6' read
Courmayeur-Campex-Chamonix Ultra Trail (100 Km, 6000 m D+)
Posted on January 15th, 2010
Words: Filippo Canetta
"The rain continued. It was a perpetual rain, a hard, steaming rain, a rain that was sweat; a bursting, a bursting, a rushing of waters, a whip in the eyes, a subtle pull on submerged ankles; a rain that would drown every other rain, along with the memory of all the other rains.
It rained in tons, a drumming rain, that decapitated the jungle, cut down the trees like a giant shear, clipped the lawns and dug tunnels in the earth and dissolved the bushes. It shrank the hands of men into the wrinkled hands of monkeys; it rained a glassy rain, a rain that never ended."
A few days after the race, this 1959 science fiction story by Ray Bradbury came back to my mind, about a group of soldiers trying to reach dry ground after an emergency landing on the planet Venus.
I read that story 22 years ago.
Its opening lines alone describe pretty well what happened on Friday, August 27th.
Five minutes before the start, it begins raining over Courmayeur, and, aside from one break in the clouds over Grand Col Ferret that let us admire the Mont Blanc glacier in all its powerful beauty, it never stopped.
The Italian section of the race is definitely the most spectacular, while the Swiss and French sections aren't quite as beautiful.
We set off right away at a very fast pace, too fast for me, so I decide to slow down, and an endless stream of competitors passes me.
I try to run my own race, ignoring what's happening around me, and above all, the water pouring down from the sky.
At the top of the passes, driven by the wind, the rain comes down almost horizontal and cold, while in the valleys it turns into tiny droplets of warm humidity, thickening into fog.
The ground, after the passage of the competitors ahead of me, is very slippery, and on the steeper stretches, for every four steps forward I take one back. Sooner or later I'll have to commit to using poles, and not just at the Chinese restaurant.
After a few hours I take stock and realize that, because of the cold, I've been eating very little. I struggle on the climbs, but since I'm carrying everything I need on my back, I don't stop at the aid stations, where instead I see almost everyone lingering for a long time. This strategy lets me, despite my slow uphill pace, gradually gain back a few positions.
I don't like using my phone while running, since it pulls me out of that solitary atmosphere that builds up after many hours of racing, but I call my partner to check if she's okay, given she's in her final week of pregnancy, or whether our daughter might end up being born on French soil.
Luckily, they're both doing great.
The rain keeps getting heavier, and everything is transformed. Uphill you're walking against the current, on the flats you're running through a lake with water up to your ankles, and downhill you're sliding through mud.
At Bovine I finally decide to try the legendary UTMB vermicelli soup. It's hot and salty, and at this point it's almost worth the entry fee on its own.
It starts getting dark, and I reach the Trient aid station determined not to stop. The rain is torrential, I try to ignore it and step outside the tent anyway, but it's just too heavy. I make it less than 50 meters and turn back. As I struggle to peel off my soaked shirt to change it, I have the biggest disappointment of the whole race, when another competitor walks in, I see him greeted by three people holding, in order, a "dry" towel, "hot" food, and freshly laundered, "fragrant" clothes.
In the five minutes it takes me to peel off clothes stuck to my skin from the damp, I notice that almost everyone has someone waiting for them with a spotless towel.
I've never wanted one so badly!
A little downhearted, I press on, but the fueling struggles start to catch up with me.
At some point I hear my phone ring, but I can't manage to open my backpack with soaked gloves, so I let it ring.
The final climb to Tête aux Vents is shrouded in fog so thick my headlamp is useless, and it feels like it'll never end.
I realize that, just a bit earlier, my phone had rung, and I'm hit with the awful worry that it might have been Irene, telling me she was heading to the hospital. How did I not think of that right away? I grab the phone and find it's stopped working, maybe it too, like me, had had enough of all that water.
Unexpectedly, I start running again, and I reach Chamonix as fast as I can. As I get to the edge of town, I see a lot of runners cheering me on. Could so many already have finished? Then I run into my friend Beppe, who I'd assumed had been running UTMB for hours by then, and he tells me the race was called off due to the bad weather, and right after the banner, I see Irene with her enormous belly.
A few hours later, CCC would also be stopped, at Trient and Vallorcine.
I wasn't a fan of how most of the top runners handled it, they could have honored the race sportingly the next day, the way five French trail runners did instead, setting a great example by crossing the finish line together, tied for fifth place.
Looking back on it now, a few days later, I almost miss all that rain and mud.
