibility points needed for qualification, the renovation of the comfort zone – an almost neverending pet project – stepped up a level.

Yes, this is not a trade show, this is actually a start line.

Part of the appeal of any race is its assurance of difficulty. With a typical completion rate of barely 60%, even with around 2,500 starters, UTMB had already met the necessary probability of struggle. The circus at the starting line would not usually be something I’d seek out, but it’s a special and overwhelming feeling of being one highly charged molecule buzzing and oscillating within a zapping and electrified global forcefield of trailrunners. As the drones and helicopters hover overhead, the emotions are raw and almost overpowering, and I’d expect that the starting line of Kona and the opening ceremony at any Olympics feel very similar.

The start is counted down and for all of the non-elites bunched behind the animal speedsters there’s a walk out across the line while the town and visitors and friends and runners from the other races during the week all line the street, 6-10 deep. For a moment we get to a jog then back to a walk, but for most of us it’s a happy and excited walk. Some runners, most especially the Aldi Antons (not quite the real Antons – beards too scrappy, brands not matched, shirts on, probably not world class athletes either) are impatient to go and push through the bottle neck, but this is an experience to soak up – cheers, applause, whoops of joy, trembling anticipation, kids with hands out for high 5s on a day that will surely be a formative memory as they go on to not turn into couch potatoes.

a random meeting with a Jean-Charles Vauthier, a French type 1 ultra runner on the first road out of town. Nice packs hey?

Having seen the start last year, I knew how crowded the spectators and runners were around the famous arch, but I’d had no idea how long the cheering crowds went on. Maybe half a kilometre along I got a cheer from the French HOKA boys, almost 800 metres along, Paul Charteris, Tarawera Race Director, towered above the crowd with his massive grin and happy voice, even further along, Kaburaki from Ultra-Trail Mount Fuji for another quick high five, and still the streets were packed, with runners up the middle and supporters on the side. It’s just not what you’re used to from trailrunning or ultra.

I’m also not used to running a flat 8km start feeling like we’re already 40km in. This first section was easy, with a late climb and quick descent to the 21km checkpoint and first cutoff (4 hours) of St. Gervais. Even on the relatively flat first part of the climb, my walking heartrate was 170. I partially bought into the data panic, while at the same time telling myself that it was wrong, and that even if it wasn’t wrong it didn’t matter because there was nothing to do about it.

the superb sunset view back up the valley from the first busted oversweating loser sit-down point halfway up the first tiny climb.

St Gervais was smooth enough. Got in about 20 minutes before cutoff and had a quick chat with the compere.

“So, you’re from Australia? It must be winter there right now?”

“Yep, so we’re having 30 degree days just like you guys.”

Smartass.

Would have got out a lot quicker if my newly bought Hydrapak bladder wasn’t an evil piece of crap. Seriously, it’s a plastic sack that water goes in, with a bit that slides to close the top. For some reason, though, somebody thought it would be a good idea to make one that barely slides shut and then refuses to slide open. Even a burly volunteer couldn’t work it. Whatever. Soup, cola, head out with cup and bowl to mouth.

Last year we’d headed out of town chasing the leaders in the pre-dusk flare of daylight to crowds swinging racks of cowbells. I was winding up the hill between the satisfied pavement crowds of diners deciding between coffee and cocktails. But here was a quick highlight – a little tri-colour bull terrier was wedged in amongst the feet of friends and owners. A quick hello, a pat, and the hilariously rowdy British owner suggested I pick him up for a photo, even as his partner told him to leave the runner alone. So of course I picked him up. If you don’t have the energy to cuddle a bull terrier, you’re probably not going to do much better trying to run another 150km.

“Bon appétit” echoed the diners’ possibly sarcastic but definitely friendly calls as we headed away from town, through the French HOKA team and their improvised shoe count, and up into the trails again.

Next stop was Contamine. Here’s a special thing about language – when you grab water from a checkpoint in a town that has a slightly toilety smell and it tastes frickin weird, you begin to think about how Contamine is really close to ‘contaminated’, and add that to the list of things you’re dealing with. That is, at least, until way later when you try the on-course sports hydration and realise it tastes exactly the same as that strange water you stopped drinking…

The first proper climb was a nice long one, topping out near 2500m and spreading 1500m of climb over about 15km. As we wound our way through the 40km mark and toward Croix du Bonhomme, I was still just thinking about the next cutoff.

The plan had simplified radically. It had started out something along the lines of “Get to Courmayeur by 10am Saturday, sort my shit out, feel good, start to make up ground”. In the preceding 6 hours that had been replaced by “Get to the next checkpoint, don’t think about Courmayeur too much just yet, don’t miss the next cutoff, how high does this one go, what time is cutoff, get to the next checkpoint before cutoff”.

Things had got decidedly small picture, but in that way they were actually quite big picture – blow this stage, fail the whole race, feel life suck.

And this is where we should probably talk about the bear.

The bear is real, man. #metaphor

While the months of training leading up to this year’s race had some pretty patchy moments, all the big boxes got ticked. Increasing mileage, training on tired legs, countdown clock being updated weekly, multiple reps of steep things, accumulation of hurty downhills, rarely disappointing coach Andy with a dotball week, and a final loading session in the Victorian Alps putting away about 120km with 7200m over 4 days that left me feeling not just confident of completion a month out, but even beginning to have those finish time fantasies runners can allow themselves when they’ve really decided to not just leave things to luck. I’d even totally nailed down which combination of jocks and shorts would cause zero chafing, rain or shine.

So it was a very harsh crashing to earth when 4 days of being coughed and sneezed on by contagious Sydney at the City2Surf Expo left me with what felt like Ebola but based on a friend’s diagnosis was more like Swine Flu, now called Influenza A to avoid offending bacon farmers. On the flight over, I felt like Patient Zero. While friends back home wrote of their jealousy at my being in Annecy, the summer capital of French holidaying, I was flat on my back in the final throes of a fever and nearly choking to death on phlegmballs the size of a baby possum. Sunday afternoon, 5 days out, I was staring at a ceiling, feeling as fresh and lively as a used condom, and thinking that this wasn’t even going to be a DNF, but a DNS.

The whole time I was smashing Zinc, ridiculous amounts of vitamin C, spirulina, Berocca, women’s Ulti-Vite, pretty much anything I could get my hands on that might turn the fight around. Some French pharmaceutical MucoMyst with the added bonus of triggering a particular endurance hormone seemed to be the game changer. But I went to the starting line on Friday feeling depleted, and that this 170km run around the base of Europe’s highest summit was going to be a more uphill battle than the 10,000m of ascent could quantify.

So yes, there was going to be a bear fight. UTMB is a challenging route that can’t be disrespected, moreso than most other 100-milers. But a few very close friends and family knew how ragged I was on approach, and that was the bear that I expected to put up a bigger and uglier play for supremacy over the weekend.

What little sense of inevitability I had about Courmayeur, the 78km mark and notional halfway mark of the race, it was already attached to a thought of failure, and thought of failure was rationalised by excuse, and the excuse was that I felt like total crap because of circumstances beyond my control.

No matter how I thought about things or bitesized the challenge I was already getting deeper into, the future felt like doom. So I changed the script. Tramping through the middle of dusty nowhere in a conga line of lycra zombies, I took ownership of my process.

I’ve only just noticed that Hugh Glass is kind of close to Hugh Jass, but this quote still worked for me the whole way through the race.

And this is the beauty of the bear. If you have to fight a bear, it is unlikely that it will be by choice. It might be under deeply unfavourable circumstances. The bear might be a lot bigger than you’d possibly expected. And you sure as hell won’t be able to put off fighting the bear until a day when you’re fully ramped up for a bear fight. When it’s you versus bear, you can fight or fail. There is no other option and all other detail is irrelevant. There was a reason I’d watched The Revenant for the 3rd time on the flight over.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna get through this but who could expect me to, knowing how sick I’ve been and what it’s done to me.”

That unhelpful rationalisation had to go. The alternative?

“Seriously, anyone can do a 100-miler when they’re feeling good. Who cares? But doing a 100-miler when you’re a total trainwreck? That’s solid! This’ll be awesome.”

Sounds perky, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like a half-assed bid at survival.

It was enough, though, to begin a change of mind. Climbing gradually in open higher country through the black tar of night, what seemed like thousands of headtorches zigged and zagged in front of me, a continuous line maybe 3 km long of human-borne incandescence. It looked like a giant shimmering electric snake. It made me think of the Rainbow Serpent, a quintessentially pre-Australian native. Below all of those bright torches, I knew there were hundreds of runners in multi-coloured lycra, which further supported a metaphor that could probably do nothing other than irritate indigenous friends if I suggested it.

Big open air aid station, fresh water, mineral water, Coke, onward and upward. There’s a rhythm to mountain races which a friend clarified to me prior to Tor Des Geants last year.

“The climb will start and it will get steep. Then it will get even steeper. Then it will get really very steep, and then you are at the top.”

As long as you know this is what to expect, you won’t be faced by too many surprises on your way to ultra glory.

Sitting is also permitted. By this point I was breaking every climb with a trailside breather. Ass planted firmly in a rock garden, staring back kilometres toward the aid station with my back to the climb still remaining, I was almost immediately joined by someone worse off than me. An Asian runner spread himself on the ground on all fours and threw up loudly before looking around bewildered, as if wondering how he’d come to be in Hell. In significantly less crowded races, the next runner would have stopped, checked if he was ok or needed help, and then maybe sent for someone. But here, there was no point. There was an endless stream of people going past like a dirt escalator, and what was he going to answer to the question, “Are you ok?”.

“No. No, not ok.”

“Well what’s wrong?”

“Hot, dehydrated, feel awful, 40km down, 130km to go, still got to get over this hill, it’s my playtime.”

Throwing up a lung or a kidney – now THAT would be an emergency warranting greater attention. This was just someone loosing their biscuits before we’d even made it to marathon distance, and there was going to be a lot more of that before this was over.

I got up and rejoined the zombie horde.

The next descent turned back upward at Les Chapieux, 49km so a nice psychological line in the sand. 1554m above sea level and the gateway to another climb to 2500m, it was a place to begin the next helpful pattern of thinking. This was just a Kedumba, our sustained hill of choice back in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. Strictly speaking, Kedumba is a 1,000m climb over 10km, topping out at about 1,100m. So this wasn’t exactly a Kedumba, but that wasn’t really the point. The body had to get this done, and it was going to be a lot harder with unhappy passengers complaining about the likely effects of altitude.

The 30km to Courmayeur was also still too long to think about, but now there were two mountain tops each within a 15km stretch to simply get through. Bonus points go to the reader who can remember what glacial valley I was in when I threw up just after sunrise. Everything was very sound of music, green, lush, or made entirely of wood. Heading across a suspended valley toward an ice crossing, a coughing fit escalated until it took all my fluids from the last hour with it. Leaning on my poles, dry heaving, it was actually comforting that nobody stopped to ask anything. As previously discussed, what is there to say? 110km to go.

Mountains are awesome. Deal with it.

At least the next climb would lead to the Courmayeur descent. This was going to potentially be a great relief. While 800m within 4km is a brutal gradient, at least it was downhill, so the thinking went. Of course the adventure wasn’t all regurgitation, dust and pain. Clouds boiling off the valley around summits below us made for a spectacular sunrise. Descending into Lac Combal with razor jagged and impossibly steep ridgelines in every direction was invigorating. The sense that we were like some deranged but happy mass pilgrimage was real and reassuring. But by the time I began the sharp rolldown to Courmayeur, I just could not give a shit for all this beauty, because my world was crumbling.

This was going to be the one place that I would connect with my dropbag, the major halfway point where I’d figured I’d be coming in 2-3 hours under cutoff and therefore have some time to rest if it felt needed. But with my guts now feeling like heavily malleted hamburger meat, I was descending at about the same pace as I would hike flat ground, and there was nothing to do about picking up the pace. Any ugly attempt at a trot or jog was immediately punished with a kick to the stomach. As what felt like every other runner either overtook me or sat on my shoulder until I pulled even further to one side so they could go past, I just felt time turning to cement.

Andy was echoing in my head, “If you can’t run the downhills, it’s going to be a long day.” Thanks Obi Wan, loud and clear bro.

Instead of getting into Courmayeur with an hour and a half or even half an hour to spare, I arrived at the sports centre at ten minutes to one, 25 minutes to doom and still not fully halfway through. The weight of what was going on really hit me. I had had the idea that getting to Courmayeur would be some kind of achievement, that I could fail here with some dignity still intact if it came to that, but there’s no shine to a DNF at all. Even if you break bones on a run, getting to the finish line is always going to be a more joyous outcome if it’s on feet rather than in a friend’s car.

Friends, family, work, my own expectations – massive disappointment was brewing. There was nothing salvageable at this point. Everything turned to shit and there was no sprinkling gold dust on it. Shit is shit is shit.

As we were funnelled into the alleyway where the dropbags hung in multiple rows, volunteers called out our numbers so that other helpers down the line could pull them out and have them ready for us. I had my sunglasses on, visor pulled down, and stared hard at the ground with one foot barely in front of the other. This felt like death. My bag felt like cruel weight. Rounding the corner toward the front entrance of the checkpoint I completely choked, I couldn’t inhale, I just made mouth motions like a fish thrown on land. The furthest each breath could travel was perhaps halfway down my neck and nowhere near my chest.

You could almost see the kids still lining the entry chute decide not to offer high 5s. This was the walking dead. Cheers for a corpse are a waste of effort.

Getting into the front entrance there was a mass of bodies in every direction. A volunteer asked if I had support. No. Solo runners needed to go upstairs she told me. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like I was about to fold completely. And then she had a conversation with someone else for what felt like forever. I turned away to go find these awesome stairs. Such a great idea, stairs. And so glad that people were coming downstairs on the side that I was trying to go up. That’s cool though, I’ll just lean against the wall here like a stain.

Getting into the main hall wasn’t much more clarifying. The cluster on the far side around the food prep area looked like a nightmare, so I just headed for an empty seat at one of the dozens of large round tables that filled the room and collapsed into it. Clearly the death was visible because a volunteer intercepted me along the way and asked if I needed any help. I probably spoke in babelfish but she sent someone else over and together we decided I should have tomato pasta and Coke. The only other person sitting at the table looked at me quizzically, as if wondering what I was doing, now with less than 15 minutes to cutoff. I just spooned pasta and sipped Coke and rummaged aimlessly in my dropbag.

I didn’t grab the spare torch batteries for another night. I didn’t put on the sunscreen for reduced damage on the battlefield. I didn’t grab clean dry socks. I almost didn’t even grab extra soft flasks of Tailwind. But I did grab a snaplok bag of spirulina and vitamins because I figured there might be some point I could think about putting it down without throwing up.

The huge room was mostly emptying. Some runners looked shellshocked, as though they knew this was it for them. But one guy in particular grabbed my attention. A little Italian runner had clearly decided to pull. With his socks and shoes off, he sat happily smashing his second bowl of pasta, oblivious to the dismay around him. He was happy, his pain was ended. So I latched on to that, and I viewed it as cowardly, and I rejected it. A very helpful volunteer came over to my shoulder again to see if I needed anything and to remind me that cutoff was less than ten minutes away.

“What do you think you will do?” she asked in English that was still a lot smoother than most of my French.

“I’m not going to kill myself here, you guys are going to have to come kill me out there.”

She smiled and said, “This is good idea you have, I like your idea.”

Feeling slightly less devastated than barely 20 minutes before I headed out of the hall with my dropbag, wondering what to do with it. I passed the table where runners were officially quitting, their race bibs being taken off and the chips being cut from their bags. Devastation. I handed mine on to the guy outside who was handling things for continuing runners and went down the ramp and back into battle. This life seemed almost over but at least I wasn’t quitting.

Heading out of Courmayeur, the feelings I had were a turbulent mix of elation and despair. On the one hand, I was still in the game. I just had to keep getting to the next checkpoint, the next summit, the next valley, but on the other hand there was still 90km to go and the first 80 had been a pretty intense way to warm up. A quick shot of white wine from the town crier and an extended plunge in the oversized and chilly watering trough outside one of the town’s hotels were final highlights before getting back into The Zone and climbing our way out of town and still seemingly ever closer to the Sun.

Every climb now, people were turning around and heading back. I wasn’t feeling their despair, though. I was starting to begin like we were vaulting the fallen – just barely, just enough.

The conversations internally pushing me on now were these:

There’s no pizza for a DNF. (seriously)

Nobody enjoys a fail story, unless it’s utterly spectacular – and I’m talking bones going through other bones, or a start line blood sugar so low it leads to immediate coma.

We’re not doing this again – meaning that to fail now would mean having to come back and suck it all up again.

And of course the obvious consideration of my support team – family, friends, and HOKA ONE ONE AUSTRALIA, as well as Ultra-Trail Australia – who had all tucked in behind me and made sacrifices of their own in addition to just putting up with my training-addled time management and my general demandingness to get here, to this point where I now felt failure was still in hot, though slow, pursuit.

Saturday mornings should look something like this all the time…

Speaking of heat – how good was the first river crossing before the climb to the refuges? Still in the full sun and heat of the day, most runners had stopped to fill up water but some of us also lay in cold melt waters to cool off. This was a vital 3 or 4 minutes well spent. Cooling the head and torso was like taking an engine out of the red zone just before the gaskets crack or the radiator explodes. Being able to lie in cool running water 4 or 5 inches deep, I could actually feel my deeper tissues regain some kind of normality.

After a steady climb (about a ¾ Kedumba) we contoured along a valley wall, rising up to hit aid stations at the famous Italian refuges, Bertone and Bonatti. I knew Bonatti from Tor Des Geants but the way that we arrived there was different than expected and seemed to drag on and on as we edged closer and closer to the head of the valley with our destination constantly failing to appear. The station 5km after Bonatti had a 6:15pm cutoff that I was of course aiming to get well within. But by the time we hit Bonatti it was after 5pm, there was a sense of heart in throat, and a couple of runners around me abandoned because they felt it was futile to go on.

But I focused on the runners who projected urgency as they sped up into the distance. After a hot and depleting day, this was now a matter of keeping food in play, enough insulin to feel energy available and not get the additional dysfunctional dehydration of high sugars, but not so much I’d be stranded on a low sugar if nausea cranked back up during the push for time targets. Cue the circus music as the juggling monkeys in clown costumes on unicycles teeter past.

Flaming bagpipes Uni-Vader is also a good metaphor for type 1 ultrarunning.

After surging and backing off and surging again, reaching Arnouvaz with 10 minutes to spare felt like a major step up. The time cutoffs ahead of me now weren’t quite so strong, given an expectation that runners going into their second night would be slowing. I grabbed some water and Coke and a couple of pieces of banana in the checkpoint and went straight through the other side, getting a safe distance from the timing mats to sit by the river on the other side and reassess before dusk took hold.

I did check my feet, which I probably could have done without – the check, not the feet I mean Footwear – gold. The new Mafate Speed 2 (HOKA ONE ONE of course) was everything I’d hoped and more. I’d spent 24 hours trying to locate any size 14 within any kind of deliverable distance of Chamonix when a wear test pair miraculously appeared via the French crew at the UTMB expo. Huge thank you to Anthoine for helping these happen. They were performing like superlight, highly technical, maximally cushioned next generation adaptations of the original great idea of HOKA’s Mafate with a little bit of space technology for faster feel. With a wider fit, more pliable midsole, and really deep sticky Vibram outsole, these were my dream shoe.

super sexy Mafate Speed 2 ready for battle.

But my socks were another story. My favourite ultralong distance socks had developed a hole at the big toe 2 hours before race start. Timing much? So instead of my usual 2-layer favourites, I’d switched to similarly cocoony single layer pair with a higher synthetic blend. If you’re not a sock connoisseur, what that means is a greater propensity to bunch because of greater motility. Dual layer socks aim to reduce friction and associated hotspots and blistering mechanically by essentially having one layer sit motionless against the foot, the other against the inside of the shoe, and any friction avoided between the layers. The single layer socks I’d gone with as my Plan B pair were putting tissue damage where it was going to be noticeable later. Having not grabbed any alternates, there was very little to do beside some retaping. This is another handy use for poles – they become your tape storage tools for when such situations arise.

Rookie sock errors get punished.

Getting back to your feet from pausing in an ultra is always special, either way. Beginning the long climb out of the waterway and toward Col Feret, one of the highest points on course, there were false starts and a sense of real resistance before any rhythm really resumed.

This is also an especially spectacular section of the course, shared with Tor Des Géants. Knowing that we were in for endless switchbacks as we zigzagged toward proper high country I kept my focus pretty local. The halfway point was another short hit of vomiting which barely broke my trudging stride. Every runner was mimicking the pattern of those around them now, just with timings out of sync – trudge, pause, get passed, cough, maybe heave, move again slowly, overtake someone else who had paused, repeat.

The climb out of Arnouvaz to Col Feret is breathtaking in every way.

One useful new trick for this race was use of about 2 square feet of my space blanket. Instead of putting on jackets to manage the cold of night, putting this shiny material over my abdomen under my shirt kept me perfectly warm as long as I was still moving, and also seemed to improve stomach function. Anticipating the colder high conditions, I put on thin arm sleeves, a thin beanie and a buff around my neck, but felt an immediate almost allergic reaction to them. It was as if my body was pushing heat out toward these garments to get rid of them. It was all part of the war of attrition UTMB and I were waging on each other. I unwound them and kept climbing.

As we finally drew into sight of the survival pod – large yellow sealable chambers delivered by helicopter and manned by mountain guides – at Col Feret, it was clear that the clouds which had been building throughout the evening were more than just cosmetic. Just minutes after we passed through the highest part of the route, the strobe of lightning and rumble of epic thunder filtered out across the heavy skies above us. It was still hot though, so there was excitement and relief as the first big fat water droplets hit.

And so began the 20km descent from big sky to small township of La Fouly. It becomess a cruel rundown once you’re back within the treeline, with gradients that allow running but also punish it, and narrow turning single track that keeps you working the whole way. Referencing the race sticker arm tattoo that was giving me all the information I needed, I anticipated a couple of small upward tilts before finally hitting the checkpoint. Instead, it’s one of those twisting trails that leads you toward the sound of a town and cowbells which you think are part of the race, and then has you climb almost counterintuitively away from them for a sustained period, and it does this 2 or 3 times until you really begin to doubt what you’re doing.

For probably the first time in the last 28 hours I was not just running/hiking/suffering with other runners, but working with them. I was flanked by an American and I think a French runner, and whoever was out front was picking up the reflective tape ahead and keeping us on track. But then doubt crept in.

“Weren’t we meant to cross into town back there? I thought those cowbells were people at the checkpoint.”

“Nah,” said the American. “They’re just cows, those bells have been going for two days.”

Now I was concerned, because that sounded like someone fatigue hallucinating. Cowbells in a European race only have cows attached about half the time.

Shit, shit, shit. As we crossed a bridge over another river and ran away from the noise of civilization, what if we were missing a checkpoint? What if we were going to turn around too late to time in? What if we were going to run 110km to just piss the whole thing away by thinking someone else had a clue what was going on? Running uncertainly onward into the darkened forest along a raging river way after it felt like we should have hit an aid station felt frivolous.

Thanks Jean-Charles! Sorry for busting up your Saturday night Here also is Ludo, a new friend from this latest visit.

So I phoned a friend, and we had a lovely conversation about what a donkeypunch La Fouly is and what it should look like and where it should be. Let’s face it – what Frenchman doesn’t appreciate a random navigation focused call from their Australian whiskey-drinking partner at 10pm on a Saturday?

Relief, when 10 minutes later the white tents of the aid station appeared. Anxiety too, as it was evident that packup was well under way. We entered a crowded humid tent, with some bodies that were quitting while others applied rainpants and jackets in an almost reflexive response as the rain really came down hard now. For the first time in the race I put my jacket on, heading out now just 7 minutes before the cut. There was still a lot of ground to cover and hopefully time to be made.

Just like the low point of Courmayeur and the chase to Arnouvaz, now came another turning point in my race. I threw a tow rope around a Japanese runner and it probably would ultimately get me home. Run/shuffling once again without a jacket, under cooling rain through hot air, I latched on to this runner about 20 feet in front of me and just matched his pace for nearly the next 2 hours. As we pulled through the gnome town of Praz de Fort I’d had my first real sense of travelling smoothly in perhaps the entire preceding 30 hours. We grabbed generously served midnight coffees from the front yard of a woman who actually had a small Bambi unicorn statue in her menagerie. I know how efficient I was being because I didn’t get a photo of it. Can you imagine? Unicorn Bambi!!?!

If the camera sees them too, they actually happened.

The climb now to Champex Lac felt like a beastier demon than its numbers suggested it had any right to. But climbing steep dusty trails through enchanted forest, we would then hit a horizontal trail taking us deeper into the forest, almost to a destination, and then throw us back into a steep dusty climb, and then another horizontal trail, and so on. The sense of déjà vu here was eerie. Some kind of gingerbread grandma in a wolfskin cooking kids in a pot of oil surely wasn’t too far away.

With the ever-reserved Stephanie Case at Champed Lac. 2am in switzerland is all about random Canadians

And then Stephanie Case appeared chirpily out of nowhere. We knew Stephanie, a Canadian runner, from the 4 Deserts and Tor Des Geants, but bumping into her on a dry and dusty disorienting switchback in the middle of wherever we were at 2 in the morning was not expected. It was a hilariously unexpected encounter in fact and a reminder that the whole world beyond our dirty little scenic suffer bubble was still happening. Calling out that she’d see us at Champex and it wasn’t far to go she headed downhill in the opposite direction on some kind of mission. It’s worth noting that the approach to Champex was incredibly distinctive. Not only were there massive mounds of shattered granite bubbling with living water throughout the forest, there were also trailside carvings from single large polished pieces of wood of mythical forest creatures and even giant slug statues.

Other trailside scenery included sleeping trailrunners sprawled on their packs, elaborately coloured rocks which pretended to be sleeping trailrunners, and ornate water fountains which also turned out to just be elaborately coloured rocks that weren’t sleeping trailrunners.

Champex Lac was my self-declared favourite checkpoint, simply because they had a seriously chunky tomato pasta that felt like winning. The woodchip floor covering of the entire tent also added a certain something. Stephanie arrived about 5 minutes after me and immediately set to making sure I had everything that I needed. She even rocked my world with her baked potatoes – these were gold. I asked if she might have any kind of access to a Garmin charger as I hadn’t done anything to charge my batteries at Courmayeur and even though the whole thing was a bit of an afterthought, the altimeter as a way of knowing how close the next location was had become a real sanity management tool. So I was totally blown away when she took off her own GPS watch and handed it to me without a second thought.

I was properly caffeinated, I was well enough fed to function, my tech was fired up, and without even knowing that I’d passed nearly 200 people in the last 3 hours, I was feeling like I’d regained some momentum. In 45 minutes ahead of the cut, and out with 20 to spare, the second night was feeling more probable than just possible.

The next stage was 17km, rolling up and down into Trient. The physio that I had seen in Chamonix before the race had explained to me that the final breakdown of three climbs was that each became progressively harder with the last being the toughest. Knocking over the first of these as the sun was rising, it felt like the last 2 were now very attainable. I was looking at it as a 3-rep training session, and had the mental benefit of having done some tough 3-rep sessions in preparation for the race. I didn’t necessarily have 140km and 8,000m in my legs when I did them, but let’s try not to think about that.

smashing soup at sunrise in Trient. Feeling almost human. Almost.

Again, into Trient with more than an hour clear, Stephanie making sure I was in possession of all essential faculties, even as she made time to get into her Angry Bird costume, and out again with minimal delay. The second last climb was Catogna and surprisingly it wasn’t as destroying as it could have been. Sunrise always helps of course, and I just kept repeating my mantra that these climbs were just the starts of the climbs we’d done at Tor.

A barefoot Kiwi and an inflatable elephant. Because. You’re a goddamned rock star Tim

Running … ok, waddling… down the grassy slopes of Vallorcine I got an even bigger rush than sunrise from the Kiwi contingent rolling out to meet me. Stephanie’s inflatable elephant and the bright orange sideboob of her nurse’s costume were certainly mood lifters but seeing Tarawera RDs Paul Charteris and Tim Day and Tim’s wife Kylie all there yelling for me and telling me I was crushing it – not strictly true but hey, take it – was just awesome. Kiwis are bastards on a rugby pitch but most other places they can be a bit of alright. Love you guys J

You’re a bloody legend too, Paul Charteris #TaraweraUltramarathon

It’d be great to wrap this up quickly and say the last climb was just a detail but it nearly brought the house crumbling to the ground. Running out of Vallorcine was spectacular. We trekked along the bubbling gurgling alpine melt stream with its electric blues and greens and electrically coloured mosses and vegetation. Herds of boulders grazed in the water because sleep deprivation can be a funny thing.

I waved at a woman who was attacking out of the sun because she looked like our friend Alina from Ultra-Trail Australia, but she wasn’t Alina and was instead attached to the three Frenchmen just ahead of me.

“Sorry, she looked like my friend from Australia,” I said.

“Yes, but you are a long way from Australia,” said Frenchman 1.

“And so is my friend.” Touché.

And then it loomed ahead of us, Montet. I had seen this climb in action last year, but at night when torches would begin to scale its face at ridiculously steep angles and then display fear and doubt in the way they flicked up and down, slowed, and sagged.

everyone should have a half naked French athlete to narrate their mountain traverses. Highly recommended. Thanks heaps Paul, you rock man.

But we were going up in the full heat of midday. Even drinking massively and dumping a large bottle of water over my head before starting this fully exposed climb, I had drunk most of my water before the climb was even half down. The heat exhaustion of the day before was reignited by the sun’s bullying fingers and soon enough I felt like all strength had leaked from my body, leaving me with at least 400 metres of elevation gain still to climb. It was dry, hot, increasingly deathly, and however high we climbed it seemed we only found that there was much more still to climb. The best way to describe the feeling is that it was something like being repeatedly kicked in the legs, fed a mouthful of salt, thrown into a frying pan, and told to think only of hot and uncomfortable things.

Another of Paul Ogier’s pics from Tete Aux Vents. Captures the vibe, if not the colourful language…

Paul from the French office had been tracking me and he and his partner appeared, fresh and smiley, when I was about two-thirds of the way up and headed toward yet another false summit. Their company was more than just a welcome distraction, it was probably the final burst of energy I needed to get off that climb, across the exposed and slightly cooler Tete Aux Vents, and begin the final descent to Flegere and Chamonix in significantly improved spirits. Seeing Aussie mates at a nearby stream was also a bonus, but to feel one of the hardest darkest parts of a 100-miler happen with less than 15km to go, and in the full light of day was quite an experience.

Garth Mcinnerney proving that I actually completed a biathlon, spending time submerged whenever possible. Halfway between death and Flegere.

The last rundown to Chamonix wasn’t truly a blur, it was more a dustbowl painstorm of unexpected anguish and stumbling. Mincing over another root and avoiding another ditch and pushing off yet another rock, I was never running trail again, well at least not for 7 days, there was a chance of trying to hike tomorrow.

And finally we were in Chamonix, roads, pavement, recognisable features. And Jo running up to meet me. She’d had a tough day at TDS and the whole of UTMB I hadn’t ever had the headroom or presence of mind to text and see how she’d gone or if she was ok, and now we were both just being emo and semi-fragile on the way to the finish line. And man Joe was there too I think. It was spectacularly pixelated.

Hitting the pavement beside the river, a volunteer ducked under the fencing and joined me. We ran together for a little way, laughing and high-5ing. He said he was Jean-Michel (I think) andhe would run in with me because there was a celebration at 4pm on stage to acknowledge the volunteers and how this race couldn’t happen without them. I was totally stoked about this, I’d been thanking volunteers all race when I could actually speak, although I think I butchered the language in each of the 3 countries we ran through. But then he said I would need to slow down if he was going to run with me, but he was already off the back.

In the end it doesn’t matter when you get to Chamonix, just get to Chamonix. It’s one of the most overwhelming finish lines any ultratrailer can ever experience. pic by Jesse Yoo.

This was adrenalin. This was joy. This was a sense that no matter how hard I blew myself apart now, I could still finally make it to the finish line. This was that sense that even though I’d forgotten the way through town I just had to stay at this pace and push through the last minute of this whole massive epic adventure. Running past cheering spectators, surprised diners, and finally that finish chute just seemed to grow long then short and I was at the arch. Utter elation. Collapsing into the arms of friends. Completely spent. Seeing Jo and Joe and Alina and Kerry and Ali and everyone all together in a moment that so many times almost didn’t happen.

Shit yeah.

Collapsing under a broken sprinkler in front of the most famous church in Chamonix felt like all promises of paradise had been fulfilled. Until I tried to stand up Thanks for snapping this one – and warning me about tight cutoffs – Jill Homer xx

Every 100-miler should feature a man hug with legend Mike Wardian.

This sweets t-shirt that Jo and Joe and Alina grabbed for me summed the weekend up way more succinctly than my writing could.

(taken from pages hosted by Medium – https://medium.com/time-to-fly/coast2kosci-2016-part-1-slow-beginnings-4b2282fb7a87#.xwvlsmohg Putting this here now as I’m finally getting the second bit done… similar vibe to Coast2Kosci itself actually)

Every edition of Coast2Kosci has a different meaning for every person. For some it’s redemption, for others it’s a target time, it’s a big end to a big year, or a way to put a line under the past.

For me, this year’s race was a natural follow-through from UTMB — a way to forever marry one brutal and amazing running experience to another, just like the first time I ran Coast2Kosci as a way for Ron Schwebel and I to both round out an insanely epic 4 Deserts Grand Slam.

Every period of preparation for a massive experience like C2K can put strain on other time priorities, and sometimes they push back. The fortnight when I should have been hitting my highest weekly mileage was spent in America for time with friends in the beautiful mountains of Colorado and the meeting halls of Santa Barbara. Nothing to complain about really, but in the same timeframe leading up to UTMB I’d put in a 3-day block in Bright with about 120km for 8,000m. In the US, I averaged about 60km per week with too much hiking.

This isn’t a sook, it’s one side to a coin. It’s a counterpoint to the week leading up to Coast2Kosci when my workmates rallied around me and effectively banned me from one of our major conferences for the year, so that I could spend some time with family and get my head (and ass) together for the race to come. Something was probably going to give, and if the boys hadn’t taken a commercial bullet for me then I might well have buckled this time — so thank you Steady, Ian, Brent and HOKA ONE ONE Australia for the love when it was needed most. I probably couldn’t have asked for it so I’m glad you told me to just take it.

With an extra few days before the event, not being spread so thin and instead being able to face the incoming challenge, it was infinitely easier to process what had gone into previous editions and what might be to come.

2012 was about going insanely large and running the arse out of a year that any runner would almost die for.

2014 was about being as highly tuned and well prepped as I’d ever been.

2015 was about a giant end-of-year blowout after Tor Des Géants had been shut down by weather.

2016 was always going to be ugly but how soon and how ugly were questions I wasn’t rushing to answer.

When we all lined up on that special beach in Eden I had everything I needed.

– a super crew, with my friends Gavin & Rebekah from Tailwind, David Clear who I’d either crewed alongside or been supported by at 3 previous C2Ks (including Jess’ course record and my PB) and of course Jess, the ringer, who would be arriving after work late on Friday.

– probably enough physical and mental experience of not being completely ready, to be completely ready

– the will to get it done

I’d had an hilarious conversation with my mate Shane the week before the race. I asked what his plan was, and it was more or less, “Yeah I’m not going to worry about the time, I’m just going to take it easy to start, not going to go out too hard, just try to look after myself and run it sensibly”. This is more or less what every ultrarunner plans/says/never does. But genuinely questioning how prepared I actually was for this one, I didn’t have any hesitation actually starting steady, even slow.

By the time we got to the first crew point at 24km in, running with Hailey (next year you will crush this, Hailey), Adam, and Jane we’d already covered most of the politically safe topics of conversation that we could — the weather, race regulation, Trump, retrospective abortion, poo, chafed nipples and the performance benefits of swearing. Didn’t leave much to talk about for the next 215km…. or did it?

Grabbing a quick water from my crew I got my walk on up the hill, thus ending the social part of the day. This wasn’t a conscious decision, it was a matter of practise. Earlier in the year at Canberra 48-hour, I’d been in awe of Mick Thwaites’ performance and a very visible part of the work he put in was his fast walking. Running over in Perth with Shaun Kaesler, I’d also been regaled with stories of Mick’s insane walking speed. One thing that my coach Andy Dubois always emphasizes is that training should be as race-appropriate as possible. Having done Coast2Kosci enough times to know that there is a bunch of walking, whether you like it or not, I’d contacted Mick to ask about the technique he used. He’d been super helpful, sending me some tips of his own as well as a basic video of race-walking instruction.

I’d probably walked more in my training than I was really happy with but as the day shaped up, and especially the second day, this was going to be a really useful tool.

In the front half of the course, though, the fast walking was really just a way to stay focused on staying focused. It was almost a novelty, and probably not anything that I was going to be putting total faith in — at least that’s what I was thinking while I was still feeling good.

With time to think, there’s also always some kind of realization about how this race works, or running generally. For me this year, there was the epiphany that the race is about remaining calm. Do your miles calmly, eat calmly, drink calmly. Otherwise you get stuck in your head and even though you might feel like you’ve done 13 hours well, you’ve simply set yourself up to fail for the next 20 or 30. Trouble is, you won’t realise that you’re not being calm while you’re not being calm, it will only be a retrospective realisation once you start paying for your misjudgment.

Ticking the miles over we were through 50km in an average pace of about 8km/h. This was ideal and not totally deliberate. This was roughly the pace we’d moved at since the start and walking at around 6–7km/h it meant the run was smooth and not too taxing. When we got to the bottom of Big Jack — actually, a quick aside first.

If you’re reading this because you’re thinking of doing Coast2Kosci or you’re already signed up for the race, Big Jack is not that big. Big Jack is a noticeable climb because

1. You’ve already got 60km in your legs

2. It’s a tricky bastard with a bunch of false peaks, so if you’re new to it you will keep getting sucked in. Well guess what, no, we’re not there yet.

Dave Clear and I have made a habit of going up Big Jack together. David’s a strong runner with solid finishes at C2K and GNW miler to his name, and simply because his running has been a bit patchy in the last couple of years, he and I love to share this climb because it’s always a hike. The views are awesome, the company’s great, the conversation turns from body, to race strategy, to life in general, and back to race gear, and then we’re at the top and it wasn’t that big a deal. Turns out we’d done the 7km in 70 minutes which doesn’t sound that fast but was totally better than the 90 minutes to 2 hours we’d expected.

Soup break with Bek n Gav, anti-fatigue caps (Hammer’s best product), wind jacket (because it was a gusting gale on top of the range), switch from my trail-loving Mafate Speed 2 to the plush baby-Bondi-like Clifton 3, quick chat with Milov (an absolute champion behind the scenes and a frickin lovely dude), bonus hug with RDs Paul and Diane and back into the fray.

(This video of Pete Kostelnick’s Trans-American Record is what happens in my head every time I put on my Clifton 3s to run long. Seriously)

I was well and truly on Vitamin M by now, so with Brazilian death metal crunching away from my iPod I was enjoying everything. I’d had some tight niggles since early in the day but they seemed to be softening and spreading themselves more evenly throughout. Roland Hassall was running along with me at about the same pace so we HOKA’d him up with a wind jacket too. Hey Roland, shame it didn’t match your shoes bro  Next year buddy!

Dave had crewed Roland the year before, and we’d actually run together at about this same spot the year before, except that I remembered Roland throwing up 3 or 4 times and pushing on, even if neither of us was thinking about this right now. It’s not the kind of thing you need to think about on a really long run because if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen anyway.

The wind was hitting us from the left pretty hard now. Good thing we were going to hit the road soon….and turn left. As gnarly as the wind felt at times on Friday, making running headfirst into it sometimes feel completely not worth the effort, the weather conditions were awesome. If you had to pick 3 conditions to run in, wind plus flies plus 16 degrees all day would really be the best ultra combination the course would ever offer. It certainly beat rain plus wind plus cold and 40 degrees plus dust plus suffer, both combinations being significantly more typical of different sections of the race, even on the same weekend.

Passing through Cathcart, Gavin and David were in front the famous little shop where cold drinks and pies could be bought before disappearing back off the grid. Dave was offering me a Coke Zero which I’d completely forgotten asking for. Waving it away, I realised we’d entered The Shithead Zone, where the runner will ask for something and within 2km completely change their mind or forget they’d even wanted it in the first place. Sorry guys, gonna be a long weekend for you hey?

Coming through this section last year, the wheels had started to fall off. Testing blood from my fingers I’d read a high blood sugar and given insulin which turned out to be unnecessary as my meter had been contaminated by carbohydrate from mine or someone else’s fingers. I’d then got into the passenger side of the car and smashed heaps of food before getting back out on to the road feeling like crap, from a mix of fast eating, cortisol in response to hypo, messy energy levels and aching hips and quads way too soon in the game. It was a nice contrast this year to leave the crew in my wake and motor on past Roland as he smashed a pie. Things were working out so far.

One of the key tools for any diabetic athlete is a new handheld device that scans the sugar from a sensor inserted into the arm. There is no blood, there is no sting, there is no need to protect anything from spilt sugars or sweat, and there is no 5-second delay. It also shows a graph of all that is going on over time, rather than single measures in isolation from each other. My sugars so far, about 9 hours in, were ridiculous. They looked like the fantasy graph that every type 1 would like but that nobody ever achieves in real life. This was great for peace of mind, physical performance and feel generally, as well as a sharp contrast to the year before.

As we headed back into the rolling hills and dirt roads, I was aware of my tightnesses and limitations but pretty happy to be holding together at a steady groove.

My friend Graham is an excellent bodyworker. He’s very experienced working with runners on and off the course and also knows me well. Seeing him just a few days out before the race he’d done the usual check-in, asked how I was feeling, what I was expecting from the run, and then gave me some really useful advice that I played with from start to finish. To paraphrase badly, after checking how my mind was and getting his own sense of how my body was doing, he suggested that they work together for a change, rather than in conflict or competition with one another.

Running for 40 hours, there’s plenty of opportunity to experiment with such radical tactics. Dropping tensions as they arose and feeling like I could just let my hips and legs work away at the distance to be covered, rather than arguing with them over how they were doing things, definitely made for smoother progression toward the 100km mark. The Dead Tree came around later than it should have, thanks to an unplanned soup and Le Snak stop. Even with a fairly even second 50km, there were signs already that the night might not be the smooth ride it was intended to be. Key hinge muscles felt a bit compacted, the stomach felt a bit ordinary, and even with a good stretch of blacktop to come — how nice it was to hit the road again before sunset — it didn’t feel like any kind of acceleration was going to happen easily.

And when the hell are you ever in a race with 100km in your legs and thinking “sweet, only 140km to go!”??

(Continued from https://runeatsleeprun.com/2017/03/16/coast2kosci-2016-part-1-slow-beginnings/)

Heading into the night stage (obviously a stage measured by light that started in different places for everyone – if, for example, you’re Andrew Tuckey, the night stage might not start until you’re back at your hotel reflecting on a new course record and the quantum anomalies you created folding space on Biloka Range) I had planned to be feeling good enough to maintain rhythm at the very least, and hopefully reinforce it with some good running in the cool of darkness.

Nope.

Did. Not. Even. Get. Close.

A couple of things happened, mainly the nausea-vomit-cold-slow cascade effect. With a stomach wanting me to carry on without it, I slowed my nutrition intake drastically. This also meant I wasn’t taking in caffeine, so with low carbs and very little zest, I slowed down almost exponentially. This meant I also got cooler, and had even less energy going into resolving whatever happened with my stomach. In the middle of nowhere, in perfect running conditions, on a downhill in the dark, Adam Connor sailed past me.

“Hell yeah. Adam’s race must be going to plan nicely,” part of me thought quickly.

“Fuck.” I replied to myself, possibly audibly.

And then I got passed by the world’s most ultra grandma. Thanks Jane – and where’s your race report, huh? Huh???.

I really enjoyed my friends’ company for almost the whole 5 minutes that I was able to keep up. But I was moving like a 3-legged horse in a truck race. At the very least, I knew I didn’t belong.

So their lights and the accompanying chatter moved off into the middle distance then faded from sight and hearing. Maybe in that order, maybe not. Either way, I was focused on what was going to happen next.

From the shimmering of the oil atop the clear liquid on the ground I knew that the beam of my torch had found the culprit.

“Yep, Gav, it was the soup.” I heaved again. More liquid, no alien babies, situation normal.

Having followed the back of the very comfy looking Tailwind van for long enough I now motioned for the vehicle to stop. Jumping in the back and climbing into a very comfortable arrangement of mattress, blankets, and being horizontal, the 15-minutes-only announcement was made and I zoned out totally.

This was only the first of 3 or maybe even 4 breaks to lie in the back of the van during the night. Woefully, I was totally ignoring the bastardised Beastie Boys line on the team shirt: No Sleep ‘Til Broken. Cold, vomiting, and tired may be unpleasant but it is NOT broken. Feeling slightly better after totally emptying my guts made me feel somewhat less shite, despite the steady stream of runners passing the bus window while I tuned out. It reminded me the lesson I learn every time I chuck in an ultra – just get it done, because if you can’t turn around a cranky gut in under an hour you should have just thrown up to start with. It’s way better than slowing down steadily and crazily for nearly four hours, only to poorly imitate Bon Scott’s death anyway.

At this point, super-positive crew was crucial. They didn’t say, “hurry up dude, this is some total bullshit right here,” and I didn’t say, “by my calculation, if I continue to slow at this rate we should make it to Charlotte’s Pass by New Years”. It was more a matter of, “Dalgety. Fuck. Dalgety.” repeat.

We finally got there, the hallowed hall at about 145km. Jess had arrived after working her day job in Sydney and heading out to mark the Jindabyne leg through the caravan park. She was her usual bouncy unreasonably optimistic 3am at an ultra in 3 degrees with a shit-splattered-looking runner to scrape off the sidewalk kind of self. In return, I sat there with shoes off and feet up under a heater inwardly thinking I must look like shit thawed out but outwardly looking like shit cooled down.

Eating with a running shoe on the table will help you remember just what the Hell you’re doing here.

Tentatively putting in some spaghetti, then wolfing down apple pie with custard and tea, I excused myself to go lube industrially. Remember, my running friends – food, then lube.

Maybe a half hour or more after arrival, we headed back out on to the part of the course most likely to cause a breakdown. If you’re going to combust climbing out of Jindy then you’re simply ill-informed. Bilk is the place to do, because if you die after putting Biloka behind you, then you’re the kind of person who would probably sleep with Donald Trump for his personality and not his cash. On our way to the first really cruel climb of the race a few things happened.

I emphasised to Jess that I’d be walking the food from Dalgety in for the next 10km or so to let the body reset after a very ordinary night.

The sun came up.

Unicorns wearing saddlebags packed full of my second wind and revitalised running juju did not show up. Pricks.

I jumped on to the back of the van and requested scissors. The crew may well have thought I was going to cut my feet off, but instead I just cut around the bottom of my compression socks, pulling their feet off and getting down to the Injinji liners I wore underneath, but leaving the calf compression still intact. Probably not the best way to do things but no blood was shed and as my feet gradually expanded I’d been picturing this outcome for the last 4 hours.

And then our unicorn arrived. In her delightful Canadian lilt, Kathryn Mackinnon leaned out the window of her slowly driven car as she pulled alongside us.

“Don’t worry, there’s still two guys behind you,” she melodied.

Abrupt reality check and shake of the head to gain elevated state of consciousness, “What the f___? We’re f___ing third last?” I inquired.

“Yeah, I think so,” she Canadian’d back without missing a beat.

“F___ that,” I assured her.

And this was when the theme from Rocky played. In my head.

Sun up, spaghetti metabolised, challenge accepted. This was the start of The Walk. After seeing Mick Thwaites destroy the 48-hour in Canberra in March, 2016, I’d written to ask him for some tips about speed walking, and he’d kindly sent all the basic info I needed. Only really practising the technique about 4 times in training, it had been enough to get a sense of how to move. But only on course at Coast2Kosci did I make sense of the real biomechanics at play.

Body tall, lock elbow at right angles, fist as pendulum driving elbow back until fist back next to sacrum, driving hip forward to lengthen stride while sending other hip back to increase propulsion, ultimately increasing pace by 40 to 100% without significantly altering cadence. Basically.

On the inside though, I was wearing a ripped grey cotton tracksuit and vomiting raw egg on myself.

Gav and Bek brought me my poles for the start of Biloka Range. If you’re going to feel your soul sucked out of your body through your backside, this is where it’s going to happen. Fortunately the cheap adrenaline shot from Kathryn’s loserboard update was still flowing and we got this done smooth but ugly. Passing someone here was also fuel for the fire, but delirium must have been still contributing somewhat as I thought it was Kurt Topper but he wasn’t actually racing in the 2016 field. Smoooooth. Uuuugly.

Soon we were most of the way to Jindabyne but before turning off Alpine Way we encountered… how shall I say this? ….. A guy who had probably never managed to underwhelm himself? A man who would always be comfortable with less? A guy more comfortable with low expectations than no expectations? The sort of dude who could only come from inbreeding unless heavy amounts of foetal alcohol were applied? The type of guy that banjo songs were written for, but not about?

Anyway, without being too harsh, a poorly sequenced stack of deoxyribonucleic acid and bad facial hair pointed his Hilux into us because we’d only left him 1.8 lanes free to drive in. He might have thought my raised arms were an imitation of the crucifix and therefore an invitation to u-turn and come back to discuss his lord and saviour, or maybe he wanted some pointers on the finer aspects of ultramarathon training, OR maybe after recently killing his three-handed grandmother and putting her in a shallow grave under a rusty upturned bathtub he’d just been missing out on the fuzzy warmth and feelgood wave of truck-cabin body odour that can only come from an exchange of barely contained hostility between strangers.

At any rate, he wasn’t convinced by the logic of running toward oncoming traffic rather than with it, but I really hope everything goes ok for him next time he jogs off some fermented squirrel and high-methanol moonshine next to a busy truck lane.

Because if it was just about running 240km, who’d bother? Right? Right?

By this point I’d also had my nipples separately taped by Gav and Billy but the rush of conflict drowned out reflection on such highlights for the next little while as we ground out more mileage, lurching toward Jindy.

(ok, it’s March and we’re nearly there. Last 70km definitely finished by Easter. Promise.)

Thank you Andy Hewat, we were battling together even if separated. Thank you Hailey Lauren, without your unwavering get-it-done attitude I think I would have broken. Thank you Dad, more than any other this one was for you.

Prologue.

When people unfamiliar with trail ultramarathon ask what you do and you reply, “I run ultra”, I’m sure they picture a legitimate sport conducted by top end athletes. Maybe they imagine someone that looks a bit like Brendan Davies, Jo Brischetto, Lucy Bartholomew, Ben Duffus or any of the top level badasses we know and admire, tearing effortlessly across impossible terrain, whittling obscene distances down until nothing remains but the finish chute and arms held high in a slow motion solo victory parade.

But that’s not what I’m saying, not at all. When I say “I run ultra” I mean that I walk, hike, shuffle, limp, stagger, and occasionally run (but never jog) stupid distances for silly amounts of time at paces that mathematically seem absurdly easy with a heavy pack on my back, full of food and fluid and preparation for any outcome. I mean that on any given race day our sport will take me into at least the sunrise of a new day, probably through multiple climate zones, and may feature any combination of blisters, vomiting, sleep deprivation, or other bodily failures that just blend into the variable terrain that exists between start and hopefully finish lines.

Early in my latest idiotic endeavor around the principality of Andorra I had some middle of the night epiphany. I realized that the best way to explain ultra would be to describe it as a pursuit where you need to control what you can, manage what you can’t, and adapt to everything that remains. In this way, it becomes a neat simile for life. I felt smugly content with this elucidation.

Then the world fell apart.

Walking through the silence,

Already made it through the night.

There will be a new day,

Whenever the sun rises.

Lyric from Lowlands by GOJIRA.

Ronda Del Cims.

Andorra is a principality in northern Spain, close to the French border. The population is extremely friendly. The countryside is as steep as it is spectacular. I came to Andorra early in July of 2017 to take on Ronda Dels Cims, a 170km loop of the territory with a total ascent of 13,500 metres. Ultra All-Star and Great Ocean Walk RD Andy Hewat also got sucked into this madness, having previously considered this mountain monster some years ago but butchered his feet before a starting line was even in sight. Once we got talking about this race some months before, he’d launched his entry process before coolly letting me know there was a spare bed at his Andorran accommodation if I needed one. The man has a special style.

The pathway to this race had not been easy. Training mileage had averaged about 50-60km per week, typically with about 3,000 metres of vert. Even a conservative goal would have been for roughly twice that kind of load. Talking with coach Andy Dubois, the guidance was to take it very easy over the first 60km as the body would be deciding how things felt based on expectations shaped by 35km long runs. At the start of the training block I had an aspiration to hit 46 hours, the same time as UTMB with flu. I figured an extra 3,500m of vert and some pretty free range technical terrain would balance the absence of a headful of snot.

By the end of the block my goal was just to be among the 50% of starters expected to finish the course within the 62-hour cutoff.

pre-race pic by Hailey Lauren, thank you as always to great supporters HOKA ONE ONE, Tailwind Nutrition Australia & Mile 27 Ultra Coaching

Race morning was not tense, it was exciting. We’d spent 4 hours the day before registering, organizing and leaving our 2 dropbags for Margineda at 73km and Pas De La Casa at 130km, and getting briefed on the course. Now we just wanted to go. And finally we did. The town’s giant statue King and Queen danced to tribal drumming beside us, fireworks and confetti exploded, the crowd roared, and away we went.

The festive mood before the scenery and pain.

Perfect cool but mild conditions gave us no assurances of a clear weekend, with the one predictable element of alpine being the unpredictable elements. As the few kilometres of level road at the start of the course ran out, there was only the certainty of sore legs and self-doubt ahead.

The way I’d approached this race was to break it down into its key components – 15 peaks and passes, each with an average climb of about 900 metres, highlights including an 880m climb over 3km at the marathon mark, and a 380 metre climb within 1km at the 138km mark, everything’s downhill from the 153km point so you only have to make it that far to get to the finish, sort of. But this also means the average gradient for the first 90 per cent of the course is effectively 18 per cent.

As long as you can accept 3km/h forward motion as progress, you should be fine.

Two merchants of pain, Ronda Dels Cims RD Gerard Martinez with former Bogong to Hotham and current Great Ocean Walk RD Andy Hewat

The first marathon passed by in a bit over ten hours. It made Running Wild’s Mt Solitary Ultra seem like a tempo run. I’d had a torrid time at that race though. My father had been ill with age and heart-related issues for some time and he was once again in hospital when I ran in the Blue Mountains as part of my very patchy preparation for Andorra. Every time I descended into a valley and lost phone reception I was dreading what text message or phone call I might receive when I again climbed into range.

I ran then remembering the experience of a good friend, Jane Trumper, who had been notified of the loss of her brother during an earlier incarnation of Ultra-Trail Australia. I tried to imagine the strength and state of Zen it must have taken Jane to finish her race that day. I remember her telling me how she had come out of thick forest crying her eyes out. When a race marshall asked what had happened, she told him that her brother had died. There was confusion before it was established that no, he wasn’t another runner somewhere back on the course.

These thoughts and fears were with me again as I started the legendary climb out of Comapedrosa. Surround yourself with steepsided slopes where every direction that isn’t down a waterfall is up a sheer pile of rocks and you can start to picture this route. Andorran ponies are beautiful gigantic animals. With their gigantic muscled bodies and proud prancing movement, entirely functional as it helps them cross nasty rocky terrain, they look like they carried knights into battle. These proud animals dotted the route ahead, largely ignoring the synthetically dressed humans sweating and straining through their national park home, hiking poles clicking all over the valley.

Actual quads, no photoshop.

That’s the green first stage of the climb. The second stage is loose rock stacked about 70 metres wide and 500 metres high, inviting broken or strained ankles while offering stunning long valley vistas behind and the first bleeding colours of dusk along the rim of the vertical horizon above. Whatever kind of rocks these are, they are all over Andorra and they clatter together with a melodic distinction similar to the jangling of empty milk bottles.

This is the only way to explain this climb.

Finally finding a compacted pathway I made for what I thought was the last lip of the climb, only to find another false summit. An even more daunting and devastated boulder field spread out before me. Bagpipes hauntingly echoed in the distance as dusk quickly faded to dark and I made for the high pass pushing loose dirt and rock down the slope even as I refused to put my torch on until I was up and out.

My blood sugars had been sitting high for over an hour despite standard injections. I’d delayed taking the slow-acting insulin that keeps me level throughout the day as the climb was an unknown and a high sugar was preferable to the crippling shakes and weakness of a low. But now I was sitting at 4 times my functional level and needed to prevent symptoms like dehydration, nausea and apathy. Under torchlight I put 2 units of insulin straight into my bloodstream and moved on, sure that levels would rapidly normalize.

The Euros can climb and descend, but they know nothing about getting out of The Basin before you put your torch on.

The climb continued, with a full moon now rising above the final stage. A steep and occasionally precarious zigzag just kept going before sudden high 5s with volunteers playing drums atop a ridgeline, a sharp switchback and the kind of technical descent that just doesn’t happen in Australia anywhere outside of the Victorian Alps.

These were moments of beauty, isolation, and mild fatigue of the kind that ultimately leads to deep exhaustion and the astounding feats and unimaginable failures which accompany it. This was immersion in a remote landscape where the only solution ultimately involves your feet.

The kilometres ticked over but I was counting ascent. By the time 50km had ticked over I’d already climbed and descended more vert than a runner completing the UTA100 course. This was one game I had going – measuring vert against other races, with Great Ocean Walk vert achieved in just over 30km, Coast2Kosci likely around 60km, then GNW miler sometime after that and the 10,000 metres ascent of UTMB likely to be done by about 130km.

Andy loading up on mineral water at 50km.

At the 50km aid station I was tucking into a bowl I’d filled with soup, cheese, meats, pasta and crackers when Andy Hewat arrived, right on cue. He’d predicted he’d catch me about 50km and his slow-but-steady war of attrition from the back of the field was shaping up as expected. It was getting toward midnight, we faced a 9am cutoff at the 73km mark and we both knew the maths would punish inattention. Andy headed back out as I took care of a few things then followed. Anxious that cutoff was creeping up and determined not to  fail, I cranked the iPod.

Music got my blood going and after a withering climb I hit a good ridgeline and finally got running again. With rhythm lines sounding like a helicopter squadron battling a tank battalion and extraordinary lyrics resulting from a combination of French native speakers writing in English and the two brothers in the band losing their mother during their last album, GOJIRA was the band playing loudly now. They had been for some months now, throughout my preparation for this race.

Soon I was past Andy after a brief conversation. He was humming along on his single speed, I was surging and slowing so we figured we would see each other again soon. We knew that there would be no free rides over the next 40 or so hours.

Run Lab coach Hailey Lauren was crewing for us. Originally the hope had been that she might drop by with ginger beer a couple of times out on course in between extended trips into the surrounding Pyrenees with her camera. But instead she was an absolute crewing hero and supportive force of nature, sending updates about conditions at aid stations and times and distances between checkpoints, as well as getting to the road accessible aid stations every 5 or 6 hours or so with extra supplies. Receiving a message from her now added extra motivation and I pushed on through the night while the body felt good and made up close to an hour getting into Botella at 63km, shortly after 3am.

And then everything really meant something else.

This image of a runner silhouetted atop a hard climb at dusk just keeps coming back to me.

I ran UTMB last year for my Dad, undeclared. In the end I was so sick from the very start of that race that I had to run it to see if I could even make it to the end. You don’t want to announce that you are running for somebody and then fail. Then when he was in hospital again late in the year, in December, I ran Coast2Kosci thinking about him, dedicating it to him. But it’s Coast2Kosci. It’s a seriously tough race surrounded by about a hundred friends. You can only bring a finite degree of somberness to such an occasion, where even a terrible time is still a pretty great time.

But Andorra was something else. I’d told Dad that he’d be in my thoughts every step. He’d told me to go and do my race, saying that he’d be there when I got back. We both knew nothing was that certain, but it was a beautiful white lie to share.

I’d spoken on the phone to Mum just a few kilometres out from Botella. Loving his Welsh roots and remembering those times we’d watched ZULU together, I’d said he might like to hear Men of Harlech played on a stereo in his hospital room. She told me how he’d tried to get up at 4am to do exercises but the nurse sent him back to bed and told her to go home. I told her I was using his mantra, “not too bad” in occasional conversations with myself to answer the question “how are you going?/ how are the legs?/ how much does it hurt?”. This had been his answer every time when faced with debilitating physical pain if we asked how he was going. Even with a tired thin voice and evidence of pain written in his skin, he would always answer “not too bad”.

I’d been in the aid station at 63km in the dark of the Pyrenees maybe 10 minutes when I received the text message that Dad was likely in his last 24-48 hours.

And then I received the message that he had passed peacefully in his sleep.

If we hadn’t cleared all the air between us over the past couple of years, if we hadn’t known this was a real chance of happening soon, if we hadn’t made the time to really tell each other that we loved each other, I couldn’t have gone on.

Everything was suddenly meaningless. The man who’d been my best friend since the second I was born was suddenly gone from the planet. Hailey was there with me, Andy arrived soon after. There was nothing other than my friends here for me, and on the other side of the planet my family would each be in deep raw grief of their own and on their own. My incredible mother, married 62 years – happily, really beautifully and supportively together, now saying an inescapable goodbye. It was like everything being an ok kind of normal one second and then realizing in the next that your ribcage had been bloodlessly pulled from your body. The only way to go on was to go.

A howling mess of tears and heavy metal, I went into the night and the unknown wanting something to hurt me physically so that it would be a pain that would make sense, that would serve a purpose, that would heal. Rain was a welcome but all-too-light texture now. Until the descent to Margineda I could sob and stagger and tuck myself away off the trail with my headtorch switched off, eyes cast out across the strange lit-up cities below or into the useless night sky looking for an answer.

Then I got the pain I’d wanted. The descent would put me on my face, bloodying a forearm, then knock me on my ass. Steep and sharp loose rocks covered by soft fine dirt threw me on the ground one way and then the other, landing on my poles with my tailbone and bending one. It was like trying to run across marbles covered in washing powder.

Picturing the rest of the descent to be exactly more of this I was shattered and sorry for myself and wanted to just quit, all the while as nimble Europeans who know these complex surfaces skipped past me. And then there were chains in sheer rock faces, one-handed handholds to edge yourself around to the next disastrously precarious position, and the next, and the next. And then it was just 2 hours of a downhill too steep and loose to run and almost too painful to simply walk. I took a photo of the first sunrise to take place over a planet without my Dad on it. The physical pain didn’t go away now, but it just meant nothing.

The first sunrise.

While I was on the verge of giving up at Margineda, Hailey was a wall of positivity and got me to change shoes and shirt, load up on food and fluid, and shuffle my sorry ass back into battle with less than an hour to cutoff. I’d find out later that Andy had come in also despondent for his own reasons and been on the verge of ending it before she also steered him back into the fray.

By nightfall I was emotionally vacant. The moonrise was spectacular, a gigantic shiny metal disc peeking out between summits like a flying saucer crashed hard into Earth. There had been a temporary stoppage earlier because of extreme winds and hail. But as alpine adventures go, these conditions made more sense than the heat of the preceding day. We ran along snowfalls from the previous week, and followed reflectors and beacons in the night until they no longer made sense, literally.

Moonrise.

In the deep dark of the second night, after about 42 hours on my feet, I lost all rational sense of what we were doing. Why were we following these little yellow lights, to the next one, and then the next one, each subsequent marker only becoming visible just as you were about to reach the one before it? We just needed to get to Pas De La Casa, the 130km aid station, and we needed to do it by not much after dawn – now maybe 5 hours away.

But I was in the middle of nowhere with only the occasional passerby at the top of some gigantic valley in the dark without any idea what I was doing or how to get where I needed to be. After contouring and staggering along steep grassy contours immersed in inky blackness I was mentally spent.

High up the slope ahead of me, I could see 2 headtorches hanging out with each other. I called up to them, “Are you going to Pasa De La Casa?”. They ignored me, maybe I’d pronounced it wrong. “Do you know the way to El Pas De La Casa?” I called out again. This time the one on the left just drifted away, embarrassed by my Spanish. And his friend started to slip behind a wall, as if to also hide.

“Hey?” I called up again, then figured there was only one way to get this done. Using my poles like pick axes I went straight up the sheer slope, some kind of righteous indignation fueling my legs and arms to work in unison and more strongly than they had all day. I think it was also the adrenaline of fear, expecting to be left in the wild and never find the course again.

“Hey, Place De La Casa?” I called out as I got closer to the remaining headtorch, then shut up dumbfounded by my own obvious exhaustion. It wasn’t a guy with a headtorch following the markers I was looking for.

It was the marker I was looking for.

Though I never felt a need to stop for sleep, I focused intently for the next few hours as the run took me up and down steep terrain, a mix of loose rock and slippery long grasses. Time was ticking, thoughts of the previous 24 hours swirled around me, and nothing but stubborn refusal to quit was going to get this done. If the next major aid station had been the finish line, then the 8km we had to negotiate to reach it could have simply been called The Final Insult. Disorientation meant I did need to sleep. But I also swore to myself that nothing was going to stop me finishing this for Dad, even if it meant no sleep and no sanity.

Line of sight suggested a short straight route through the dark to an illuminated Metropolis in the middle distance, but the course took us on jagged left and right turns, plunging down hard amongst giant boulders strewn across a debris-packed stone valley. Andy would remark almost identically, “what the ____ was that??” on reaching our next opportunity for food, fluid and warmth. Again, Hailey sorted everything out for me about a dozen times faster than I would have at that point. A 20-minute sleep on a camp bed was hardly refreshing but had me thinking much more clearly before hitting the final morning and crucial last day.

The miracle of sleep, leaving Pas de la Casa, pic by Hailey Lauren

The route now cruelly descended into a river valley, thick with reeds and sucking mud. It was flat but no place to make up time. Needing to cover the next 13km in just over 4 hours after barely averaging that pace for the race until now, there was an awareness that everything could be futile if commitment wasn’t total. Then it was more climbing, some descending, and a climb whose steepness was by now merely hilarious rather than unbearable. Another aid station, another cut avoided.

The last climbs were monsters. They took us into what felt like it might have once been a gigantic volcanic mouth or crater. We were going deeper and further along but everything screamed for us to get up and out. Above us, storm clouds boiled at the edge of the mountains ringing us in what looked like a scene from the very creation of the world. And still time stalked us like a rabid dog.

With a nauseous angst that we had missed a turn, that we were just following the wrong race flags back to a previously visited aid station, I could feel everything that still mattered slipping away. Certain that everything now must be done with a do-or-die level of determination, I took the sharpest ascents I could. Nothing was going to stop this run. Finally out of the craterous mountain bowl and heading into the last 17km I got my animal on and caught up with Andy once more. He was doing it tough. We moved like very non-identical twins.

Primordial soup.

The Andorrans are so friendly, one runner had told us, that even if you get to the 9pm cutoff at 11pm, they’ll give you a finish. But we shunned that. You can’t have a 64-hour finish in a race with a 62-hour cutoff. We had to push hard. It didn’t help Andy’s motivation that he had hallucinated the next aid station being a lot closer than it ultimately was. Then he got motivated really quickly.

A final touch base with Hailey refocused us on the time and distance challenges ahead and then the hard panic of closing kilometres. Andy’s GPS battery was flat by now, so I had us chasing about 10km with 80 minutes to go. It was all downhill from here. And I’d thought it was going to now be open dirt road, as opposed to semi-technical trail. We had to run every downhill, we had to keep running the flat, we cursed the time-sapping uphills, then welcomed the relief of walking.

Together for the start of the final push. Pic by Hailey Lauren.

As the route zigzagged in through residences close to town then switched us back on to farm trails we could feel that we were close to straying beyond the edge of desperation. After 61 hours on our feet, with just 28 minutes left to knock over the final 4km, a couple of locals informed us that it was just 2km to go. Suddenly everything was Sound of Music. With a feeling like we were going to definitely make it we could relax enough to recall the horror descent to Margifuckingneda. Yes, we still had to keep pushing in case of any diversion, but we could do this. The cheers from passing cars told us so.

Everything hit me again now – everything he taught us, everything he’d endured over his final months, the kind of discomfort that a proud and stoic man would laughingly rate an 11 out of 10 – next to which the brief and voluntary discomfort of beaten feet and sore legs paled into less than nothing. There was the beginning of understanding, knowing that a hole that could never again be filled had opened in my reality, and that getting back to Australia would feel a unique kind of hollow. I’d run the hardest race of my life, the toughest physically and emotionally that I could have ever imagined, and he wouldn’t even be there to tell about it. He might never even know I’d finished. In his last moments of awareness, though, if his son would always be somewhere in big mountains taking on a ridiculous challenge and thinking of him every step, maybe that was enough.

——-

By Roger Hanney

Part 2 continues here. If you’d like to throw some spare change toward the awesome work done by the Telethon Type 1 Family Centre in Perth, we’ve passed our $2500 fundraising goal but donations are still welcome here. They’re helping type 1 kids grow up knowing their aspirations are their only limitations.

The Short Version

Hardrock is a race that I first became aware of and intrigued by maybe 7 years ago when iRunFar coverage told of a mountainous 100-miler where Karl Meltzer was dropping the hammer until things got wild with violent lightning storms forcing runners spread around the course to hide in abandoned mine shafts or risk electrocution, at least that’s how I remember it.

So to find myself pinned down in a high mountain range by violent, explosive electrical storms with just under 20km still to go had a bitter sweetness to it. At the time, it felt like looking through a solid glass wall at some place you want to be but might never be able to reach. Afterward, it felt like beautiful effortless poetry, laid down by Norse gods of chaos. I could have probably finished Hardrock an hour earlier, without borderline hypothermia threatening to derail my race as my knees became numb in icy rain that pounded through ozone, but I got the full Hardrock and wouldn’t switch a moment of the experience for a quicker finish. Watching vivid blue and white bolts of galactic energy riff the landscape ahead of us, above us and beneath us on a torrential Saturday evening high in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, knowing that all around us other runners were deeply embedded in this elemental carnival, we were eye to eye with the universe and it was fucking glorious.

Pic by Scott Rokis, Finish Line looking back towards Little Giant and Green Mountain www.scottrokis.com

Pre-Race

Running at altitude requires an acclimation period, preferably of about 3 weeks. It’s either that or turn up on the day and hope for the best. Organically though, arriving in the outpost town of Silverton well before the start of the race has much greater benefits than just adaptation to altitude.

The mountains surrounding Silverton are spectacular, the remains of the mining constructions left by the communities that Hardrock celebrates border on alien, the community that congregates for this event is eclectic and wonderful to be part of, and time spent visiting or marking parts of the course is time so well spent as to be almost essential for a better chance of success on game day.

By the time the 10-second countdown started just before 6am on Friday, July 20 2018, I had visited Grant’s Swamp, Handies Peak, and Virginius Pass with experienced Hardrockers and run across the final 20km of the course on my own. Effectively, I’d disarmed the fear associated with some of the nastiest descents, the highest climb, and the section of the course where I’d likely be the most fatigued.

I’d had an unexpected but welcome conversation with mountain legend Joe Grant a few days before the race. He gave me some great advice about treating the race like it’s a hot day. The final sections going in a clockwise direction feature some really runnable country, but apparently people often neglect this opportunity by focusing on the big obvious challenges early in the race and treating the Maggie section as just some other bits of the race, rather than as a solid opportunity.

Spending time on course with Andy Hewat and his friend Larry Hall who I now count as our friend was extremely valuable. Seeing little things that can be done wrong, like following on when it seems the course goes straight ahead and thereby missing important turns – such as coming out of Grant’s Swamp towards Oscar’s Pass – reduced chances for simple but costly mistakes in the race itself.

This was all part of the effort to control the controllables. And it turned out that the uncontrollables relating to Hardrock can be as epic as the race itself. Less than two months out, we were watching with alarm as massive forest fires exploded across Colorado, threatening to limit course access, force route changes, or maybe even cancel the race entirely. Closer to race day, major landslides closed part of the 550 Highway near two of the major aid stations on the course. As if this wasn’t enough, barely a week out major landslides hit Bear Creek Trail, a crucial part of the course itself, and even just 40 hours out from the starting line, further slides closed the roadway between Durango – where many racers were staying – and Silverton.

The Long Version

From the start of the race, I took Andy Hewat’s advice as seriously as I could – ‘don’t get too excited’. But I did also text Hailey from the top of the 1st climb – something along the lines of ‘1 down, 11 to go, wahoo!’

By this point I’d already spent time on trail talking with race legend Kirk Apt. He had a chuckle when I told him about how Hailey had been out on trail with someone directing her in their American accent to just run over the next ridge and turn when they get to the Karens.

‘How will I know who this Karen is and why are there two of her?’ Yep, cairns.

23 finishes including race wins under his belt, I got straight to it and asked him what it feels like to be an institution. His answer was unexpected. To paraphrase he replied that it’s a bit embarrassing because he’s the type of guy who does keep to himself but it’s also humbling and a real honour to be part of this race in that way.

Megan Finnessy the Dirty 30 RD and massage therapist was positioned on course shortly after, taking photos of runners from behind a placard that asked ‘what are you going to do with that miraculous special kiss?’, obviously referencing the kissing of the rock at the end of the race but hilariously accompanied by handing out Hershey’s Kisses.

On the next climb, the symmetry of coincidence found me just next to Betsy Nye, also a race legend and previous winner. In the rawness of the moment she was talking with the runner behind her and saying that she was running this year’s race for her mum, having found out only 3 days before that she had been diagnosed with cancer. I think we all sent love her way right then. It was just a matter-of-fact sad-beautiful moment in the presence of a compassionate soul and loving daughter. I’d been focusing on some of the difficulties of the race – namely that my breathing felt constricted or shallow whenever we were climbing, and even the climb to Grant’s Swamp was feeling like a challenge. But the reality of another person’s heartache can sometimes draw whatever you consider as your own burden into sharp relief.

Passing over the top and descending into Grant’s was special for a number of reasons. The people on course around me was obviously a big one. But so was taking the moment to put another rock on the Joel Zucker Memorial. He was a Hardrocker who loved running and dogs, and his legacy has done a world of good even in his premature absence. Reading about him in Bob Boeder’s book Hardrock Feverhad made the tragedy of his early passing much more real to me than even the memories of those at the race itself, and acknowledging him felt more real this time too.

The crowd on Grant’s was awesome. I’m sure they were digging the schadenfreude of this insane descent as well as just being awesome crowd and bringing the vibe when it was needed. High 5s with a couple of friends at the lip of the drop put me on a positive footing for this nasty scree and rubble descent, as did seeing Larry for the first time since the start line. I picked a really bad line initially, getting across to where there was no runner below me but unfortunately where the surface was almost entirely devoid of moisture or any kind of soft surface, and much more like trying to skate on ballbearings than toboggan in soft snow.

At the bench (meaning: extended level section after sharp descent, not actual furniture) Larry handed me half of an avocado and tomato burrito that he was working on and even now, barely 20km into the adventure, I could feel my stomach welcome simple whole food. I also told him I was glad I hadn’t killed him with dislodged rocks. He appreciated that.

We could now see the big switchback climb to Oscar’s Pass waiting for us at the other end of the valley but it felt like it would just be another big rocky climb and we had some beautiful flowing forested single track to go first. Katadyn make water filtration systems for hiking and one thing I’d grabbed at REI in Boulder was a 600mL soft flask with a filtration module built into the cap. Out of water and getting thirsty I used this now, filling up from a stream crossing. I agree with the sentiment of not caring race day about whatever stomach bugs picked up from streams are going to do since they take 2-3 weeks to kick in. But, that said, something that makes water safer without making it taste like chlorine and fits in your running shorts pocket is pretty awesome.

As we ran the soft shaded trails opening up in bends and turns below us, Larry said that we looked like getting some weather, starting anytime now and probably going until late afternoon. Almost on cue, the greying sky boomed and rumbled at our back and a few fat drops of rain splattered us from the air. Some spectators also gave us a weather prediction as we rolled past and I laughed that Larry was already way ahead of them. Then a sign, with a blown up photo of strips of bacon shaped like a heart and musical notes depicting ‘Don’t go bacon my heart’ announced Chapman Aid Station, and the general character of any Hardrock Aid Station.

Also, we’d met Britney and Ryan from New York on the street before the newbie course briefing a couple of days before. She was racing and he was crewing so it was a welcome surprise when Ryan jumped in at the aid station, grabbing my drop bag and steering me to a seat where I could sort anything I needed while he filled my bottles to whatever my ridiculous needs might have been at the time. I shared some sunscreen with Betsy and Larry, cheered for Gordon Hardman – the guy who originally floated the idea of a San Juans 100-miler as a way to bring something back to an area hit by the downturn in local mining investment – and then rolled out with Larry and Betsy just as RD Dale Garland rolled in up the 4WD track.

Betsy and I got talking with her being interested to know where I was from and me trying to remember her exact PB but getting it wrong by about half an hour. Lucy Bartholomew and Dakota Jones were directing foot traffic at the turn toward the next climb. It was so nice to see familiar faces on course, but it was also already just phenomenal how much love we felt from people who didn’t know us at all and who we had never met. There really is something more to being a Hardrocker than just doing a tough 100-miler. You get carried along on the experiences of people who have done the race before you. Moreso you get carried on the dreams of people who may never actually do the whole course themselves, but are out there making it possible for you to get after it, and doing so without any expectation of anything in return for their service. It is a deeply humbling sensation to feel that kind of support.

The rain had barely started for the afternoon before it completely stopped, leaving us hot, exposed, and sunbaked, climbing switchbacks ground out of an endlessly rubbled landscape. The runner ahead of me, who I’d later learn was an IT guy named Bryan from Colorado University, was in a knee brace and it seemed that every time I ran out of air and raised my head gasping he had also stopped to prop on one leg about 20 metres up the trail. Betsy had sent me on ahead with positive affirmation of how strong I was looking, and now she was slowly reeling me in. Talking with Western States – Hard Rock double record holder Jeff Browning earlier in the week, he had told me that he was having a tough race one year when he worked out that steady uninterrupted progress was the way to go in the face of altitude adversity. He’d worked it out by the way that Betsy Nye crushed him, just grinding it out and sucking breath right past him as he kept stopping between efforts, trying to regain his own. Yep, that’s what this felt like.

By the time we eventually crested the next pass, disoriented by effort and the shifting, uneven, spectacular red landscape, she was long gone. I fist-pumped the runner behind me, only for near-carnage as he lost his balance backward from standing up straight for the first time in maybe 40 minutes only to land on the cairn marking the top the climb with his ass and slide down it upside down on his back. After helping him back up and checking he was ok – a bit muddied but not bloodied – it was finally time to run downhill for a while – a long while.

The descent into Telluride is spectacular. Ahead of you is a mountain landscape that looms ever larger as you get closer to the town itself, while mountain waterways criss-cross the steep trail which is peppered by big historic mining debris of wood and metal with a growing cleft off to one side that eventually becomes drop-off running along the trail edge.

Planning for drop bags necessarily meant guessing times in and out of checkpoints to make sure that important things like cold weather protection and torch batteries would be in the right locations. Estimating a finish in the 40-45 hour range, we’d put an ideal time out of Telluride as being about 4:30. Running downhill gradually and chatting with Bryan we now arrived at about 4pm at this major aid station where our crews could easily drive in to see us.

Hailey and Jill were a welcome sight as the generous crowd in the staging area cheered us in. Larnie was also on board, helping out with Andy Hewat not far behind. (Jill is an author and tells the Hardrock 2018 story here beautifully from her perspective.)

I would have liked this to be a ruthless checkpoint, but my guts were just not getting with the program. Running downhill for a while had been good to make up time but just set me up for a gurgley gotta-go kind of feeling. I know, so sexy huh? We got ginger beer in – Bundabergs from Colorado Blu in Silverton. Some food decisions were starting to become evident. Gummi Bears were dead to me so we wouldn’t be hitting any more of those for the weekend. Maurten 360 is a sports drink that forms a slow release gel in the stomach and allows 90g of carb rather than the usual 60g limit per hour, but it just felt to me like it was contributing to a nauseated feeling so we also cut it. Tailwind was still going in well and especially at altitude it was one of the few things I could put in steadily. I just wanted to dilute it more as I usually go double strength. Chips were still kind of good – Jalapeno Cheddar for zing. Avocado was going in really well, and Caramel M&Ms and PayDay and Snickers Bars still seemed good options.

It’s not exactly a scientific meal plan, but for me the crucial thing is to know that I can still reach into my pocket every 20-30 minutes and grab 80-150 kCal in some form that I’m not going to just puke back up.

As I was leaving the bathroom to grab my pack and head back out Andy was just arriving at the aid station. Last year at Ronda Dels Cims he’d predicted he’d catch me at 50km and he ended up being exactly right. So with that in-joke already between us he rolled past smiling, “Oh, caught you sooner than I expected to”.

Hailey trotted out of the station with me, saying that there were a few hours before the station would close but that talking to a seasoned Hardrocker she’d been told 5pm was really the functional cutoff after which making the finish would become challenging. It was 4:30pm as I hit the road.

The climb was almost immediately sharp, grinding us back into the solitary uphill trudge we’d been expecting after a short burst of adrenalin from the aid station good vibes and cheering race supporters in the street. The rain started to tease here, not quite enough to suck the heat out of the day, but almost enough to think we’d need weather gear out for the exposed heights we were heading toward.

On this section Matt and his mate that we’d met the other day in Cunningham Gulch were heading the other way, returning to the starting point of their double Softrock. That’s the kind of cool stuff that just happens around this race because people love it so much – these guys had done Softrock clockwise over 4 days and then gone back the other way so that they could witness and cheer the race on their own final day of double-softrocking.

The exposed areas above treeline loomed harsh and Martian up ahead through the thinning treetops as they got closer with the climb. By the time I was traversing rocky barren ground I was just about out of water and Tailwind. The theme of the day was GRIND and this was definitely that. If I get to do this race again I’ll definitely plan my hydration a bit smarter. Over the next incredibly scenic section until Kroger’s, dropping over the lip, traversing the bowl, and dropping, climbing and traversing again, I went close to an hour on nothing to drink. I necked a handful of M & Ms to get just enough energy to finally make it to Kroger’s. The squeaking of marmots and picas and of course the incredible views provided some relief, but running dry is not the thing to do any time in a miler, especially in the first 50km.

All that practical angst was forgotten in an instant on the steep final haul to Kroger’s, as I semi-recognised a couple of runners above me on their way back down from Virginius Pass (the location of Kroger’s Canteen) in the direction I’d just come.

‘Is that Darcy Piceu?’

‘Yeah, who’s that?’

‘Oh man, you crushed Andorra, that was so good. It’s Roger.’

‘Roger Hanney? Oh yeah, I follow your stuff on…’

‘…annoying social media channels?’ I completed her sentence.

Hold everything – is that a massive boost in the middle of a day out or what? I’m a big fan of Darcy Piceu because she is tough as hell and she does races that are crunchy and brutal, not frilly and glamorous. The weekened before Hardrock – which she has also totally owned – she crushed the 100-miler in the Pyrenees that is Ultra-Trail Andorra, or Ronda Dels Cims. It’s over 160km with 13,500m of ascent. It’s not quite as high as Hardrock but it’s a lot steeper and frequently less groomed. She tore the race a new one, finishing with a fast winning time in blown-out conditions that saw organisers stop the race with very few runners making it to the finish at all. I had a sense of how hard her 36 hours would have been, as Andy and I had pulled it out of the fire in 61 hours and change last year.

But, bonus points, getting kudos mid-race from one of your heroes – ultimately meaningless ego fuel but also taking it.

Arriving at the tiny crack in the exposed Virginius ridge line that is Kroger’s Canteen a minute later, I was chirpy. Thanks Darcy!

Station Captain Roch Horton and his volunteers, including another badass race winner Anna Frost and recent Nolan’s destroyer Joe Grant, had made us all a beautiful brief home up high. With room enough for 4 runners at a time to sit on a rock bench to the right of the narrow cleft in the cliff face and a perogi kitchen cooking up to the left, the awesome team of volunteers was also swarming us to get bottles for refilling with Tailwind or water and anything else we needed. This crew hauled up more than 27 loads of gear and supplies to be able to look after all of us this way. We all got a rockstar welcome. To be treated so well by people who have done bigger things than we can imagine is just utterly humbling, and it definitely helps pull you through the race from aid station to aid station.

I sat and regrouped briefly, rallying when Roch’s playlist pumped out Run To The Hills by Iron Maiden. Then we all cheered the next runner coming in as Roch announced a ten-time finisher arriving and – literally – rolled out the red carpet. It was a shaggy dusty piece of bright red fun fur perfectly suited for alpine royalty. And yes, I toasted when the option became available. I toasted the volunteers, but I may have referred to them as crazy em-effing badass heroes.

We still had a good amount of sunlight at this point, so I was hopeful of a decent rundown to Ouray. First though, I knew the Virginius descent was going to be sketchy having seen it the day before, but I hadn’t grasped yet how sketchy. We had the straight down rope option to the right or the diagonal rubble option to the left. Frosty reckoned the right would be quicker so that was good enough for me. Joe Grant was working with another team member to supervise the static line which a runner was already nervously halfway down. Without apparent roping experience she didn’t have the confidence to lean back and make the rope taut and more dependable. The irony of roping is that if you don’t trust the equipment, it does little to help you, causing you to trust it even less.

Yes, the descent from Virginius is this steep.

Joe Grant to one side as Tony Neal starts his descent.

Growing up, I had a fear of heights and consequently roping until one day my brother explained to me how most abseiling rope is strong enough to hold a car. After that I eventually did roping work with State Emergency Service bouncing around trees and rooftops with chainsaws in the rain. I might have got a bit excited by the rope option because of this… When I finally jumped on line with another dude, I started by rappelling back quickly enough to really scatter some small rocks and get a touch of rope burn through my fleecy non-climbing gloves. Slowing it down and moving a bit clumsier we all eventually got down to the next shelf. James Varner on the course marking day when we came out here did this descent with no rope in around 20 seconds – significantly faster and smoother we were doing with all the help in the world right now.

The clockwise descent from Virginius/Kroger’s puts you through 3 loose scree fields before you reach a firetrail/jeep road that frees you up to roll quicker. I sucked on these. They were so dry that you may as well have been trying to smoothly descend marbles scattered on sandpaper and wood shavings, and I made the 2^ndand 3^rddescents harder by picking lines that looked clean but actually just had shallower surfaces. The deeper the loose material on top, the more it’s like soft snow that actually holds the foot as it sinks. I took such a shitty line that Andy appeared again and bombed past me on the left of the 3^rddescent as I edged timidly down the wrongly chosen right hand side.

As at Grant’s Swamp, I didn’t take the wiser option to empty shoes and instead just wanted to get the show back on the road as soon as we were back on flatter, smoother ground. I caught up to Andy soon enough and we checked in with each other and another runner whose name escapes me but who was a multiple finisher and tough competitor with everything well under control. Shortly after Virginius with a lot of road and some single track still to descend before Ouray, there was another aid station, just as friendly but definitely less entertaining than Kroger’s. I grabbed vegetable broth and blew through here. Light was fading but with the long sunlit hours I wanted to get as far as I could before needing to pull the torch out.

Jill’s partner and my good friend Beat had recommended a buff for this section to help with dust from the jeep road. Looking at the Blue Mountains Running Company buff on my wrist I had to smile. It was as covered in filth and grit as the rest of me and was not going to be any good to breathe through. This was also when I realised that I’d left my iPod turned on after charging it the day before, so when I went to take some Vitamin M now nothing happened. Oh well, better just focus. The aim here was to just smoothly roll down without using up any real physical resources. I didn’t want to blast the quads or shake the guts or stir the surface dust, but did want to make use of the fire trail descent to get some time banked.

This descent has a sheer dropoff on the righthand side of the road into a beautiful mountain chasm with a fast-flowing river at the bottom. The opposite side of the canyon features heavily in Ouray’s annual ice-climbing festivities, when chutes of water are deliberately directed to created frozen climbing walls through the winter. Our friend Larry had told me about his daughter doing this one winter.

As light faded I still wanted to see if I could get away without the torch, but rolling into dusty areas with more 4WD and construction traffic I stopped to pull it from my kit. Fine dust stirred up from the road swirled in my beam in much the same way that it was kicking up in my eyes and throat.

Next thing I knew I was running with Larry again. His night sight slows him down unfairly but he doesn’t complain about it, he just knows that’s something he has to work with. In his bawdy Chicagoan he told me that we had clean road and I should get going. I genuinely enjoy Larry’s company so I told him he could shove that and asked how his race was going.

He was moving smoothly and the only downside so far had been a runner above him at Virginius kicking rocks loose without shouting any kind of warning down, meaning Larry copped a fast moving 3-inch rock tumbling into his right shoulder. I speculated that a few inches to the left could have been a less dismissable result, but also had to ask WTF??? Communication in these situations of shared hazard is crucial, and for a runner to not understand that shouting ‘rock!’ is an essential community service is just bewildering, regardless of fatigue levels. I’d shouted it a few times, feeling like a clumsy ass but knowing that it gave people beneath me what they needed to be safe.

We chatted some more and as throughout the day I found matching a gentler pace than my own gave a good chance to move with less impact. Sensing we’d caught up enough, Larry again insisted I make use of the road and sent me on my way. Night traffic on this out of the way road was surprisingly busy, with headlights and dust kicking up with little respite. I wasn’t just making sure to not miss the turnoff to the left, I was looking forward to it. Soon enough, single track appeared and I turned off the road. There was a noticeable temperature increase here too, maybe a matter of 5 or more degrees C. The mining tunnel that caused Joe Grant a significant head injury some years before was probably another point for anxiety, being semi-unknown with potential for harsh consequences, but it actually felt more like an adventure theme park – all part of the ‘this is what miners had to live through/with’ experience.

Finally getting into Ouray, I was running again with ten-time finisher red carpet guy Neal Taylor with whom I would be tic-tacking for the rest of the race.

It was also clearly front of mind that the next climb would be the biggest of the race, effectively 1800m over 15km. There’s a mystery to nighttime alpine running/hiking. Is it going to be clear/calm/cold/misty/foggy/windy/benign/brutal? Scenarios play out mentally beforehand and they need to because you have to bring the most appropriate gear with you. This is part of what’s going through your head coming in to aid stations. Also, with Hardrock facing natural disaster after natural disaster this year, the final planetary event had been multiple rockslides/landslides around Bear Creek Trail, a key section at the start of the next climb. Even though this was still closed to the public, negotiations with the relevant authorities had ensured access for Hardrockers, both to assist with some of the trackwork necessary for the race to go ahead and also during the timeframe of the race itself.

Getting into the semi-festive almost Christmas-lit aid station of Ouray now I was feeling pretty good, mentally ready enough for the big night session ahead, lifted by cheers from the ever-friendly crowd as we crossed the bridge into the aid station and just wanted to find my crew. Hailey was quick to spot me and lead me over to where she and Jill had set up at the aid station. As always, one of the race volunteers also intercepted me and asked what I’d like. I immediately booked vegie soup and ginger ale so he went off to find that.

Hailey and Jill were like an indy-car pit crew that had been given a 1974 V8 Ute missing a couple of cylinders to work with but they didn’t seem to mind at all. I was really looking forward to having Hailey pace me out of Ouray on this section. I know that she doesn’t love heights and was a bit concerned for how the exposed sections we were about to hit might make her feel, but I was also confident that she could kick my ass over about any distance or any speed right now.

We put some food in as a priority so that at least some would settle by the time we left the aid station. I went off to the weirdly curtained bathroom to change shorts and re-lube. The hot day had meant heavy sweating and with the amount of salt in my shorts they’d dried and started to work just a little bit like sandpaper – not something to ignore with more than 24 hours still to go.

When I got back, Andy was nearly ready to go and Larry was in the area with his pacer Kim as well. I took my bombproof Montane Spine Gore-Tex pull-on as a shell option not knowing how the night might shape up as we got higher and the hour got later.

Suffice to say, the climb did not end how it started. We rolled out of Ouray after a quick word of advice from Charlie Thorn to get moving and get after it. I might have been a bit loud in wondering who the hell would want to go to a Toyota FJ festival because it looked like that was on as well – either that or there were a lot of FJs in town or I was hallucinating that every 2^ndcar was an FJ.

Larry’s pacer Kim sounded like she had a pair of army-officer-grade nuts on her, which would probably be useful if any of us got a case of the sleepy slowdowns. Hailey and I were up to the road just before Bear Creek Trail ahead of the others and had a nice surprise in the form of a big red Jeep. Our good friend Jean-Luc from HOKA ONE ONE had been following our tracker because we were hoping to run some kilometres together this weekend. With travel in this part of the countryside subjected to airline timetables, car hire, mobile coverage and road closures, Hailey had been doing a great job of keeping in touch with him when possible with me being out on course and him getting into town just recently. I warned him I was a stinky ultrarunner then gave him the kind of big hug you give friends that you only get to see every 6-12 months. All of these little moments – new meetings on the course, a friend from out of town coming to shout support, seeing your heroes out there, complete strangers hiking out the other way and saying things like ‘you guys are amazing’, it’s all fuel for the fire.

There is so much of this good-vibe fuel out on trail at Hardrock. Even in the long sections of seeing almost nobody on course, there is a deep inaudible hum of positive get-it-done from everyone in remote Colorado and around the world who has been part of this race or is watching it, cheering it, just wanting us to bring it home.

We said goodbye to Jean-Luc. He had to go prep his gear if he was going to join the run some time next day. There was a happy elation as he honked and roared off, then his carhorn blended into other horns with more cars passing under the bridge we now had to climb over to get onto the trail proper again. I heard Larry up ahead explaining to Hailey that this next section was very exposed in some areas over the next 2.5 miles and that keeping away from the drops and just going slowly and safely would be crucial. I had some idea of what we were in for but at the same time, no idea.

Banding together again, the 5 of us ground our way up Bear Creek Trail. It’s a mixed experience. The trail is truly a natural treasure, with unfenced life-taking drop-offs on one side of the track, and massive and impossibly angled rock walls looming above you on the other. The whole time, you’re either on a sea of small multi-coloured loose rocks, or slippery dirty narrow angled tracks picking between obstacles, or just smoother easier trail that still comes with a sense of the potential for risky stumbles as you go faster, so you never go faster, not really.

It was gorgeous and unexpected and awe-inspiring all at the same time, and after 17 hours on feet we’d have probably happily swapped it for an escalator.

The terrain altered as we climbed but it never ceased to be mindblowing. There were even abandoned old mining tunnels cut deep into sections of the rock wall to our left. And all the while we were aware that elements of this track had been wiped out by a rapid cascade of earth and rock and even trees just the week before. Whenever we thought we’d identified the section where the greatest carnage must have taken place, we’d reach another shattered section of trail that would cause us to reassess.

Ultimately though, we came to a section where I called out to Andy ahead of me to look up. Turning his headtorch to face directly overhead, he was stunned to see the same thing that had me and Hailey wearing our WOW faces. Maybe ten feet off the ground and horizontal, caught up in what looked like metal cables or telephone wires, a telegraph pole or fallen tree was suspended directly over the trail, at about 3,000m in the middle of nowhere. Yep, special.

From here, it became one of those dig-on-through kind of ultra nights. Britney grooved past while I was communing with nature. Andy pulled back because he was favouring descents over climbs. I lost track of Larry and Kim but we all eventually ended up at the Engineer Pass aid station together where Hailey smashed a whisky, I sucked down some ginger ale and the haunting marmot mating calls from outside the tent were actually other runners vomiting hard.

The awesome thing about Engineer aid station (where I made sure to not sit anywhere near the comforting heater) was how it appeared a couple of miles earlier than expected. The shitty thing about Engineer Pass aid station was having to keep going for a few kilometres after it before we could get heading downhill again.

I hadn’t been keeping up with my calories. Nearly 20 hours after starting out, I’d finally got to that place where the next piece of food you put in might cost you the last five pieces of food you put in. As Hailey positively urged me on and primed me with self-belief, I knew that my energy inputs had been way below acceptable by the way that I couldn’t even understand the mumble words coming out of my mouth when I spoke to her. I had anti-nausea medication with me but wanted to be properly stuffed before taking anything. Then it happened. A proper staggering hands-on-knees nasty hollow kind of dry-heaving with strands of saliva and your basic ultrarunning ectoplasm just as we got to the final steepest part of the uphill haul, slow motion chasing torches over the rise ahead of us. Then I took my meds and pushed on. We’d been on the climb for a bit over 5 hours before we finally turned downhill toward Grouse Gulch and the promise of a new day climbing Handie’s Peak.

Part 2 continues here.

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Continued from Part 1

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Asking around about how best to prepare for Hardrock some months ago, I’d got a load of helpful advice from some very experienced runners who know the course backwards. My friend Beat gave me great advice, so did Grant Guise, and race legend Karl Meltzer. Karl had been the only one to say that there’s actually a lot of roadway on the course. The descent we were now on was a jeep road. Relative to technical single track, these are superhighways. But relative to ordinary nicely cleared firetrails these are obstacle courses, unevenly littered with potholes and every shape and size of rock that might ever appear on a roadway. I think I need more practise moving quickly on these things, because even once we’d picked up the pace a bit, it just felt like we were walking quickly downhill. I thought about Great North Walk, our favourite 100-miler back home, and wondered how I’d view someone running into the halfway point – whether I’d see them as doing well or pacing badly. On reflection I felt more comfortable with my slow fast walk.

With a bit of delirium creeping in and the witching hour behind us, I tried to make up for my sadass bonking-vomiting-crawling phase, narrating the torches ahead and below us for Hailey.

“Have you seen my cat? He was here a minute ago.”

“Oh shit, where’d I put the keys? Have you seen my wallet? No, that’s a marmot.”

At any rate, we made it to Grouse at about a quarter to 6 just as the first grey light of day had taken shape. I expected that I’d have to twist some arms to get a 20-minute nap but Hailey even felt like 40 minutes would be ok. I spotted Courtney Dauwalter either waiting to pace Howie Stern or just finished as I was heading into the tent. She’s such a badass ultrarunner. Too tired even for a fanboy moment, I punched some food in and after switching into a fresh top grabbed a cot out the back and zoned out until about 6:30. I was never really asleep, aware of the runner chatter around me, but it was a good chance to just calm the body a bit and reset before going again. As I was prepping to get out again Andy Hewat had come in and taken a cot. He was looking and sounding a bit ragged. I didn’t know how he was going to go getting out of Grouse but felt pretty confident that Hailey and Larnie and Jill would get him out if he was capable of still going. Also, he’s a tough bastard.

Leaving Grouse Gulch pic by Jill Homer

Now I was on the climb to American Basin and Handie’s Peak, a mountain with spectacularly epic views and also the highest point on the course. Back on my own, having a fresh iPod was gold and I savoured the moment as the first crushing rhythm-driven guitar blasts of Gojira for the entire race tore apart the tiny columns of air in my ear canals. It was simply beautiful in this first moment of being alone in maybe 25 hours to just be overwhelmed by gratitude for close friends supporting the race and for the beauty of the moment and for the depth of the challenge and for my Dad who left this world just over a year ago.

GOJIRA – epic tunes to go long to.

Time alone didn’t linger long enough for me to get even slightly introspective. Larry was punching on ahead with Kim still talking away. When I caught up the conversation turned to the race news. This was the first I’d heard of Xavier Thevenard’s disqualification for taking assistance. Larry explained that he’d been seen and reported receiving ice and water after Ouray just at the start of the long Bear Creek section where there is no way to get water other than to carry it. We chewed this over between ourselves, speculating in the absence of objective facts. We all felt that rules are rules and having some sense of how much love and effort the race organisers put in, that it would have been a painfully difficult decision for them to make, and that they should not have been put in that position.

At any rate, 40 miles behind the race leaders we at least had some topical distraction for a while as the elevation slowly increased under our feet. Over the next rise I passed Gordon Hardman again. The man to originally conceive of doing a 100-miler in the San Juans, he’s not only a race legend, he has the single most appropriate surname ever.

Gordon Hardman, a Hardrock giant, who also didn’t mention that he’d torn a hamstring and quad 3 months before race day. Most appropriate surname EVER.

(These 3 images show my blood sugars for the duration of the race. I didn’t reset the clock on my Freestyle meter, so with the 16-hour time difference the race started at 10pm Sydney time on the July 20 readout. I was climbing Handie’s Saturday morning around 7:30am which starts just before midnight on the July 21 reading and continues into the July 22 reading.)

At any rate, I was eventually over Handie’s and after briefly appreciating the beauty of the world as seen from the summit – 14ers rule!!! – got on to another sketchy descent. Hitting the valley behind Handie’s, I was in the land of occasional Buddha marmots. Here the marmots would sit particularly still and less squeaky than usual, reflecting on the new day from their stony perch. But I saw more than a couple of these marmot-stone pairings shift into chubby little Buddhas with marmot heads. Yep, daytime hallucinations let you know it’s happening.

I’d been tic-tacking with a Spanish runner and his pacer/partner and rolled downhill past them now as they took some relief from a mountain stream. This was a good flowing downhill and I wanted to use it before the day got too sunny. Trying to enjoy the run by not thinking too much about pacing, but also thinking enough about pacing to be able to enjoy the run – it’s not necessarily a fine art but it’s definitely a fine line.

My guts seemed to have settled a bit and I was able to use most of the descent to the next aid station reasonably happily. It was definitely starting to warm up and after loads of pretty scenery and sweet single track the base of the rundown eventually flowed toward a clearing. I spotted Dima Feinhaus with his pacer Joel Meredith. Dima would have an unfortunate end to his race as well, basically by panicking in extreme weather and going way off course, sufficient to not complete the route required for a finish. At this point though he was just looking unhappy, as opposed to actually doomed. Joel though, nearly always smiling, swapped some banter with me on the way into the next stop. And how could you not be happy, given that Burrows Park aid station was playing Bowie and other ‘80s hits with an awesome retro prom theme, pot-stickers, and – wait for it – ICE IN DRINKING BOTTLES.

Oh my god, ice in bottles was so well timed. It meant revival. Pork dumplings, ginger ale, and icy cold bottles as well as a quick gender-inversion wedding pic and I was on my way.

Burrows Park, keeping it seriously competitive on course

Getting out of Sherman and climbing toward Cataract Lake was a solid haul, with some moments of doubt due to sparse course marking and fatigue. During the race, I made sure to have the GPX of the course on my Garmin and Ultra Trail Project on my phone. This meant that at any time if I was concerned about being on course or not, I had two reliable digital maps tracking me live. In amongst the bushes, with trees destroyed by beetle strike all about me and a creek off to my right with some concern that the trail might be on the other side of the river, I used the map on the phone for maybe only the second time in the race. Soon enough, a course marker confirmed that I was on track. But it’s important to note that the most effective method isn’t always the one we go to first when tired, and making poor choices can easily cascade into a problem in remote or unfamiliar locations. Hardrock is not a race where you want to be doing any bonus kilometres at all.

Some of the scenery on this climb was spectacular. It reminded me of the section early in Tor Des Geants climbing to Rifuggio Deffeyes, being so green with water running all around, not to mention it was feeling a bit pinchy and steep even though I think it was probably not as steep as other sections.

After coming past an incredible split rock waterfall at the end of an elevated mountain stream, I again caught up to Dima and Joel. It was beginning to look ugly. In his own race last year, Joel would have been off course by about this time, being a 32-hour finisher. As we talked Joel asked what kind of finishing time I might be going for. I’d been keeping these thoughts out of my head mostly but now that Handie’s was done and it felt like we were into the final major section before the last heroic climb out of Cunningham I let myself be a bit optimistic.

‘Maybe aim for midnight?’

‘Nah dude, keep the foot down but it probably won’t be midnight. Just keep your foot down.’

This kind of simple breakdown of what’s possible is interesting and valuable. No point frothing up chasing an unrealistic goal if the exertion of chasing it then takes away your chance to finish. Matt, the Softrocker I’d been speaking to earlier, gave me some great advice he’d got one time, ‘Protect the finish.’ Just because that’s a simple principle doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable one. (Check it out Trump, that’s how you handle a double negative!)

It’s easy to look at a 40km section with a few flattish bits in it and think, ‘alright, home and hosed’ but that doesn’t account for the kind of fatigue 120km of mountains and altitude will put into you, or the accumulative lack of energy from messy digestion, or the fact that most of that last 40km stretch still happens above 10,000 feet, or the weather….

At any rate, I waved to Dima and Joel and resolved to just keep moving forward, positively and with as little risk of breakage as possible. I caught up to Bryan again, and then passed the really friendly dude in the ‘Keep Calm & Hardrock On’ t-shirt and kilt who’d done my medical at check-in. This Cataract Lake section was beautiful and diverse, with really rubbly forested sections but then more open tundra with a kind of Scottish feel to it.

Tragically, in one section where the suspended valley really opened out you could see the beetle dieback had torn the colour out of almost all the trees on opposite slopes of the valley. Hopefully this is one environmental disaster that can be solved before it’s too late. Forests aren’t just beautiful to look at as we run or drive through landscapes, in steep areas they’re essential for some degree of erosion prevention, and of course they’re natural habitat for a variety of animals and birds and they play a crucial role in water catchments. Just saying. 

Constantly spectacular back country

And then it began. The Weather.

The sky had greyed up in a metallic and distinctly threatening manner. With beautiful geographic features of raised red scree fields steep and way off to the left, ahead of us were rising fields of grassy green dotted by small alpine bushes. No shelter. Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

BOOM….rumble rumble

GROWL … pummel pummel

At least two different systems were snarling at each other from opposite sides of meadows behind us, chasing us toward the next aid station. Lightning flashes followed rumbling, rolling eruptions of bass across the sky.

I knew we were probably screwed. Even though it was open country, this meadow climb was still messing with us through classic use of false summits – just when you think you’re up, you’ve got to keep climbing.

Soon enough icy rain began to hit us. I pulled my wind jacket out of the front pocket of my jacket and threw it over myself and my pack. It cut the wind-cold somewhat but it was saturated pretty quickly. I still wasn’t sure how soon I’d be at Maggie aid station but decided to keep what little warmer gear I had with me dry until I could change into it under some shelter. I spotted a cave up and to the right but figured it would be a detour and cost extra mileage to get there. Meanwhile the rain was coming in so cold that my right arm felt like it had gone numb. I felt certain that hail was going to happen any minute and just hoped it wouldn’t be golfball sized when it did. Pushing on toward the pass I was finally going downhill, moving with the intention of keeping warm as well as getting to the aid station.

Maggie was visible for a while before finally dropping down toward a cheering crowd of fluoro volunteers and supporters. Hot chocolate and bacon was the name of the game and I switched out of my wet singlet and wind jacket into an Icebreaker merino long sleeve and the ZPacks light cuben fibre/ eVent jacket I had with me. A volunteer loaded me up with ginger beer and Tailwind and I got moving again as the aid station was hit by a heap of runners arriving at the same time. First, through, I dropped my ginger beer soft flask, with the impact causing the gas to come out of carbonation and make the whole thing look set to explode. That would have not been a popular move in a confined space.

As soon as I was out of Maggie and climbing again, the rain basically stopped and I had to take off my jacket and unzip the merino to try to cool off. It’s another first world problem in the mountains – bouncing between hot and cold from exertion and sweat with the added variable of the weather going in any direction at any given moment. I considered pulling wet clothes back out and putting them on to not overheat but dismissed that as a pain in the ass and a stupid idea.

Looking back now as I slowly climbed out of Maggie Gulch I could see the distinctive old school Hardrocker in flame-painted long pants with his desert hat and pale-faced levels of sunscreen. I couldn’t remember his name in this moment but I knew he had multiple finishes and Andy reckoned you could set a watch by the evenness with which he paced the race – so on the one hand I was in good company, but on the other I didn’t want to be passed and spat out the back of the field, so I pushed on.

Rick Hodges heading toward Green Mountain as the storm builds around us.

And then the hail started. It was small, pea-sized stinging pellets, but always with a sense that something more would come, something severe. I took Rick’s cue as he pulled out his jacket and put my own back on as well as our torches. Two other runners were with us. Even though one of them was Mr Ten-Times, he had his hood on and I didn’t recognize him. The other was wearing a clear plastic poncho over her clothing. I thought to myself that she was underprepared for these conditions, then realised I was the only one not wearing rainpants, and felt like maybe I need to shut my head up. Then the world became electrified.

Where we were, light had now gone and the world was metallic shades of black and grey and silver. We were in a natural basin, almost like a crater, with the higher edge above and to our front featuring the pass we needed to climb, 200 metres directly ahead of us, and to our right and left were high uneven ridge lines, each plunging down as it got further from us.

Rick and I were standing at the foot of a natural gravel ramp, dotted with course markers and leading to the highpoint we needed to climb over. A giant crooked handful of lightning fingers exploded and danced across the elevated ridgeline to our right. You could feel the ‘Uh oh…’ in the air between us, a sense that things had just got real. I found out later that somewhere on the course this was probably the moment when Roch Horton was pumping his fist and exclaiming, ‘finally!’.

Yes, finally, the weather had arrived.

And just as I was thinking that maybe we could go up and over while it was off to our right, a different lightning front blasted the pass we needed to head for. Rick said, ‘do you hear that?’

I listened, and quickly became aware of what he meant – water. We could hear the water flowing under, around, and between the pebblebed beneath our feet. Basically, we were standing on a lake, at a high point, in a major multifront electrical storm. Suffice to say, my sphincter clenched.

More flashes across the sky, some general and blocked out by the massive rock formations around us, some as clear as Star Wars explosive laser effects, riffing across the ridgeline, shooting down in sharp rigid bolts off to our right, seemingly below us and behind us. The sky was shaking, the rain kept coming down, time was marching on.

‘Well,’ said Rick, ‘We’ve got until 2am to get through Cunningham’. It was just after 8:30, but this was little comfort. Time aspirations were slipping away but worse still, hazards that might block a finish were mounting.

The benefit of electrocution would be having worse things to worry about than a DNF, but at this point hypothermia and hypoglycaemia were also stacking up as likely issues. Even though the thought of gels at this point was kind of gross, I inhaled the 3 Honey Stingers I’d picked up at Sherman. I was low on carbs and hoped these would get me through whatever we were about to face.

I pulled the short section of space blanket from the front of my pack and with some difficulty in waterproof gloves managed to wrap it around my torso under my shirt, creating an extra layer of insulation for my stomach, liver, and kidneys. Wearing my headtorch and wrapped in foil, I now felt like the most likely superconductor in the area.

‘Shit dude, I’m getting cold,’ I said to Rick.

‘Well we should probably just stay here until this lightning stops.’

This was barely 10 minutes into the storm.

The 2 other runners with us were sensibly sitting over amongst large rocks, probably out of the wind but just as wet and rain-exposed as we were. They barely made a sound – smart and stoic.

‘My wife’s going to be worried for me,’ said Rick, ‘she’s pacing me out of Cunningham and I’m going to be running late.’

I have never experienced a storm quite like that. I have run toward lightning at 3,000m in Northern Italy in the middle of a blizzard in the middle of the night in conditions that left 2 of my fingers half-numb for nearly 4 months, but without a specific sense of sharp indiscriminate bolts of electricity raining down from the sky. This, though, was like warming up the dancefloor in some Planetary Disco of Destruction. It was phenomenal. Every time we thought the last bolt had been discharged in one direction, more would come from a different quarter. Even right after a series of explosions when it seemed like silence was the only possibility, more hot white and explosive blue shards of angled light would tear the atmosphere behind us or in front of us or above us. We were truly in the lap of the gods, understanding what those early Nordic warriors must have experienced to prompt stories of giant hammers and anvils.

And all the while I was bracing myself. Even as I jumped up and down and pounded my hiking poles into the ground to keep muscles firing and stay tolerably warm even as my knees went numb, I knew that of the three options facing me, hypothermia and hypoglycaemia were the ones I could prevent, lightning strike was just going to have to be a coin toss if I was going to be a Hardrocker.

‘How many finishes have you got?’ I asked

’16,’ said Rick, ‘but I’ve never seen it like this.’

Time stretched strangely. Perhaps it was the clash of fatigue with the all-absorbing deadly light show of the moment, but it felt at the same time as though this would go forever, and also as though there was only this moment, this breath, this flash and crackle hanging above and around us in space.

But this was it. This was the full Hardrock. I’d first followed this race from afar in 2011 or 2012, when iRunFar’s coverage reported that runners were pinned down by lightning that had forced some of them to shelter in abandoned mine shafts. I’d thought ‘wow, that sounds awesome’.

Increasingly, I felt the possibility of the finish slipping away. No way was I getting this far to get frozen out or shut down. Rick had checked my pack for my ultralight rain pants, the only way other than running that I was going to get feeling back in my legs, but they didn’t appear. In my lack of clear thinking, I didn’t ask him to dig a little deeper for them but replayed a conversation from Grouse about hanging on to them for the day and rewrote the ending.

Finally, after maybe 45 minutes or more, the lightning died enough that I wanted to go for it. I said to Rick that I was going because the alternatives sucked. He and the other two runners’ torches seemed to follow behind me. I wasn’t 100% sure about getting over this pass although I had at least run back this far from Cunningham when scouting the course, otherwise I wouldn’t have felt so confident about going over it now. Actually, this wasn’t so much about course knowledge as adrenalin and survival.

The view from Green Mountain on a clear day. Not what was happening on race night.

pics by Scott Rokis http://www.scottrokis.com

pics by Scott Rokis http://www.scottrokis.com

pics by Scott Rokis http://www.scottrokis.com

The other torches weren’t moving up as quickly as I had but I could see they were grouped together and even with Rick’s 16 finishes, there was enough experience for them to get down safely. That was my rationalisation as I felt bad for leaving but I had to go or I was going to freeze up.

I promised myself that even though I couldn’t think of this guy’s name, I’d find his wife at the aid station and let her know he was safe and on the way. How? I could call out ‘Who’s waiting for their husband?’. Yeah, because that wouldn’t start a panic.

Maybe, ‘who knows the guy with flames on his pants? Dresses like a hiker? Desert hat and too much sunscreen? Anybody?’ Yeah, because that didn’t sound totally crazy. This was what was going through my head as I ran the long flowing line down toward the final aid station of the race. Looking quickly over my shoulder I could see that the others were almost out of sight far behind now. I just had to concentrate and not stack the run down. I was thinking about dry socks, warm clothes, maybe lying in the car until I felt like I had a pulse again. I was thinking about hot food, and Little Giant. 3.5km with an 850 metre climb? That would be a piece of piss after this. Science just tried to kill us and failed, gravity had no chance of stopping this train now.

Hitting the final ridge close to the aid stations but before the switchbacks cut back toward the aid station I hurled a couple of ‘Cooo-eeee!’ into the valley so that Hailey and the crew might hear and know I was on the way. Down and on to the final diagonals of the descent I could see torches opposite on their way up Little Giant, uncertainly stabbing about in the dark like on the final big climb of UTMB, where you can almost see runners in the dark from a couple of kilometres away looking up then down than up again as they think ‘f___ no!’.

Turned back now toward the final run down into the gulch, picking my way over rocky gaps and slippery sections of single track I heard a ‘cooo-eeee!’ from below. That had to be Hailey. I called back and then heard the excitement of crew and volunteers waiting below.

Always classy when it’s warranted I shouted down, ‘How about that f—ing lightning?!?!’ It was definitely awesome being on the other side of it now. You can’t feel much more alive than when you really put yourself out there and sense a real possibility of being wiped off the planet while playing the game you love.

Getting in to Cunningham felt like a reboot. I was warm enough now that I no longer had any thoughts of an emergency lie-down or warm-up. Hailey and Jill and Larnie and now Amanda, our other friend from California, marched me into the aid tent for warmth, food and supplies. Just as we were getting there I met Rick’s wife. The conversation was a lot quicker and easier than expected.

‘Is that your man up there with the flame paintings on his hiking pants?’

Job done. Where’s the soup?

Mal and Sal Law were here too now, although I think I may have been a bit delirious and not registered faces properly immediately. Mal was rearing to go and pace Andy. I was hoping Andy would be in soon, having not known whether or not he’d made it out of Grouse in any kind of good shape.

As always, awesome aid station volunteers. Any time I’d recovered on the highly motivated run down was blown on the sit down, but this felt like the finish was locked in now. I sculled my first Coke of the whole race. We just had to get over Little Giant without being shock-blocked by lightning again.

Hailey jumped in now to pace me. In her own training she’d run the section out of Cunningham up Little Giant and down in to Silverton in a bit under 3 hours. Now we just ground it out. I tried to start the climb at about the same pace I expected to finish it and just keep grinding. A dude blew past me wishing us luck. We passed him what seemed like a few minutes later, doubled over on the side of the trail making noises as if he was trying to projectile vomit his entire digestive system.

‘He might have gone a bit too hard,’ said Hails, cautioning against a similar result. Sure enough, I was making marmot mating sounds soon too, pausing only long enough to point out with amusement that there was a piece of carrot, which Hailey dutifully photographed. Seriously, I hadn’t eaten any carrot in at least 24 hours. I also noticed that the Coke and chicken must have been fully digested because all that kept it company now was noodles. Noodles and I just don’t get on.

The grind kept going. The moon emerged from the mountain top behind us, eery and oversized. While we paused at one point, we felt chills run up our skin from the sound of a rockslide on the adjacent slope. It was something like bottles tipping over and over each other, with no sense of what started it or when it would stop. Coming out of complete mysterious darkness, it was a sonic experience that left us on edge but kind of thrilled by nature.

Finally we got to the top, across the narrow neck to the other side and on to the single track descent toward the jeep road. We weren’t totally alone but we were also kind of oblivious to other runners at this point – not in a shabby way, just in a very brief friendly conversation then back to complete focus on not slipping off the mountainside kind of way. I’d developed some kind of mad clumsy superpower, where I would just totally overbalance and pull a miracle save at the last second. We’re talking one pole jammed between two rocks and one foot up in the air with a 180 twist, then a reverse footslide with a single hand rock grab. I had no idea what the hell I was doing but at least Hailey was entertained. After all, I’d just taken the same amount of time to get up Little Giant as it had taken her to get the whole way to Silverton in training.

Once again, a jeep road was being sworn at and having its ancestry questioned. And then I was just on autopilot. Hailey narrated faultlessly every turn and feature that was coming our way. Nothing seemed like it had when I’d done this section in training but, yeah, sure, let’s just get there.

Lucky we had plenty of time to get finished now, because I burned some of it doubled over leaning into my poles at the side of the trail, dry heaving like a champion. Bridge, single track, green stuff, tree roots. It all just blended together.

‘How’s the time? Just after 3?’ Yep, not going to break 45 with a sprint from here, let’s roll it in.

And then we were in Silverton. Leaving the forest edge we crossed the bridge into town. ‘What about those two guys up ahead, do we turn there?’ I asked.

‘I don’t see anyone,’ said Hailey, as we came to a lamppost and a stop sign.

And then we were turning into the final street, the final two blocks.

‘You wanna run now?’ Yeah, sure, what’s the worst that could happen?

And then there were happy noises, and we were in the best goddamned finishing chute in America, and I don’t care if it’s a bighorn sheep, because to me he’ll always be a goat. And I kissed the rock.

Out of nowhere a tall guy in a yellow jacket appeared next to me. A moment of non-recognition and then realising it was Dale Garland. I warned him that I was probably a bit stinky and then gave him a big hug, suddenly everybody was there. Jill, and Amanda and Larnie with Andy’s Australian flag. I’m not big on flag waving at all but I really felt a heap of pride, knowing from what Andy said that only 5 Aussies have previously become Hardrockers. Bookending Dale with Hailey we got photos and then got the whole team in.

So much had gone into this moment – months of committed solitude in training and necessarily some big weekends spent apart from Hailey, regular discussions with my coach Andy Dubois from Mile 27 to keep me on track in preparing properly, strength sessions prepped by Andy and Hailey and with input from my awesome physio Aideen Osborne (Integral Physiotherapy), regular physio sessions with Aideen straightening me up, plus deep tissue from Faye LeHane at Bioathletic after big ugly weekends, and HOKA ONE ONE Australia as my workplace, friends, and major gear supporter, alongside nutrition support from Gavin at Tailwind and Andy at Gu. The advice from Andy Hewat about how to prepare for the race by getting fit, then really putting in the time to train specifically on arrival in Colorado made a massive difference, as did the time acclimatising with Beat and Jill.

And after all this, Wardian’s working the kitchen making us coffee. He’d had some time to rest after his afternoon finish the day before. Dayum, it’s why we call him Wolverine.

Definitely pre-race

With barely 6 minutes to go, Hailey called out from the turn 2 blocks down. Andy was coming! Holy shit, this was going to be close. Like a distant grey snowball gathering momentum and mass, Andy appeared in the middle distance, headtorch still bright, running at a possessed gallop. Mal was beside him, then Hailey, Sal,  Larnie, everyone between Andy and the finish line joined him in his dash to become a 5-time finisher and veteran. His world was a pinhole of goat-shaped light as he focussed in on making it to the finish. The emotion was electric for everyone who had turned out for this, all connected by the joy of an impossible achievement. With barely 2 minutes to go, on his knees with face pressed to the stone, Andy Hewat completed the run from Cunningham to Silverton in just over 4 hours to become the final official Hardrock finisher for 2018.

After 100 miles and nearly the full 48 hours allowed, after 4 previous finishes, after hours of being unable to eat, and outlasting the most brutal electrical storm most of the other veterans had ever seen, Andy had rallied. With the help of his family and a good mate, he fought back against odds that would have seen most people quit. He literally had to fight the rising sun to make the impossible happen, and to the cheering of people who hadn’t shared a step of his journey but could all feel what it had taken him to get home, Andy kissed the rock for a fifth time. The moment was as electric as anything we’d lived through the night before.

Thank you Silverton. Thank you Hardrock. Thank you all volunteers, organisers, food prep crews, aid station operators, course markers, kitchen managers, trail crews, runners, crews, and supporters. There’s nothing quite like this. Wild and Tough.

I was on Virgin Atlantic flight VS206 on the weekend from Heathrow to Hong Kong, connecting with CATHAY PACIFIC CX111 from Hong Kong to Sydney. I have had no reply yet from VIRGIN ATLANTIC or CATHAY PACIFIC. Here is the text of the complaint I have sent to them both. In addition to the $AU1700 I had already spent on my fare, by the behaviour of these airlines’ respective staff members I was forced to pay an additional $AU1500 or face not being able to get home. I have never had such an absolutely appalling experience from any airline. Staff member names have been changed for their privacy.

Wednesday August 1st 2018.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN at
VIRGIN ATLANTIC,
VIRGIN AUSTRALIA
CATHAY PACIFIC HONG KONG
CATHAY PACIFIC AUSTRALIA
and associated air travel regulatory bodies

Over the weekend I had the most disempowering, traumatic, baffling, and disgusting air travel experience of my life at the hands of VIRGIN ATLANTIC and CATHAY PACIFIC.
I have travelled the world by air extensively over the last seven years – USA, Chile, Argentina, France, Switzerland, Egypt, China, New Zealand, etc. – and I have never ever been so absolutely mistreated by an air carrier who having been paid for the simple service of transportation instead abandoned me in a foreign country, denied any responsibility for my situation, and forced me to buy a full fare with another carrier in order to make it back home within any reasonable timeframe.

1. I hold VIRGIN ATLANTIC responsible for making a clerical error when I checked in at Heathrow.
2. I hold CATHAY PACIFIC responsible for exploitative, deceitful and abusive practices in disrupting my check-in procedure in HONG KONG.
3. I hold VIRGIN in HONG KONG responsible for misrepresenting my situation and providing absolutely no assistance when VIRGIN’s initial error at Heathrow gave CATHAY an excuse to try to extort $US1200 from me.
4. Once CATHAY blocked me from checking in in HONG KONG, VIRGIN provided absolutely no assistance of any merit.
5. After my bags were removed from the CATHAY flight which I was booked to retun home on, CATHAY PACIFIC’s departure area desk in HONG KONG claimed that they could not do anything to help me as they could not access my booking and I would have to deal with VIRGIN.
6. I had no reasonable option other than to then buy, late on Sunday night (29/6/18) a direct flight from HONG KONG to SYDNEY with QANTAS for approximately $AUD1500.

I want a full refund of the flight which CATHAY PACIFIC staff prevented me from boarding even though I had a booking, was at the Transfer desk an hour ahead of check-in closing, and had paid for my luggage to go through to Sydney. I want a written acknowledgment of unacceptable treatment by CATHAY PACIFIC desk staff and an apology from CATHAY PACIFIC.

I want a written acknowledgment of error, an apology, and appropriate, adequate compensation from VIRGIN given their ultimate responsibility for the human error made by their staff when checking my luggage at Heathrow and the complete lack of assistance provided in HONG KONG when this whole issue could have been prevented from escalating to the extreme outcome experienced.

I will explain in full what happened as I have had no direct assistance from either airline in question even though I have asked VIRGIN to contact me and I have asked CATHAY PACIFIC for who to contact for customer relations assistance in Australia and Hong Kong and globally but received absolutely no reply after more than 48 hours.

On the afternoon of Saturday July 28, 2018 I went to Heathrow Terminal 1 to board a flight back to Sydney via Hong Kong after close to a month of travel through Colorado and London. My confirmation number for the London to Hong Kong booking was TRLKEF. I had a large rucksack, large wheeled duffelbag, a sausage bag commonly used as cabin luggage, and a very small backpack for my computer and sundries.
The weights of the two larger bags respectively was 16.8kg and 23.4kg, while the weight of the sausage bag was 11.7kg (total 51.9kg). I did not know these weights at the time but they are relevant to know, given what happened when I ultimately tried to deal with CATHAY PACIFIC in HONG KONG. My tickets for both London to Hong Kong and Hong Kong to Sydney allowed for checking in 2 23kg bags.

At Heathrow Terminal 1, Counter 25 or 26 I asked about the price of checking a third bag. I could have simply carried this bag on to the plane and put it in the overhead compartment as I usually do but the trip had been long and I wondered whether I could easily just check the bag and pick it up again in Sydney. The VIRGIN counter staff member told me that he wasn’t sure whether it would be ̵ £65 or £140 but he would check for me. He then told me it would be £65. I asked if this would mean the bag going straight through to Sydney and not having to collect it in Hong Kong and he confirmed that yes, £65 would get me a third checked bag sent straight through to Sydney. I said that would be great and checked my 3 bags. He gave me a card with a written note on it and sent me along to the end counter, number 30 I think, where another Virgin staff member took the card from me, spoke back and forth with the first staff member, and then took £65 payment from me for the 3rd bag to go through to Sydney.

I did the usual stuff – security, the lounge, boarded the plane (Virgin Atlantic Flight 206), and had no further cause for concern until reaching HONG KONG and proceeding to the CATHAY PACIFIC international transfers counter. The flight into HONG KONG had landed shortly before its scheduled arrival time of 4:55pm on the afternoon of Sunday July 29. As part of the same booking, TRLKEF (GoToGate KMBR83), I was meant to be catching CATHAY PACIFIC flight CX111 from HONG KONG to Sydney at 6:55pm. I had left myself plenty of time between flights and made sure they were part of the same booking in case either was delayed or rescheduled at all. So far, everything was normal enough.
But then at the CATHAY PACIFIC transfers desk I was immediately treated poorly by staff.

The first staff member that I spoke to was CATHAY STAFF 1. She told me that there was a problem with my baggage because of excess weight. I explained that I had a third bag that I had paid for to be checked right through to Sydney when I went to the Virgin counter at Heathrow. She said that no, the bag weight was 60kg in total and that I was only allowed 30kg, and that the excess weight fee would be $US40 per kilogram. Immediately working out that this would be $US1200 I told her that I had paid for the extra bag to be sent to Sydney already. She told me that I had only paid Virgin, that I had not paid Cathay for the extra weight, and that at this point in the process, Cathay would not be able to accept payment per piece of luggage but only per weight. I repeated that I had paid for the bag to be sent through to Sydney. At this point, when I showed by baggage slip from Heathrow and flipped the receipt (AUTH: 821929 AID: A0000000031010) out of the way, I was dismayed to see that HKG and not SYD was typed on the pass in small letters. I told her that this was a mistake and that I had paid Virgin to send the bag to Sydney but they had obviously entered it wrongly.

CATHAY STAFF 1 then called VIRGIN, whose representative VIRGIN STAFF 1 said that I had only paid for the luggage to be sent to HONG KONG. I said that yes, that is what the staff member for Virgin at Heathrow appeared to have mistakenly entered into the system, but that this was not what I had asked for or paid for, and that I had asked about the price of sending my bag through to Sydney and that I had paid for my bag to be sent through to Sydney and that Virgin staff at Heathrow had told me that my bag was being sent through to Sydney.

CATHAY PACIFIC Desk Manager CATHAY STAFF 2 then became involved. She and CATHAY STAFF 1 had been talking to each other about me and looking at me but doing little to acknowledge anything I was saying. They just insisted that it would be $US1200 for my bags to stay on the plane. CATHAY STAFF 2 asked me to wait to one side. Staff were not helpful at all. I did not know what was happening, other than that they were waiting to hear back from VIRGIN. After close to 20 minutes, the phone went and it was VIRGIN STAFF 1 from VIRGIN. He spoke to me and told me that I had only paid for the third checked bag to be sent to HONG KONG. I told him that I had asked staff at Heathrow about the price of sending the bag to Sydney, that I had paid for the bag to be sent to Sydney and that I had been told by Virgin staff that the bag was being sent through to Sydney. He was no help.

I asked CATHAY STAFF 2 if I could see her supervisor. She said that she was the supervisor and that no, I could not talk to anyone else. It was now shortly after 6pm. I had shown CATHAY STAFF 2 my original booking from months ago guaranteeing me 2 23kg checked bags with CATHAY PACIFIC. She then said that by subtracting 46kg from 60kg and multiplying by $US40 I could agree to pay $US560 if I wanted to get on the plane but I had less than a minute to say yes. I said that this was ridiculous and that I had already paid for my bag. She said that they were going to close check-in and not let me on the plane. I had had no help at this point from CATHAY PACIFIC or VIRGIN AIRWAYS. I took out my phone and put it on video record mode and asked her to say that again please because I wanted proof of what CATHAY staff were doing to me. She covered her face and cancelled my check-in. I have never felt so completely at a loss as to what went wrong, and I have never been so badly treated by an airline. I paid for a ticket, I paid for my luggage, staff tried to extort $US1200 from me, when on reflection if we look at the actual weight of the checked bags even without taking into account the payment when I checked in at Heathrow for an extra bag, they were in fact 5.9kg over the 46kg originally paid for with CATHAY PACIFIC.

I was told to wait for a VIRGIN staff member. At this point I was in shock. A VIRGIN staff member appeared and walked me downstairs to the VIRGIN desk. Here I met VIRGIN STAFF 1. He spoke quickly and aggressively to me. I said to him, “I am not stupid, and you are not stupid,” to which he replied in an agitated manner, “Don’t call me stupid, if you’re calling me stupid…”. So I corrected him, “No no, please listen to what I’m saying – I am not stupid, and you are not stupid. With us both being not stupid, I’ll bet $US1200 that we still can’t come up with any sensible reason why I would have possibly paid Virgin at Heathrow for my bag to only go as far as HONG KONG. Why would I possibly take a bag that I could carry into the cabin for no charge and check it in for £65 to only go as far as Hong Kong so that I can be charged enough for an additional economy class seat to get it to Sydney?” I think that once we were eye to eye and that I was explaining to him that I had paid Virgin staff at Heathrow for my third bag to be sent through to Sydney, and that somebody had made a mistake by only entering the bag as shipping to Hong Kong, I think he actually sensed that a mistake had been made. But he asked me to wait to one side and that he would get back to me.

I stood waiting for some time but it was starting to get late and nothing was being done to help me at all. I went to the bathroom and changed my shirt as I’d already been in transit now for what felt like close to 20 hours. When I came back, VIRGIN STAFF 1 had printed off a list of flights back to Sydney over the next couple of days using a system called Amadeus. He came around the counter and spoke to me and told me that my checked bags had been put out in the baggage collection area on carousel 8. He said that I might be able to get a better priced flight back to Sydney if I booked something online. He also said that paying for extra baggage only covers it going from port to port. But this made no sense to me. If this is an internal industry practise, how or why would a paying member of the public know about it, and why wouldn’t staff at Heathrow say so. All of this just added to the incredible, jarring frustration of being absolutely disrupted by a system that couldn’t seem to acknowledge that it was in error. I didn’t want to be stuck in Hong Kong overnight as the next day was Monday and I had specifically made bookings with the intention of being back in Sydney by Monday morning for work.

I went through the process of filling in an immigration declaration, and collecting my bags from the luggage area. They had CX111 tags on them indicating that they had been either on the flight that I had booked or ready to go on to the flight that I had booked, and tags indicating that they had been selected for removal as well. They were sitting by the carousel and I don’t know at this point how long they had been sitting there. I put them on a trolley and found my way to the Departures desks. When I went to the CATHAY PACIFIC desk and told them that I had paid for a CATHAY PACIFIC flight back to Sydney but been interfered with by CATHAY staff and I wanted a replacement flight back to Sydney, they apparently tried to look up the booking but then said that it was with Virgin and that they couldn’t help me and I would have to speak to Virgin.

By this point it was getting late on Sunday evening, I had to get back home, almost all other flights to Sydney over the next 24 hours looked like taking about 20 or more hours and featuring additional stops, plus I had received nothing that felt like help from VIRGIN in Hong Kong so far. I went to the QANTAS desk and asked if they could squeeze me on to a flight home. I bought a ticket on QF155 for about $AUD1500 and taking my sausage bag with me as cabin luggage I had to pay an excess baggage fee for my two checked bags, an additional $HK1050 – significantly less than the $US1200 that CATHAY PACIFIC staff demanded.

Eventually I got my flight home with QANTAS.

I have tried to contact both CATHAY PACIFIC and VIRGIN about this through direct messaging and have been completely ignored by CATHAY and have not had meaningful direct assistance from VIRGIN.

This has been an absolutely terrible experience, and I believe CATHAY PACIFIC’s staff conducted themselves in a manner that was unethical, immoral, shameful and possibly unlawful. I believe that what might have been simple employee error in the first instance by VIRGIN ATLANTIC staff at Heathrow was compounded by irresponsible, unhelpful, and ignorant behaviour of VIRGIN staff in HONG KONG.

I will continue to send this communication to the relevant airlines and any associated regulatory bodies and related parties until this matter had been addressed in full.

Roger Hanney

There’s a catchy title hey? The Fasting Mimicking Diet, or FMD, has been researched and developed by Dr. Valter Longo. It is less of a diet and more of an intervention. By restricting caloric intake and managing macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, fats etc) within a particular ratio, the practitioner (you, if you’re giving this a go) triggers certain beneficial stress responses in the body.

I first heard of this intervention by listening to Longo on Rhonda Patrick’s Found My Fitness podcast. I highly recommend the audio over the video, perfect for a run or long drive. Her conversation with Joe Rogan was the first time I’d heard of her, and I’ve listened to her regularly since.

And here is Patrick’s first interview with Longo, laying the basis for his research approach back in 2016.

The basic principle is this – given that the human body displays many beneficial regenerative processes during prolonged fasting (more than 3 days), and given that we’re seeing a global epidemic of ill health especially in westernized civilizations, it is possible that the body has evolved over a very long time to benefit from a recurring limited availability or intake of food that has only become a non-occurrence within a very short period of time, relative to human existence.

But, fasting on only water for much more than a day has a very low compliance rate. Even in patients who are out of options, Longo found that adherence to prescribed 5-day fasts was low. That’s right, people are less scared of dying than of missing out on chocolate.

So he developed the FMD as a way to achieve the physical benefits of a fast without the total suffering and inconvenience of zero food for 5 days.

“Alright, I’m interested, but what are these benefits?” you ask. Great question.

Essentially – reduced inflammation throughout the body, reduced insulin resistance (these two go together almost always), reported doubling of stem cells (see The Longevity Diet, Longo), renewal of high per centre of white cells, weight loss.

Those are the least complex immediate benefits and more than enough reason to want to try the process for yourself, whatever your state of health. The FMD is recommended as a twice yearly act of maintenance for people in good health and something that can be done 6 – 12 times a year by people with deeper health issues ranging from type 2 diabetes to much more serious conditions. In The Longevity Diet, Longo details the benefits of the FMD when used in conjunction with chemotherapy with some statistically significant results.

Longo explains the action of the FMD on the body with an analogy about ancient armies. Paraphrasing, if the Carthaginian army were to fight the Roman army it would be hard to tell them apart because of similar uniforms. However, explains Longo, if someone were to shout ‘Kneel down!’ in Latin, the Romans would understand and drop to one knee, leaving the Carthaginians exposed to arrows (chemo) fired by archers (doctors). Healthy cells in the body react to the FMD by shielding themselves, whereas deranged or dead cells are left exposed and easily identified by processes of regeneration or elimination.

For myself, the idea that autoimmune conditions have been genetically existent for millennia but only really exploded in the last century was novel. This was probably the trigger that made me want to try the FMD. Also, breaking my finger in a trail-running stuff-up on Boxing Day, more stem cells sounded like a great idea. Longo’s notion that periods of sustained not eating are something the body has evolved to, not only benefit from, but also need for healthy maintenance is a compelling hypothesis.

Originally I was going to get hold of the PROLON meal kit that has 5 days worth of food, exactly the same as the meal kits used in clinical settings by Longo and his team. But when I was referred to the Australian supplier they weren’t just out of stock, they require a doctor’s note if you tell them that you have any kind of health condition. They did not respond positively to being told that for someone selling low calorie mealboxes they could really try act less like someone’s intrusive parent. My general tip would be to try not patronising self-reliant people with your cliched perception of their health condition and see how far that gets you.

So, having saved $USD250 I went with Plan B. (Most of this money goes into a healing and research oriented foundation which is great, but I also think the pricing is oriented toward the affluent ‘I wanna live beautiful forever’ west coast US market). Talking with Kerry Suter from Squadrun about how he had done the FMD on his own terms I settled on a basic meal plan. Kerry’s golden nugget of advice was to create a white list of things I would eat rather than a blacklist of things I couldn’t eat. This mental approach is, I think, key to being successful with as little stress as possible in undertaking the FMD. Daily, I would put my intended food intake into the MyFitnessPal app (thanks for tips and other great tips Hailey) and make sure it was close to 700kCal for the day.

Taken from The Longevity Diet by Dr Valter Longo, this is the definitive overview of what goes into the FMD. Buy the book, it’s an invaluable resource full of useful advice and beautifully expressed insight.

Longo’s FMD calls for 1100kCal as a way to ease in on day one and then 800kCal days 2-5, with sensible and gradual reintroduction of higher calorie meals from day 6 onward. But by setting my daily goal at 700kCal it was easy to not go over the recommended intake and jeopardise the total benefits that only really start to kick in from Day 3. Day 1 was physically challenging, with a growling stomach well aware of how much I wasn’t eating. Day 2 was more about the distraction of food billboards and pictures of meals online. After that it was actually easy.

Other elements of Vongo’s research also reinforce, mentally, the value of the process. Two groups, one which undertook a 5-day FMD, one on a standard diet, were given the same amount of total calories over a month. The group that had undertaken the FMD lost more weight than the one that hadn’t. A commonsense interpretation would simply be that the intervention restores certain processes in the body so that it works better after the FMD than before.

Listening to Satchin Panda discuss circadian rhythms and their impact on health, from Day 3 I also kept my eating within a 10-hour window from first non-water mouthful of the day to last. Longo is anti-coffee but I did go with short black decafs that I don’t think did any harm. The tocopherols in decaf apparently stimulate autophagy (cleaning up by the body of dead or broken cells) so I felt like that was a beneficial compromise between what I wanted to have and what I wasn’t meant to.

Meal intake was essentially
Breakfast: half a can of organic lentils with half a medium avocado and a teaspoon of olive or coconut oil, plus multivitamin and Omega-3 capsule.
Daytime: 45-50g raw cashews, plenty of water, and a constantly present thermos of peppermint or ginger-lemon tea.
Evening: half a bag of Pitango pumpkin and ginger soup, sometimes with a ripped up handful of kale for extra fibre

Day 1 – weight 93kg
Day 5 – first run of the week (I didn’t want to jeopardise the experiment by going hypo early in the process by having to take in extra calories). 8km run/walk on treadmill with incline over 65min. Energy felt consistent, steady sugars, not even hungry afterward, ate first food of day 2 hours later. Same on Day 6.
Day 6 – 87.5kg. Beginning of crucial refeeding and recovery process.

3 weeks later – weight holding steady at 89kg.

Running during FMD

I chose not to run during the main period of the FMD, because I didn’t want to get to day 3 when things were finally starting to happen and have to scoff jelly snakes in the middle of a forest somewhere just to be able to make it home, having also disrupted the entire process only to have to start again.

I did run on treadmill on Day 5. Straight out of bed, unfed, on a 4% incline I ran/walked about 8km in 65 minutes. There was no feeling of tiredness in the body, and as expected joints were actually quite open and moving well. This is a typical observation during a multi day fast. Sugars slowly began to increase after about 45 minutes (more likely 25 minutes, Freestyle Libre is the best option in my world for measuring sugars but needs to be used with an understanding that the number on the screen reflects what sugars were a quarter of an hour ago, and that trends mean more than single values). I felt no need to eat until 2 hours after running. It’s interesting listening to Rhonda Patrick that the whole idea of needing to get protein into the body within a narrow window right after training has also now been debunked.

Day 6 also featured a morning treadmill run, fasted from sleeping. I added faster intervals, 300-400m at 14-18km/h, punctuated by hiking and jogging. The total time and distance for the session was the same as for Day 5. I sweated profusely early but did not feel any degree of unwillingness from my tissues to suffer. If anything I was conscious that the core work I did last year leading up to Hardrock 100 has been badly neglected and needs a revisit. Again, sugars climbed in the latter section of the run, on the basis of monitor lag, adrenalin, and Levemir diminishing with passing of time.

Training fasted, especially exerting and suffering fasted, has been identified as a beneficial stressor, increasing mitochondrial efficiency. I could finally understand our friend Andy Hewat’s commitment to long fasted morning runs, and will be including this approach in my training from now on. Metabolising natural fat stores requires less water than digesting and metabolising carbohydrate, so there is a decrease in thirst before carbs or introduced and also from blood sugars not rising to the level that every type 1 recognises as a cottony and unquenchable thirst.

Levemir intake during Fasting Mimicking Diet starting 7/1/19

Day 1 5u morning, 4u evening

Day 2 3u morning, 2u evening

Day 3 2u morning, less than 2u evening

Day 4 1u morning, less than 2u evening

Day 5 less than 2u morning, less than 2u evening

Insulin intake was tapered off during the week with sugars becoming increasingly stable. Typically I take 10 to 20 units of Levemir as basal insulin per day with anything from 12 to 30 units of Novorapid. By the end of the week I was on 3-5 units of Levemir maximum with 4-6 units of Novorapid during the day and sugars almost entirely flat between 5 and 7 mmol/L (multiply that by 18 if reading this in the US).

Besides weight loss and increased insulin sensitivity, I also saw the elimination of puffiness in my left ankle. This had been going on for some time and is par for the course with long running and probably also with getting older. I think that doing something restorative for the body as a whole and in particular the lymphatic system contributed to this, and inflammation has not returned.

Kerry – possibly using another Longo analogy, talks about a steam train with engine problems struggling to make it to the next station. By ripping up the old chairs and tables and rotten window frames from various carriages and burning them alongside coal, the train can make it to its next stop where it gets fitted with fresh furnishings and can set out renewed. This is simply what the body does when directed to recycle its own failing tissues, with resultant regeneration.

I’ve had no previous experience of broken bones but after a medical registrar told me my finger would take longer to heal because of diabetes (this is also someone who did not identify themselves as a registrar, leading me to believe they were a qualified specialist until we went to book a follow-up appointment, ha! – always check on that stuff) the physio 4 weeks later would tell me that I had actually healed very quickly. Possibly a coincidence, but…

In short, the Fasting Mimicking Diet is – in my opinion, obviously – a great tool for improving health in a number of ways. There are immediate benefits that are physically observable, but also the way that I thought about food – often absentmindedly grazing or eating totally denatured junk food – changed during and after the process. It’s strange that so many people feel comfortable with what can easily amount to over-medication or radical interventions like surgery, but flinch hard at the idea of restricted calorie intake in order to kick off natural and well documented beneficial health processes.

For fatigued long runners, type 1 diabetics, and anyone not happy with the way their body is working I would definitely recommend the FMD. I’m looking forward to a second round in March and a third in May, as Hardrock 2019 draws closer.

(this is here in case you’re a type 1 or dealing with diabetes and specifically interested in how blood sugars on low insulin and almost no exercise reacted to the FMD with the insulin and food intakes described above).

After a career engaged in “wheel to wheel combat” Mark Webber, the most recognised Australian Formula One driver of the modern era recently founded a new Aussie clothing brand.

He’s a chiseled, gutsy, straight-shooting success story. And he wants to talk about tights.

Getting off the canvas is most of the rules.

More specifically he wants to talk about putting tights, and jackets, and shorts and shirts on any Aussie who embraces the joys of our great outdoors. In particular, we’re talking about an event that will clash with the timing of the upcoming federal election and rival it for sheer amount of dirt thrown – Ultra-Trail Australia.

As 20,000 spectators and trailrunning competitors from all corners of Australia, and the globe, converge on Sydney’s Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Webber couldn’t be more excited. One of the biggest events of its kind anywhere in the world, UTA100 (so named for the pinnacle event of the festival being a 100km mountain run) will be the first major event partnership for Webber’s clothing brand.

His plucky new Aussie sports label will be front and centre in Katoomba from May 16 to May 19 as dreams, hamstrings, and hearts are built and broken across the sandstone canyons and eucalypt forests of one of Australia’s most iconic adventure and travel destinations.

Taking its name from his Twitter handle and 2015 autobiography, Webber’s Aussie Grit Apparel specializes in hard wearing, high quality men’s and women’s sporting gear for trail running, mountain biking, and triathlon, from elite performers to self-identified weekend warriors, like Webber himself. A youth spent outdoors adventuring around his hometown of Queanbeyan planted a passion that he has returned to, now the smoke of brake pads has cleared.

“I’m not a gym guy at all and I did 90% of my conditioning and work outside,” says Webber over a tinny phone line from Europe. “I loved the outdoors when I was training for my sport, and I continue to love the outdoors.”

In car racing, the glamour is unmissable and the punishment invisible. The forces in the fastest cars on the planet can make drivers suddenly weigh half a tonne.

Webber recounts a situation where sports scientists reviewed mystery blood samples without knowing what kind of athletes they’d come from. “This guy has been absolutely pasted! What sport is it?” the scientists exclaimed, giving up on the guessing game. But, he explains, “they just never ever expected it to be Formula 1.”

Still lean now at 80kg, for his 18 years as a professional driver his job was to keep his 183cm frame weighing just 73kg. In 1,000 scheduled days of racing, testing and practise, he only ever missed two days at the wheel.

no one gets nervous going to get the groceries, because you know what’s going to happen.

Asked about the people who inspired not just his career, but his approach to his career, Webber says these people weren’t just special, they were Special Forces.

“I had it drummed into me what kind of discipline was needed for them to get their job done, and I tried to encapsulate that into my profession.”

Given the chance to mention being physically and mentally conditioned by elite British operators, one could easily exude braggadocio. But instead, there’s an unaffected pragmatism.

He jokes with his world famous tennis friends that their sport is the opposite of his. Drivers are hidden behind helmets and fuselage. But with new camera technologies beaming the physical exertions of tennis stars worldwide, from the strain on their faces to the kicked up sand blasting from their feet and their performance literally centre court, it’s clear that every shot takes them closer to catastrophe.

“But at worst,” says Webber, “if something goes wrong there’s no real consequences for them, they just lose the match. They don’t go sliding down the road at 350km/h.”

It could seem like a famous figure is just partnering with a small group of local co-owners to lend his name to a clothing line to boost sales. He doesn’t need to work another day in his life, so why take a chance with a new business? But Webber has actively promoted gritty outdoor action since the turn of the century.

With some mates, he set up the Mark Webber Tasmanian Challenge in 2003 as a chance for off-season fitness and fun. It grew into a legendary multisport adventure race.

He concedes that “the first one we did was extremely optimistic”, but doesn’t specify that it involved a blistering 1,000km of kayaking, mountain biking and running within just 10 days.

This background is perhaps why he has both an easy affinity and abiding respect for Ultra-Trail Australia creators and Race Directors, Alina McMaster and Tom Landon-Smith. They themselves came from a world-beating heritage of extreme endurance and adventure racing.

When they launched what would evolve into a uniquely Australian festival of trail running just over a decade ago, the couple sent 160 runners on a 100km adventure, supported by just 30 volunteers. That number has now swollen massively, with nearly a thousand volunteers and more than 12,000 supporters cheering over 7,000 runners competing (and partying) across five different distances, with the ultimate still being 100km.

Renowned for attention to detail – Landon-Smith has a reputation for sleeping four hours per night for months on end as he personally answers thousands of emailed questions from runners – this family business recently kicked what many would consider a winning goal. They sold their startup to IRONMAN, the world’s biggest events company and an absolute giant in the world of high end endurance sports.

Understanding how rare such success stories and major opportunities for explosive growth really are, Webber is officially “stoked to be associated with UTA and IRONMAN in such an early phase of our business”.

Such partnerships and success for Aussie Grit feel almost inevitable. The way that Webber speaks about meticulous preparation, discipline and relentless commitment is reminiscent of the way that many people discuss their favourite footie team – with passion and an implicit lack of interest in any alternative.

“You’re not going to win every time you go out and that absolutely comes with the territory, whether you’re Roger Federer or Michael Jordan”, says Webber, discussing the challenge of giving everything but not always winning the day.

“It’s part of top flight sport that you’re going to have some adversity and that’s crucial. You have to have some adversity and that’s why it’s crucial now that everyone shouldn’t get a ribbon for 6^th, 7^th, 8^thplace – because of the resilience factor of being able to learn, that whatever the circumstances are, the fire has to be there to be able to bounce back.

“Getting off the canvas is most of the rules. There were people (in Formula One) who maybe didn’t have the career they could have or should have, because the canvas was a comfier place for them. That’s no place for the people that have long careers. Theywant to get back up.”

It’s evident that Webber will never echo the hollow repetition of other people’s inspirational quotes or share photos of sunsets that he wasn’t witness to. Because he has a lived experience that eclipses that of almost anyone around him.

What can compete with tales of plunging blind into a greasy mist at over 300km/h, ears straining for the telltale acoustic warnings of imminent collision or a meaningful sudden change in engine frequencies?

“You get nervous before the race and that’s great. I lovethose nerves. That’s the purpose and that’s why you’re there – no one gets nervous going to get the groceries, because you know what’s going to happen.

“‘Here we go, grab what you want, drive home’. When you’re doing something, the unknown is healthy. The unknown is healthy and testing yourself in something where you don’t know what’s going to happen is very very different.”

And maybe this is also why the guy on the other end of the phone from Europe has thrown his hat in the ring with a startup.

From day one, Webber proposed the Aussie Grit Apparel concept as being something fiercely tough, active, and Australian – character traits he also sees in Ultra-Trail. From design to materials selection and first production, he has embedded himself in the process. This globetrotting World Champion has flown from Europe back home to Australia 85 times that he can remember, and at least a couple of those trips have been just to spend time with local runners that are now supporting his brand.

Just like lovers of adventure and the Aussie outdoors have embraced Ultra-Trail Australia as a wildly successful homegrown running festival, Webber hopes Aussies will embrace his own homegrown spirit of adventure (and outdoor gear) the same way that he has always embraced them.

Visit www.AussieGritApparel.comto see what Mark and his team have been up to, and visit www.UltraTrailAustralia.com.auto see their gear in filthy, sweaty action.

(Originally written prior to Ultra-Trail Australia as part of freelance writing contribution for UTA media team.)

You’ve done a 200km mountain run in September, you’ve knocked out a 240km road run in December, there’s a 100km mountain run in New Zealand this weekend and it’s almost February already – what could possibly go wrong? Let’s just call the previous seven weeks of not running a committed recovery phase.

Seriously, it was Wednesday. I needed 3 more points to lock in a place for UTMB. March 19 for Northburn wasn’t looking good with two other reasons to be in Australia that weekend. The next and final option would be the Ultra-Trail Australia weekend in May, also problematic for work and travel reasons. Nice first world problems to have, but they meant that if I was going to do this I’d better do it ASAP. Only finding out that there was a 3-point opportunity in New Zealand with 3 days to go, at least training wouldn’t be the problem.

Grant Guise had temporarily hijacked The Ultra Easy’s facebook page – I didn’t mention that this was possibly the most cunningly named mountain race ever? How did that slip my mind? The sales pitch was equally deft: ‘Pick you up from the airport then?’

Nice try, Grant, but you already had me at Easy. Long story short, girl says ‘yes’, HOKA says ‘go’, Scotty Hawker says it’s a blast, entry & airfares get booked and I’m off to New Zealand for the What Are You Made Of Challenge 2016. Oh yes, I am that guy.

The only noteworthy exchange during Friday’s transit was with Border Control at Queenstown Airport. Kiwis easily match Aussies for smack talk and banter, which is one good reason to have at least a few Kiwi mates.

I can’t think of any others.

After the half hour shuffle to get to Customs, I asked ‘what’s with the long queue, I thought you liked Aussies?’ The tongue-in-cheek but telling reply nailed it: ‘We’re the friendly ones, remember. New Zealand doesn’t have a Christmas Island.’

BOOM. Thanks Aussie foreign policy. What can you say to that? ‘I didn’t vote for them,’ I mumbled off, recognizing that yes, there’s no comeback for what Australia is doing to refugees now, and even our nearest neighbour sees us that way.

Enough social commentary, let’s run.

By the time I arrived at the Albert Town Tavern, Wanaka, the evening race briefing had ended but it was good timing to catch up with some familiar faces, leave my 60km drop bag and get gear checked. No pressure, but Nolan’s superbadass and Hard Rock winner Anna Frost was casually Instagramming the area and even Bryon Powell was in the mix, ready to drink microbrews over fallen bodies. Then it was off to stay with friends, go through the final faff and grab a few hours sleep before the 3am start. What could possibly go wrong?

Okay, fine Sal – yes, I got told ‘goodnight’ 3 times before I finally crashed.

Some of these people may have a lust for life and even nav skills. Not sure about the guy in the hat though. L to R Matt Bixley as featured naked on the internet, Sally Law as featured crushing the Hillary solo, Mal High 5-0 Law, and an idiot from Australia

One thing you don’t necessarily want to be doing is asking a stranger for lube in the carpark outside a pub at 10 to 3 on a Saturday morning, but that was how I met Lance. This tough and most excellent bastard blew my mind – ‘sorry mate, haven’t got any. Never needed it – I’m bowlegged.’ I’m pretty sure Lance’s skeleton had adapted to accommodate his physiology. The tough old bugger dropped me pretty early but I really enjoyed his company along the way. And geez I wished I was bowlegged too.

Because nothing that starts in a pub carpark has ever ended badly. Ever. #whatcouldpossiblygowrong

When we hit the beginning of the first climb, my friend Sally’s question from the night before echoed clearly in my mind as it would continue to throughout the day, ‘are you mountain fit?’. Well, I’m sure we’ll find out, I thought with 97.5km to go.

By 97.4km I knew the answer was ‘not for sh*t.’ This was going to be a long day, better enjoy it!

The course is timed to give runners the thrill of sunrise from the summit of the first climb. The front end speedsters missed that by virtue of passing the first support staff while they themselves were still climbing to their positions. I was more polite, waiting until they were in position and the sun was well up before getting near the top of anything.

Sunrise boiling away misty herds of cloud over Lake Wanaka. #swoon

Speaking of extreme volunteers, Anna Frost chucked in a bonus peak-bag metres to the left of the path before giving awesome guidance, ‘it’s rolling to that next wee hill just in the cloud there’. Never believe a Kiwi when they say ‘wee hill’ or ‘just over there’ or ‘non-technical’. Their intentions are good, but their bloodlines run from Middle Earth and they forget we humans are made of pudding and weakness.

Mal and Sal (check out their incredible adventure here) meanwhile had pulled up a nice spot to catch the golden morning view. Mal couldn’t resist, ‘When you said you were going to take your time I didn’t know you meant this much time.’ Thanks buddy! See you back at the chateau!!

Grinding along a rolling ridgeline leading steadily and more steeply up through morning cloud, we came across something totally unexpected – free pies.

Yes, that’s right, mile high pies #randomestpastryever

That’s right, just over the summit of Roy’s Peak, at about 1600 metres, with no roads in sight, there was a drink stop with a generator, oven, and free Waka Pai pies for all. Surreal, but awesome. I skipped the pie but filled my bottle with electrolyte and ran on. 200 metres later, sucking on a dead hose I realised it would have been timely to pull out my bladder and fill up on water too. Whatever, it’s downhill from here to about 37km. How bad can it be?

Ha ha ha ha ah ha ha haaaa. Don’t ever ask that in an ultra.

There’s a special angle of downhill, where running, hiking, and walking all beat you up just as much, and this was mostly it. Finally in the valley after an extremely uncoordinated descent on packed dirt road, I scooped water from a stream that may or may not have traversed acres of cow poo. Taking small sips and tipping it on my head and neck, I figured dysentery shouldn’t hit for at least long enough to get the race finished. The upside would of course be weight loss. Everybody wins!

Almost missing the 38km aid station by following a fenceline instead of cutting across a field, I found out later that the turbo-boosted race leaders made the same mistake when they’d gone through several hours before. It must be hard running so fast that you miss turns and get through checkpoints before they’re even set up, poor guys.

Coffee, banana, electrolyte, banter, go. The next climb was the one I’d expected to be soul destroying. Fortunately, I had no soul left after the first climb so there was nothing more this one could do to me. And besides, big climbs are awesome. They hurt. They only take longer the slower you go. They’ve got all the time in the world. And they don’t tolerate excuses. About 20km later, after a sustained ascent of 1400 or so metres, fizzy cold black poison had never tasted so good. Can’t believe Coca Cola don’t want to use that tagline.

Somewhere around 50km, smashing in left over Red Bull Zero and liquorice because I’d forgotten to grab my own stuff, and I don’t know what this awesome vollie is thinking but it’s almost worth a caption contest… May have been something about neither of us doing our hair…

The Bob Lee Hut (I know, bobbly hut) checkpoint crew were all over it. Pete gave sage advice about sticking with my trail shoes for some of the bobbly (ha!) sections still to come. Catching up here with a few other runners and heading out again without too much delay, it also felt like a game again, rather than an epic survival challenge with a 20-hour cutoff that might just crush dreams and break hearts.

Running out from Bob Lee with a Kiwi Girl and Malaysian dude, we exchanged notes on the giant mystic rock up ahead. She’d been leaning toward koala, I was locked in on giant Buddha. On approach, we were both right, but as we drew level, it was just another giant rock. Thanks, caffeinated fatigue. You cloud our judgment and reshape our sore and sweaty world in entertaining ways.

Try telling me that’s not a Buddha.

And then things went off course. Literally.

All had been good. I’d got a burst of energy and picked up the pace from slow hiking to slow trotting. The other two runners were a couple of hundred metres behind. I knew this because every now and again I’d look over my shoulder for some misguided assurance that we were still on course. This long, sometimes winding open fire-road section didn’t feature any of the usual pink marking tape or orange tubed star-stakes, but I figured that whoever marked the course up this far had just run out of tubes and tape. So it made sense to follow the line of black star pickets, just like we had followed on earlier sections of the course.

Soon enough, there was a slight divide of the track. A wonky fluorescent pink arrow in the middle was tilted just a bit left, but up ahead and off to the right there was a renewed line of orange piping. If I had kept up and left, I would have seen the markers that continued straight ahead toward the 1900m summit of Pisa.

But no, I trusted the orange.

If I was going to have weird hallucinated fantasies starring Grant Guise, this would be the best time for them.

Like an evil pied piper I veered right and dropped down past a survival hut where the orange pipe ran out. Assuming that all was good in the hood and that some degree of randomness had again informed the course markings I followed the only obvious markers – more plain black star stakes. After about 4km of slight downhill alongside a creek, I’d now lost sight of the runners who’d been following behind me and come to a blue twine across the roadway. Stepping over it I looked for more star stakes and found some straight ahead. As I was jogging down to those and wondering whether the elevation marked on the course had been wrong or whether the route would again climb soon, the 60km checkpoint crew pulled up next to me in a Subaru stuffed with bodies and large drink containers.

Pete, driving, wound down the front passenger window and called out those special words that turn runners’ world upside down.

‘What are you doing here?’

We quickly worked out how I’d ended up in the wrong place. With access to a mapping app that could supposedly function even without mobile coverage, I really could have avoided this situation, but I hadn’t thought to use it for GPS-based navigation. I’d only used it as a reference point to check I was on the right track, and even then only sparingly. Now I’d just done about 4 extra kilometres and was off course behind the sweeper, or Tail End Charlie, as our Kiwi mates say.

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

‘About 2km back that way’. Pete said.

‘Well I’ll run back up to where he is.’

‘We can’t leave you behind the sweep.’

‘Well I’d better go now then.’

‘You’ll have to get in the car.’

‘I don’t want to get in the car. I’ll run up.’

‘We can’t leave you behind the sweep.’

This was going nowhere faster than I’d gone nowhere.

The front passenger and his mate jumped out. After making sure that jumping in the car to get back to the sweep and hopefully the place where I’d steered wrong wouldn’t necessarily mean a DQ or a DNF even though the RD could still make that call if he wanted to, I jumped in the front and we turned back around. Asking the guys who waited behind to keep eyes out for any sign of runners coming along the course from where I’d been, I felt like a totally evil stupid bastard. This was going to be knife edge stuff. Time was not at all in my favour. If the 2 runners who had been behind me hadn’t already self-corrected their own routes, or didn’t appear in the next couple of minutes, then following me was probably going to completely ruin their day.

Pete handed me off to the next vehicle. Driven by Kurt, this big grey four-wheel-drive was the Tail End Charlie I had somehow ended up behind. Negotiating some gnarly gullied roadway back to where I’d dropped down to the right, we could see the proliferation of evil orange poles that had made for confusion. I’d done extra mileage. We’d burned 28 minutes talking through it and getting back to where I’d left the course. Asking the injured runner in the front seat what I needed to knock out to get in under cutoff, he replied with ‘a 6-hour marathon.’ Even with a largely descending and rolling remainder to the course, it was going to be quicker than I’d managed all day – sad but true. Turning to Kurt, I said ‘I’ll totally ____ing do that, come on man, seriously.’ He hardly even thought about it, just saying, ‘ok, get out here then.’ Barely half an hour before, my heart had hit the floor via my stomach. But now there was hope. It was still going to be a tough push to get back in, but the clock was still going. ‘Right, game on.’ That one got a chuckle from Kurt as I headed out the door.

Before Terry took our innocence. Sorry, there just haven’t been any pictures in a while. I know some of you can’t read. I definitely can’t. Anything more than 80 characters, forget it.

Throwing my pack on, I got the hiking poles moving quick as possible. Kurt seemed like a patient guy but that probably wouldn’t last if I kept him driving at 5km/hr for the next 20km. Launching forward with heavy metal crashing in my ears, the adrenalin ramped up and we were all on the way to the summit of Pisa and whatever lay beyond.

Finally cresting, Kurt stayed behind with the next checkpoint crew, taking in the mindblowing mountainscape that ringed the horizon in every direction.

‘Alright, see you guys soon.’ Heading downhill and away, once out of view I pulled out my glucose meter for the first blood sugar check in nearly 3 hours. I hadn’t wanted to pull it out in front of Kurt in case it started him on the thought process of, ‘so this guy has gone slow, got lost, got behind the cutoff pace, aaaand he’s diabetic? F___ this.’

Sugars were good, legs were working, we were pointing downhill, it was do or die. Stabilisers and flexors seemed to have fatigued in their roles as motors so weaker, less efficient muscles like the hamstrings, quads, and gluten were finally recruited for running. I’d paused my Ambit during the lift with Pete and Kurt. Fumbling mental arithmetic said that with the timer saying an average pace of 11:48/km for 13 hours, and an estimated 5½ hours left for 33km, running at an average of 9:00/km is what it would take to get home, so to achieve that I now had to run against my watch until it might eventually say 11:00/km. And that was the new game.

For most of the day the game had been Let’s Finish This 100km Before It Finishes Us, but now the game was Get This Average Pace to 11:00/km. Sexy, huh?

And remember, if there’s a good chance you’re coming home empty-handed, at least grab a photo of yellow flowers for someone special who’ll appreciate them.

11:35/km. Finally, after pounding downhill for ages I caught the back of the field.

Nope, it’s a hiker.

Finally, after pounding downhill for even longer, I caught the back of the field.

We tic-tacked for the remainder of the 2,000-meter descent. Whatever way we played it, this was ugly. Remember those angles on hardened dirt road that hurt whatever way you do them? Yeah, lots of those. With the cutoff for the 87km aid station at the wool barn being 9pm, Stefan and I speculated that it might be 5 minutes away or half an hour. Either way, let’s just get there.

At this point, pushing against reason and what might be possible, on the verge of vomiting for the simple fact that it might break the monotony and couldn’t really make things worse, I thought about my partner Jess, the level that she runs at and the demons that she must face. And I thought ‘Holy S__t.’

11:21/km. Finally, as you do, we hit the last checkpoint with just over 20 minutes to spare. I’d put on afterburners and got in ahead of Stefan, only to crash in a chair and garble incoherently. Clearly the check crew were runners because this didn’t seem to faze them at all. They just provided – sound the celestial brass section – ginger beer and iced water. WIN. All I’d been wanting for the last hour was anything ginger and without royal blood. Thank you, wool shed crew!

Stefan blew through without stopping and five minutes later I was up again too. We’d been contesting the wooden spoon all day, and still neither of us wanted it. The new improved Tail End Charlie, Jo the adventure-racing physio, lobbed in with me as we headed into the final 13 or something kilometres.

Maths is cruel, especially in the final stages of any ultramarathon, and should be treated as a foe, not a friend. This means that however much time you think you have on hand, you have less. However close you think the finish line might be, it’s further. However fast you want to go, run faster. However quick you think you’re going, you’re slower.

One of the coolest heads in endurance is Andy Dubois. As my running counsellor – I feel like it makes him responsible for a slow undisciplined runner if I call him my coach – Andy has helped me prepare physically and mentally for some really fun ridiculousness over the last couple of years.

Two key insights he gave me before Ultra Easy were that once you can’t run the downhills, you’re on your way to losing a massive amount of time, and that hiking by choice early, rather than later on by default, would really be the way to get through this. The first piece of advice he’d actually given me was, ‘take yourself out this weekend for a 5-hour test run because… oh wait, you can’t, because you’re running 100km in New Zealand this weekend’.

In my internal dialogues throughout the day, these nuggets of advice kept surfacing. Whenever I caught myself wasting runnable descents, I would pick it back up as best I could. Whenever I felt like I was running into an exhausting space, I’d reassess and ease back long enough to know better. It wasn’t any kind of a stellar day out, despite being an exceptional experience – perhaps because it was such a constant barely-going-to-get-there grind in fact – but if I hadn’t been tuned in that way by Andy and his common sense approach, I wouldn’t have been able to out run the clock over the closing stages.

New Zealand’s version of ‘wee hills’

No more idea what per km. When I pulled up past Stefan, walking with his partner, Jo abandoned me for him and I called out that I thought it was about 9km to go. A calming inner voice told me that there was plenty of time to make it now and we could just cruise it in, but I’d been picturing 20:00:01 all day and was ready to gut myself.

A rolling stop-start run alongside the stunning turquoise waters as all colour leeched from the sky in the late Wanaka dusk, more awesome vollies, the surrender to pause and finally put on a headlamp, face encased in a nuclear pulse of riverside midgies, that typical running-in-a-dream feeling of time passing without any forward progress, an increasing sense of panic that everything was even further away than even worst predictions, a couple more turns and finally, red numbers hanging blurred in space.

Over the line, I was empty. Thanking Terry the Race Director for his contributions to sanity and failing to recognize our friend Sal on the first couple of attempts, two things dawned on me. Firstly, I had actually just made it with about ten minutes to spare. Secondly, the pub was shut.

Weird. The Finish line was way more crowded when the race started than when it ended…

At least the pub was open the next day.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Thanks homies!

The End.