A Mountain Marathon

I will never be "fast" and, in my opinion, road races are designed for speed. Map out a course of a prescribed distance, run on pavement, maybe with some "hills", and see how quickly you can cross the finish line. For me, this has little appeal or excitement. It's hard for me to get jazzed about pounding pavement through city streets. Now, start me off in the middle of a cow pasture and point me toward a mountain pass on a trail that borders raging streams, skirts a glacier and has volunteers standing at high points asking each runner if he or she is OK to go on before they hand out a plastic poncho for the wind and sleet you are about to turn in to, and I'm your Huckleberry. This was my kind of marathon.



I did not adhere to a strict training regimen in preparation for this race. While Seth had spreadsheets of how many miles he needed to log each day to build for his 78K, I followed a more relaxed (some would say reckless) approach to my training. Battling with some nagging injuries early on, my longest run in preparation for this alpine marathon was 12 miles. Now, I know what your thinking, I'm either a super athlete who can pull out a 26 mile run with over 9,000 ft. of elevation gain with minimal training or an idiot. My race plan, if one can call it that, was to "crawl up the climbs, fall down the descents and walk the flats with pride." In truth, it turned out to be a much better experience than I expected.



The start was in a small village called Bergun (seen in the photo above). It was a 40 minute train ride from Davos, where both of our races would finish. While waiting on the platform I met a woman who had done this race several times in the past, but this was her first time running it since beating Leukemia. We rode the train together and she told me about the course. As I walked through the village to the starting area I heard a voice ask, "Meg?" I turned around to see a friend from my teacher training program at George Mason University. Lisa was in Switzerland with her boyfriend and they were visiting his sister who happened to live in this small mountain town. We looked at each other, dumb struck for a moment and then did the requisite squealing and "Oh my God-ing". She walked with me to the start and, at one point, looked at what I was wearing and asked, "You know that it's cold at the top right?"



The photo on the left above is the left hand turn onto the trail where the elevation began to rise dramatically. You can see in the second photo that everyone has been reduced to a hiking pace. We're all trying our best to keep the cadence high and move with strength. It continued like this, a slow and steady climb to the top of the Ketsch Pass where announcers in a mountain hut called out runner's names and a photographer was hunkered down under a tarp snapping flattering shots of exhausted people like this:



This was the spot where volunteers handed out cups of chicken broth, asked if you were OK to go on (but in German so: Alles gut?) and then promptly handed you a tightly folded plastic poncho. Everyone else seemed to be putting them on so I figured I'd follow suit. Oh man, am I glad I did.



The two photos above were taken just before I stepped over the top of the pass and began the descent into a wind blown sleet storm. You can see that we are up in the clouds at this point. It took me 2 hours and 37 minutes to get here, which was only 16K into my 42K race and we were far from finished with the climbing. The descent was tricky what with the poncho plastic blowing around your legs, slick rocks from the rain, mud and cow patties and the rocky single track making it tough to get around people. I started to hear a low, muffled sound gong, ding, gong, gong and looked up to see a herd of cattle grazzing along side the trail with their monster cow bells serenading us through the muck. I started to laugh out loud, is this cool or what?! I mean seriously, where am I?



The trail eventually flattened out a bit and I began to pick up some speed, running more consistently now. As we curved right around an alpine lake I looked up to see a line of orange ponchos disappearing into the low hanging clouds. I actually said, "Oh. My. God." out loud. I wish I had dug my camera out of my Camelbak to capture that image for you but it was under my poncho and that thing wasn't coming off for the world. Above you can see the very end of the climb and the aid station at the top. From here it was all pretty much down hill. I did manage to turn around and take a photo of the climb from the top looking back at where we had just come from (notice the drop off):



To put it in perspective this second climb peaked at 21K, that is half way through the marathon. It sounds pretty sweet to have the second half all down hill, unless you are my quadriceps that is. I began bounding down the trail, taking it as fast as I dared. I was feeling good aside form an occasional calf cramp that threatened to become more than a fleeting twinge but never materialized into a full blown cramp.

With around 15K to go my "relaxed approach" to training for this race promptly reared up and bit me in the ass. My muscles, who had been thoroughly prepared to run 12 miles had performed admirably and even exceeded their preparation and, with 15K to go, said "Aaaaaaand, we're done." At which point my tendons were charged with the task of stabilizing my knees that my muscles no longer could. Now tendons, they're right nasty little buggers and quite adept at performing feats of strength in short bursts. But ask them to shoulder the burden over the last 9 miles and I can tell you, they will give you more than just 1 piece of their minds. My IT bands both gave me the finger and began twisting their sharp little knife points into the sides of my knees. I know this pain, and I know what it means. So I relent and I walk down the hills. It is a strange thing when your body would rather run up hill than down, but that is how I made it through the last 9 miles. Fortunately we were able to play on some glorious single track that was relatively flat and I was able to maintain a consistent jog.

The day before the race I received an e-mail from my friend Becky in which she gave me some sage advice for how to approach the run: "Enjoy the views, regardless of how you get there and enjoy what you are capable of doing." Good advice for life. I wrote this on the back of my race number and said it out loud to myself several times along this spectacular course. I was, yet again, reminded how lucky I am to keep waking up everyday.