Ultra Tour Monte Rosa (UTMR) Race Report

This year my occasional^[1] training partner Chris Wood was selected in the UTMB lottery and asked me to come over to Chamonix and crew him. Europe is a long way to go and not race, so I looked around and finally settled on Ultra Tour Monte Rosa (UTMR) as my "A" race. UTMR is conceptually similar to UTMB in that it's a 170K tour around a mountain in the Alps but it's about 10% more climbing than UTMB and considerably more technical, so times are a lot slower. UTMR is about a week after UTMB, so after crewing Chris I took the train from Chamonix to Grächen on Monday, giving me a few days before the race start at 4 AM Thursday.

Course Overview #

UTMR is a serious mountain race with over 10000m of climbing.

Conceptually, I broke it up into four main sections corresponding to the locations where you could have drop bags and conceptually bigger aid stations.

1. Start to Zermatt (34.2K)
2. Zermatt to Gressoney-la-Trinite (77.4K)
3. Gressoney-la-Trinite to Macuagnaga (123.6K)
4. Macugnaga to finish (167.9K)

The segment to Zermatt is the fastest—though still with over 2000 height meters of climbing. It's important to get through this section fast because after you leave Zermatt there's a big climb up to the glacier and then a 2K glacier crossing. For obvious reasons you want to cross the glacier during the day, and so there's a tight (9 hr) cutoff at Zermatt.

After you get over the glacier you're looking at a long mostly net downhill section into Gressoney-la-Trinite, but with a significant climb partway through.

Followed by Gressoney-la-Trinite you have a series of three really big climbs. The first two are before the Macucnaga aid station and then after that there's only last big climb and descent followed by a smaller (only 700 hm!) climb, some rolling stuff, and then a descent into the finish.

I'd managed to recon the first few kilometers (nice!) and the last few kilometers (incredibly steep), so I had a bit of a sense what to expect here. I did the last two km on my first day into Grächen, right at the time when a bunch of runners from the (even longer!) Swiss Peaks race were coming through; they looked tired and still had a long way to go!

Overall Logistics #

UTMR is by far the longest race I'd ever had to do in terms of time so it presents some real logistical challenges, especially as I was doing it without crew.

Food #

Food at an American race tends to be dominated by sports nutrition such as energy bars, gels, sports drinks, etc. (aka "space food" or "engineered food"). On longer races like hundreds you'll often see hot "real food" like soup, quesadillas, pancakes, bacon, or sometimes even burgers as it gets later in the race. By contrast, European races tend to be much heavier on some kind of real food from the very beginning, but it's mostly snacks like bread, cheese, charcuterie (seriously!), with maybe a small selection of sports food, and then again some hot food as you get later into the day.

I've done nearly all my training with sports food, and I wasn't sure how I'd feel about bread and cheese^[2] and I didn't have any experience with the sports drink that UTMR was serving, so I planned to carry most of my nutrition with me; UTMR had 3 drop bag locations so this meant I could carry about 1/4 of my food for each segment, though in practice I expected to try to eat some of the real food as well. This actually wasn't so bad in terms of how much I had to carry between aid stations but did mean I had an enormously heavy bag to carry to Chamonix and then to Grächen.

Gear #

European races tend to have more serious mandatory gear lists. For example, here's what UTMR requires:

Requirement	My gear
Mobile phone	Nokia 105[3]
Fully functional head torch(s) with replacement batteries	Petzl Nao RL (main), Petzl e-lite(backup)
Bottles or bladders with capacity to carry 1 litre	Standard 500ml softflasks
Emergency food rations in a sealed ziplock bag (400 calories)	Maurten, SIS
Emergency bivvy bag	SOL Emergency Bivy
Whistle	On pack
Elastic bandage / strapping	Coban
Drinking cup (cups will not be provided at refreshment points)	Hydrapak Speedcup (gimme from Lake Sonoma 50)
Waterproof jacket with hood	Inov-8 Raceshell (discontinued)
Waterproof trousers	Raidlight Ultralight MP+ (older model)
Warm long-sleeved thermal top layer	Patagonia Capilene Thermal (borrowed from Chris)
Long running trousers or trousers that cover over the knee	Patagonia Terrebonne trail joggers
Warm hat	Smartwool hat
Gloves	North Face Flashdry
GPS tracker(provided at race registration)	N/A
Identity papers	N/A
Microspikes	Rented from race organizers
Bowl and spork	Sea to Summit Frontier Ultralight Collapsible Cup, Sea to Summit Frontier Ultralight Spork
Sheet sleeping bag	Mountain Laurel Designs Sleeping Bag & Quilt Liner

UTMR checks that you have all this stuff at registration before they give you your race number, but of course this is just the minimum, and when I got back to my hotel I had the following email:

SEVERE WEATHER WARNING

Tomorrow afternoon from around 4pm onwards conditions crossing Teodulo (the glacier) and into Italy are expected to become very cold and windy, with snowfall. The temperature will be -2 deg C, with wind chill factor down to -10 deg C. Winds could be up to 50-60 km per hour.

For you safety please carry extra clothing including warm pants, thick gloves, warm hat, warm (duvet) hooded jacket. We suggest putting warm gear in your dropbag for Zermatt so that you have protection through the bad conditions.

The race will proceed unless our security team advises us that conditions have become unsafe.

This definitely freaked me out and it would obviously have all been a lot easier if I'd known it in Chamonix which has about 5 outdoors stores per block. At this point I was definitely regretting not bringing my tights or borrowing some from Chris, but there were a few open stores and I ended up buying a pair of hiking pants, a thick warm hat, and some thick windproof gloves. I'd already brought my Patagonia Micro Puff Hoody so I was covered as far as a puffy ("duvet jacket") goes. All of this extra stuff is bulky and heavy, but based on the weather reports I wasn't going to need it till after the glacier, so I was able to store it in my Zermatt drop bag. Also in the Zermatt bag: the microspikes which are only needed on the glacier.

I've done previous races on headlamp only, but for this race I decided to add a waist light (UltrAspire 600); I have friends who've used them at races and said it was dramatically better and I figured I'd be out for two nights and this was the time to use it. I expected Gressoney-la-Trinite would be somewhere a bit before midnight and it got dark around 8 or 9, so I decided I'd be OK with just the headlamp till Gressoney-la-Trinite, thus avoiding having to carry it halfway. I also left a pair of extra shoes in my Gressoney-la-Trinite drop bag, which turned out to be a really good idea (see below).

Pre-race I spent some time dithering about what shoes to use for UTMR; I did most of this season in a pair of Salomon S/LAB Genesis, but on my last outing, I started to have some discomfort in my feet about half-way through and so I decided to try out the Salomon S/LAB Ultra Glide, which is much higher stack and bouncier. I ordered a pair of the Ultra Glides when I was in Flagstaff, but I only had about 30 miles on them and wasn't sure how they would feel over a 100 miles. On the one hand, the Ultra Glides seemed to have a somewhat tight toe box and I was worried they would be too tight if my feet swelled during the race, but on the other hand I thought it might be nice to switch to something bouncier half-way. Eventually I decided to be optimistic and start in the Ultra Glides and then have the Genesis in my Gressoney-la-Trinite bag.

Pre-Race #

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday kind of bumming around Grächen and trying to eat well and sleep as much as I could. It's a tiny town and everything is within walking distance, so I walked over to the local market and scored a bunch of food, including some gnocchi and pesto for the night before (one of the benefits of being in an AirBNB is that you can cook). I slept pretty well Monday and Tuesday night but had a really hard time Wednesday night. Usually I'll be able to fall asleep pretty well but will keep waking up but this time I spent a lot of time just lying in bed doing relaxation exercises and trying to fall asleep. Eventually I did get a few good hours right before my wakeup time, but it wasn't amazing.

I timed the start pretty well and got to the start at about 3:35 and then realized that the volunteers wanted us to put pre-printed labels on our drop bags—so that's why I had four wristband type things in my packet—and I ended up having to run back to my AirBNB, grab them, and then come back. Fortunately my AirBNB was really close, so I still made it in time. In retrospect, I doubt it would have mattered, but I was in pre-race rule following mode.

Start to Zermatt #

The first part of the race went quite well. You start by running through the town for a kilometer or so, followed by a relatively short but steep climb and then transition to a longish rolling section. The rolling section is fairly runnable but still slightly technical and narrow, and people were still fairly packed in, so I just tried to cruise through it without expending too much effort.

Following a shortish descent, we began the first big climb, 5.8 km and 1011 hm up to the first aid station at Europahutte. This part went relatively smoothly as it was early, everyone was relatively fresh, and this early in the race everyone wants to take it easy. I took a short stopover at Europahutte to fill my aid station and then it's a short slightly technical downhill followed by what is the longest foot suspension bridge in the alps, the Charles Kuonen Suspension Bridge, at almost 500m long.^[4]

There is a fantastic view from the bridge, but to be honest I found it a fairly unpleasant experience because the bridge sways quite a bit and you can hear the cables creaking. Intellectually you know it's safe, but it just takes one look down to wonder whether the engineers really know what they're doing. I wasn't excited about the crossing, but it's not like you're going to turn back, so I just gritted my teeth, made sure I had one hand on the rail, and kept going. A few people had passed me on the descent from Europahutte, but I found myself wishing more had, because some of the people behind were crowding me, which didn't help matters.

The original UTMR course stays up high for a while but due to some trail closures, from here there was a fairly rapid descent down to the valley floor and then the aid stations in Attermenzen and then some easy running on gravel road to Zermatt. This is a bit faster than the original route and as a consequence I was way ahead of schedule and the cutoff for leaving Zermatt, so things were looking good, at least as far as not having to cross the glacier in the dark went.

I spent about 20 minutes in Zermatt overall, retrieving all the stuff from my drop bags, cramming the extra clothes into my dry bag, etc. This is obviously longer than ideal, but in a long race like this, I don't mind spending a little extra time at the aid stations, especially the ones with my drop bags. Even so, I almost left my spikes in the bag, which would have been disastrous, as they are mandatory gear for the glacier crossing and it actually would have been quite sketchy without them, even though there wasn't really anyone enforcing it.

Zermatt to Gressoney-la-Trinite #

From here on in, things get real, starting with a 1389m climb up to to Trockenersteg. This is actually a pretty easy grade as far as UTMR goes (14% average) but when added up with the glacier crossing it's the longest more or less continuous up on the course. I hit the top here feeling pretty good—it's at high altitude, but I'd spent three weeks in Flagstaff getting acclimatized, with the result that there's still some negative impact, but I didn't feel that bad, unlike some of the people nearby me, who were clearly feeling the altitude.

Trockenersteg is a tiny aid station, basically just a table set up in the doorway of the building at the top of the ski lift; there were bathrooms and the like and probably some kind of cafe (maybe closed?) but the station itself was just dudes with fluids and energy bars. At least it was shaded from the wind, though, which let us get our warm gear on in preparation for the glacier crossing, which promised to be windy. It's about 1km to the ice itself and from there it's about 2 miles on ice and snow.

We just sort of trotted over to the ice transition and then everyone sort of collectively sat down and put on their spikes and maybe some warmer clothes, and then headed out onto the ice. For my money this was the best part of the race. You're up above 3000 m (10000 ft) and walking over a giant piece of ice—how can that not feel epic? Now the truth of the matter is that this section of the glacier is between two lodges and, has, I'm told, been groomed, but nevertheless, it feels wild, especially if you live somewhere, like I do, where there is basically no snow. Once you get past the snowfield, there is a relatively short section on rock up to Teodul and then it's 16.9 km and 1600 m down to Teodul.

This downhill went pretty well, except that at some point I tripped and went down hard, hurting^[5] one of my ribs and tweaking my wrist. This wasn't great and led to some discomfort throughout the rest of the race, but nothing that was going to stop me. Thanks to the runner whose name I've forgotten but was with me at the time who helped retrieve my poles and made sure I was OK. Somewhere on the downhill I ran into Stuart Secker, who I'd met on Monday and had dinner with. He had a lot of experience with 100+ mile races, especially difficult stuff like Mogollon Monster and UTCT, plus he'd reconned some of the course, so I decided to stick with him for a while, and we headed to Rifugio Ferraro together.

By the time we hit the Rifugio it had been raining on and off, and it was clear that the bad weather had started to roll in. The guidance from race officials was a bit equivocal, something like:

1. It should get better in a few hours.
2. We're not canceling the race.
3. We advise you to stay here for a bit.
4. We won't make you stay.

I'm generally not a fan of waiting things out unless they're really bad and neither was Stuart, so after a bit we decided to head out.

From Rifiguo Ferraro to Gressoney-la-Trinite is a substantial climb (~800m) followed by a longer downhill. Pretty soon it started to rain fairly hard and then we were getting lightning and thunder, though the lightning seemed modestly far away. At this point I had on a warm top plus my rain pants and my rain jacket, but not my rain gloves or (I think my second warm bottom layer). Unfortunately, once it's raining this much, you really don't want to take off your rain gear to put anything on underneath it, so I was mostly just stuck being a bit uncomfortable. Fortunately, the climb itself was mostly rock and wasn't too slippery, though it wasn't just smooth path either.

By the time I hit the top, it was dark, really windy, I was cold, and anything that wasn't covered by waterproof gear—in particular my hands—was cold. I tried to find a location out of the wind in the summit to put on my warm gloves, but they hadn't been in the dry bag and were so wet that I couldn't get them on with my stiff hands, so I ended up just getting colder and watching people pass me before I headed down. I'd stopped partway up for a minute or so and had managed to lose Stuart, but managed to run some this first section a bit and catch up with him. His take was that the most important thing was just to lose altitude as fast as we could—thus getting to where it was warmer—rather than try to get warm immediately, so we pushed on.

This descent was all dirt and would have been super runnable except that with all the rain it was instead really muddy and slippery and my feet came out from under me and I fell on my ass a number of times. Nothing was really hurt other than my pride, but I definitely ended up covered in mud. These were mostly minor falls, but then later Stuart fell a fair bit harder and tore his pack, so a hard bit all around.

Gressoney-la-Trinite to Rifugio Pastore #

Gressoney was the first aid station with beds, and my original plan had been to get some sleep there to avoid my traditional 3 AM low spot, but when we arrived we were told that the beds were all in use and there weren't even any spare blankets. This wasn't an immediate disaster because I needed to do some maintenance in the form of changing out of wet clothes, swapping stuff out of my drop bags, etc., and I was hoping that by the time I was done a bed would have opened up.

Once I got into drier clothes—including the warmer hiking pants I had bought—I set about fixing my feet; after hours of being wet and muddy they had started to wrinkle up and I knew from past races that this can lead to irritation between the wrinkles. Pretty much whenever I stepped I was starting to get discomfort and this can be a race ender, so I knew I had to attend to it. The main fix for this is to get them dry and keep them dry. I was able to get some paper towels from the volunteers but medical didn't seem prepared to do anything, and when I asked them for diaper cream^[6] they didn't have it, but fortunately Stuart actually had some, so with the help of a surgical glove^[7] borrowed from another racer, I was able to get my feet nicely covered with cream and then get new socks on. I was somewhat distressed to discover that one of these socks had a small hole in the toe, which would come back to haunt me later, but at this point I didn't have much in the way of choice.

I also had to decide which shoes to wear: I was finding the Ultra Glides quite comfortable, with no real discomfort, but at this point they were totally waterlogged, and I decided that the best thing to do was to swap them out for the S/LAB Genesis, which were dry and have a Matryx upper which tends not to absorb so much moisture. I think this was the right call, because at this point I was super worried about my feet being too wet, but I wish I'd tried the Ultra Glides earlier; if I had I might have just had two pairs of these. I also picked up my UltrAspire waist lamp, which meant I had twice as much light going out of Gressoney as heading in. From here on, there are three big climbs, all between 1200 and 1600 m, and then the rolling bit to the finish, but this gave me a set of milestones to work with.

I lurked around Gressoney a little while longer, and tried to get some sleep on the floor, but without much success. Stuart told me he was thinking about dropping—he eventually did—and Karl, another guy I had been running with told me he was definitely dropping. I didn't want to head out entirely on my own in the dark so I ended up hooking up with three French guys for the next stretch.

Apparently I'd rested enough and warmed up, because I felt reasonably good coming out of Gressoney, and quickly found myself dropping my companions. I'm not sure how eager they really were to have some non-French speaker tagging along anyway, so I eventually just ended up pushing through this section largely on my own. I don't actually remember this bit that clearly, probably because it was in the dark and I was undercaffeinated—I was still hoping to sleep—but eventually I made it to the top of the climb at Passo dei Salati, which was basically a ski lodge. This rifugio was like the house of the walking dead full of race zombies. There weren't any beds but there were some people stretched out on benches trying to sleep or just asleep on tables, and after grabbing some soup and tea (no coffee available!) I tried to do the same, and I think got maybe 5-10 minutes. Not enough.

From Passo dei Salati to Rifugio Pastore is a long downhill followed by a climb of about 400 meters to the Rifugio. In theory that shouldn't have been that hard but I managed to make it about 5 feet out the door before realizing I needed more clothes, so went back inside, layered up and then headed back out. This section was a bit tricky to navigate in the dark and I ended up briefly teaming up with some other people to find the way down, but eventually got separated.

This segment was fairly runnable once it got light, but I started to have a really low spot partway through, I think due to a combination of not eating enough (see below) and not sleeping (this is why I wanted to sleep at Gressoney!). A few times I just sat at the side of the trail on a rock and tried to recover and eventually Mick Caren stopped by, asked if I was OK, and offered to wait with me. I sat for a few minutes and then we set out together, which was super helpful, and we ran together for much of the rest of the race. It was fairly uneventful down to the bottom and then the first part of the climb to the Rifugio was on asphalt and gravel road so Mick and I were able to hike that nice and fast. Eventually, we had to turn off onto single track again, and things got steep, but it wasn't that far to the Rifugio.

At this point I was super tired, but fortunately they had a sleeping room and there were plenty of beds, so I settled down for a nap, and asked one of the volunteers to wake me up in 20 minutes. I'm not saying it was great, but I did manage to get some sleep, which was a huge relief and I felt much more prepared for the next two climbs. When I woke up, Mick was still there and he told me that he'd just gotten a message that due to a rockfall the race was being truncated at Saas Fe (147 km) and we'd (somehow) be shuttled back to the start. I'm not going to say I was 100% sad about by this: I obviously wanted to finish the race, but I was also getting pretty tired.

Knowing that we only had to really make the next two climbs and then it was over gave us all some new energy and we set out at a pretty good pace. At this point, some of the stage racers were starting to pass us^[8] which made it a bit hard to judge your pace, but also was a bit energizing to see people who were (1) fresh and (2) impressed by you.

Rifugio Pastore to Macucnaga #

This next stretch is the longest without aid in the entire race (21.6km) and requires you to go all the way to the top of the pass and then back down again. I started out feeling OK and things were looking good and then partway up the weather started to turn, first into rain and then into hail. I really didn't want to get soaked again so I stopped to change my gear and lost contact with the people I was with for the rest of the climb, about 1200 m.

The climb itself had reasonable footing, consisting mostly of moderate-sized rocks and scree, with a foot-wide or so ledge of flat rocks set in the side of each switchback, so you had the choice of hiking up the slightly unstable scree or adapting yourself to the ledge. It seemed like most people did a combination of the two of these, and I did as well. I wouldn't say I was feeling great, but I was managing to make OK time, albeit having to stop several times to put on gear or take it off.

Eventually I hit the top and started the long descent, which is where things started to go really sideways. A common phenomenon in most ultras is that as your legs get tired it gets harder to run downhill and you actually want to hike more and more, but this was something new: the downhill was really difficult single track with big rocks and roots. Someone who was better on the downhill than me or fresher could run this—and a number of the stage people came by—but I was reduced to mostly hiking and some very slow jogging and certainly was never able to get a rhythm. This went on forever and every time you started to think it would open up it would be a false alarm and you'd just have to climb over some new rock. This was an incredibly demoralizing section for me because I was expecting to be moving moderately fast in this section but actually I was going about the same speed down as up.

I ran most of this section with Jamie Hardman, who had sort of been trailing me on the climb but then caught me on the downhill and we both kind of suffered through it together until we finally hit some easy fire road. We were about 3km from the Macucnaga aid station when suddenly I started to have some real GI problems and I had to let Jamie go while I ducked into the woods to take care of business. At the end of the day, though, I was moving a bit faster than he was and so I got to the last AS only a few minutes later.

Macucnaga to Saas Fe #

Macucnaga is the finish of stage 3 of the stage race, and seemed to be in some kind of restaurant/hostel kind of thing. Everyone was kind of lurking around the restaurant feeling half-dead and knowing they had to get up and keep going but not really wanting to either.

This was the last drop bag location and so I was able to ditch some of my stuff—though not too much—and change my socks again. As soon as I got my shoes off I was able to see that I had a lot of wrinkling and ended up having a long exchange with the volunteers and the medic about whether they had any diaper cream. They didn't and wanted me to go see the race doctor, which seemed like a lot of overhead. Fortunately, after 10 minutes of hanging around barefoot my feet seemed to have dried up enough that the wrinkles were abating, so I just smeared as much Sportslick on them as I could manage, put my sock on, and crossed my fingers. Mick had gotten in a ways before Jamie and I, but he was still hanging around and we all decided to head out together.

The last climb to Monte Moro Pass is the steepest long climb of the whole course, clocking in at 1500+ hm over 6.4 km, at an average grade of around 23%, so we knew we were in for something special. The initial part of the climb was actually pretty encouraging: well groomed rock in a better version of the previous climb, but soon enough it veered off into single track. This pattern continued for some time, with a section of rough fire road and then you'd have to do some rocky single track which would eventually come back to the fire road, just to add insult to injury. I had some more GI issues partway up but was able to find a place to pull off while everyone waited. I came up to find that they were chilling with some goats, so I guess they had found a way to entertain themselves.

Eventually, this all gave way to the real mountain trails, which is to say big rock slabs without much of a trail where you just kind of go flag to flag. By this time, it was getting dark, windy and cold. I bundled up early while everyone else waited but then about 15-20 minutes later they were getting cold and we had to try to find something slightly shaded from the wind so they could put their gear on. This climb is really deceptive because you can't see the finishing hut for much of the way, but you can see a a hut/ski lift terminus cut into the side of the mountain and you keep thinking you're heading towards that, but actually you just bypass it entirely.

The last 300 height meters of climbing are almost certainly the worst because you're at high altitude, and it's rocky and steep, and you're constantly having to high step and then maybe not make it and fall back onto the previous step. We could see another runner maybe 2 minutes ahead of us and he kept stopping—to catch his breath maybe?—but we never quite caught him. Finally, we hit the ridge line and then it's a short few hundred flattish meters to the aid station, with the promise of it being all (mostly?) downhill from there.

It turns out that "mostly" is doing a lot of work here. First, the aid station isn't actually at the top of the peak. Instead you need to climb up to the top to where the Golden Madonna Statue is.

This isn't really a technical climb, but what it is is a bunch of metal stairs bolted (cantilevered) into the rock face, so you're going up this relatively exposed section—with, at least in my case, a death grip on some cable—to the top. From there, we'd been told it was about 2-3km and 500m down on technical rock and then it was runnable. This turned out to be literally true, but with a big asterisk. First, the rock wasn't just technical but wet and incredibly slippery and fairly exposed. Fortunately, none of us actually fell of, though we did manage to get way off course and have to be waved back on by the photographer.

Eventually we hit the runnable bit, which was initially grass and then some very nice road. Looking at the profile, it looked like we had to go up some and then it was a nice long descent to the finish, where we had to lose another 500m or so. We power hiked to the top pretty fast and I announced I wanted to run to the finish and that I needed to stop and take some of my gear off. Jamie and Mick politely waited and then waited some more after the long suffering zipper in my pack gave up, leaving me with a giant hole where stuff could come out. After some maneuvering, I ended up pulling most of the bulky stuff out and into my dry bag, and then closing the remaining hole somewhat with safety pins from my bib.^[9] Initially, I was just holding the dry bag, but eventually I realized I could hang it from my pack, and so I could run.

Jamie and Mick didn't seem superenthusiastic about the whole running thing (Mick: "I could shuffle") and I was starting to gap them a bit, which I felt a little bad about seeing as they'd waited while I broke my pack. In the event, though, it didn't matter much because soon enough we detoured off the perfectly good fire road into (you guessed it), yet more super rocky single track, which slowed us down a lot. I'm not going to say I loved this, but I think my companions found it a lot more demoralizing; at this point I was just resigned to slogging through it. It also helped that I had put my poles away which turns out to be easier on this kind of terrain, at least for me.

Eventually, we got dropped off at Saas Almagell, at which point things promptly went wrong because there was something wrong with the flagging. We spent 20-30 minutes messing around trying to figure out where to go (props to Mick for insisting we were going the wrong way!) and eventually had to message the race director to ask what to do. The dude they sent out didn't really speak English, but he managed to communicate that we should go back in the other direction and led us to an arrow which we had missed the first time. From there it was about 5K and 200 meters of ascent into Saas Fe, but on nice gravel road and then actual road, though with a short section of single track. I was still feeling like I could run at this point, but I didn't see a lot of value in splitting up so I just kind of dawdled a bit and we all finished together. There wasn't much in the way of a finishing arch, just a sign and some volunteers who scanned us and that was it.

I won't say I wasn't tired at this point, but I was basically feeling OK and I don't think I would have had any trouble finishing the race if they hadn't cut it short.

Post-Race #

As I mentioned above, the messaging was pretty vague on how we we were going to get get from Saas Fe to the finish, and what we were then told was as follows:

1. There is one shuttle.
2. It takes 8 people.
3. It takes about 2 hrs for the shuttle to round trip to Grächen.
4. The 4:00 shuttle is full so you have to wait for the 6:00 shuttle.

Nobody was that enthusiastic about this, but there also wasn't much to do about it; you can't really Uber at 3:30 AM in Saas Fe, and the alternative was taking the train, which itself takes like 2 hrs, so I just settled in to wait. Initially I was told there were no beds, but then someone found me one, and I futilely tried to sleep for 20 min or so and then just resigned myself to sitting in a chair, snacking, and trying to stay warm till 6:00. Eventually, they told us to walk over to the shuttle, about 10 minutes,^[10] and then a quick 45 minutes or so back to the start.

It's clear there were a bunch of last minute arrangements, but this section really could have been handled better. There was a lot of confusion about who would be on the next shuttle, with the intent seeming to be in order of arrival, but actually they started to take people in a different order until there were some loud objections. Also, having one bus really isn't enough.

Retrospective #

This was by far the hardest race I've ever done, much much harder than UTMB. The comparison point I've been using for people is that there are parts of UTMB that are somewhat technical and that you might be a little concerned about running. Once you take out the relatively short road or fire road sections, that's what the good parts of UTMR are like. The bad parts are, I guess, in principle runnable in parts, but really technical. The best comparison points I can give from my own experience are:

• The bad downhill parts are like the most rocky parts of Rock Creek Park in DC.
• A lot of the climbs are like the upper parts of climbs in the Sierras (e.g., Glen Pass) with a lot of loose rock and scree.
• The top part of the climb to Monte Moro is like Flagstaff's Blue Dot but longer and colder.

I'd trained on all this stuff, but it's different to have a couple miles of something and just to have it be endless.

Nutrition #

I really didn't keep to my nutrition plan. Based on previous practice, I had been planning to get a lot of my nutrition from sports drink, drinking high cab drinks in half my bottles and lower carb in the other half and using solid food when drinking the lower carb. In the event, I just didn't drink anywhere near as much as I expected; my timer would go off and I didn't feel like drinking and just kind of put it off, so even on long stretches I never really ran out of water. I also had to force myself to eat solid food. On the other hand, I'd get to aid stations and would feel a lot more interested in the bread and cheese.

I'm not sure how big a problem this was in practice, because you don't really need to get in 300+ calories an hour at these low levels of exertion. There were some moments where I did really feel like I needed to eat more, but I think those mostly coincided with low points for other reasons, such as fatigue. Basically, I think I could have managed this better, but I'm not sure it was really impactful. I would definitely plan differently for a future event, though, focusing more on salty stuff and less on sweet foods. Deprioritizing liquid calories would also make aid stations easier as I wouldn't have to get sports drink into my bottles.

Time and Pacing #

The UTMR site says that times are about 20% slower than UTMB, but I was clearly much slower (and the winning time is about 30% slower than a typical UTMB winner, though UTMB is of course a much better field). On the basis of my 37:49 UTMB finish time I had guesstimated 45:00 for UTMR, but I didn't even finish the abbreviated version in that time, and I would have expected something in the low 50s for the full course, so obviously I underestimated things. That was just a guess, so I don't want to get fixated on comparing to 45 hours, but I did spend some time trying to figure out what parts were slower or faster than you would have expected.

The obvious thing to do here is to compare to my UltraPacer forecast, but this ended up with several challenges. This is gonna get a bit technical so feel free to skip down a bit:

• My original forecast was for 45 hours and I hadn't put down any real wait times at aid stations, just forecasting a ridiculous 5 minutes.
• Ultrapacer is having some trouble determining aid station delays. I think this is because the positions of the aid stations are a bit off. UTMR's tracking had the same problem to some degree. I have splits from my watch for some of these but not others.
• I accidentally stopped my watch somewhere in the middle of the course for 40 minutes, and when Runalyze exported a GPX file from the FIT file it basically erased the gap, shortening the elapsed time by the time my watch was stopped. UltraPacer won't take a FIT file and Garmin choked trying to output the GPX.

Ultimately, what I ended up doing here is to use fitdecode^[11] to translate the FIT file to a GPX file with unadjusted timestamps and then upload it to UltraPacer. I created a new plan for 50 hours and added some split times for the aid stations, using a combination of my real splits and eyeballing a bit. This doesn't tell us everything, but nevertheless there's a pretty clear pattern, shown in the following figure.

Part of what's going down here is just UTMR underestimating how much I'm going to slow down throughout the race (you can tune that parameter but I didn't), but I think the main contributor here is how slow I was on the two technical downhills, followed by spending a lot of time in aid stations in the last half (I wasn't the only one!). You can see that mostly when it gets uphill, I am flat against the forecast and or making progress, and then when it becomes downhill I fall behind a lot.

You can't blame UltraPacer for this: if you don't tell it a section is technical it just works based on grade, so it doesn't know that those sections will be especially bad, but it's also the case that I'm particularly slow on that kind of section; as I said, a lot of people were going by me.

I finished fairly far down (officially 119 but we all came in togetherish so really 117th) out of 135 finishers with 61 DNFs, so this is pretty squarely in the middle. I usually finish a bit further up, but in talking to people I got the impression that this was a really stacked field; almost everyone either had done or was doing some serious race, whether it was UTMB, Mogollon Monster, Arc of Attrition, or whatever, and I know some of the less prepared people dropped out.

This is actually right about where I finished in relation to the fastest finisher as UTMB (a couple percentage points faster this time). On the one hand, I felt like I trained harder for UTMR and was more prepared, but on the other hand this race really pushed one of my weaknesses that I've had trouble preparing for because there's just not much of it here. If those sections had been like the rest of the race, I think I would have been about 2-3 hrs faster,^[12] but still clearly not 45 hours for the full race.

All in all, this was an epic adventure and definitely worth doing. With that said, I think I'm going to take a break from this kind of technical European race. Both here and at Grand Loop I found it kind of frustrating to have these long sections you were just going super slow because you had to pick your way through something. I definitely do like having a lot of climbing and I don't mind being out on the trail so long^[13]At least for next season I'd rather focus on races where the limiting factor is my fitness rather than my agility.

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1. He moved to NYC! ↩︎

2. I'm vegetarian, so no charcuterie. ↩︎

3. I usually use an iPhone 12 mini but I wasn't sure the battery would last the full race and I didn't want to have to mess around with a battery pack so I just bought a cheapie feature phone and a local SIM. ↩︎

4. According to Wikipedia, the longest foot suspension bridge in the world at the time it opened. ↩︎

5. Bruising? Cracking? Who knows. It hurt some but not as bad as when I've definitely broken a rib. In any case doctors don't bother with the difference because they don't treat broken ribs unless it's really bad or displaced or something, and you just have to wait it out. Feels better now. ↩︎

6. A trick I learned from Roman Danyliw. ↩︎

7. "Windproof and waterproof glove" ↩︎

8. There is a 4-day stage version of UTMR. ↩︎

9. I had duct tape but it was too stuck together to use... ↩︎

10. Saas Fe is apparently some kind of car-free zone. ↩︎

11. Which I totally vibe coded. Hope it's right! ↩︎

12. Better not even to speak of the 30 minutes we spent messing around Saas Agamell. ↩︎

13. Though I still maintain that a 100K is a great distance because you can sleep in bed after. ↩︎