Lavaredo Ultra Trail 80km

I had a startling moment of clarity as I slogged my way along Val Travenanzes: I’ve got life wrong, I thought. It’s all wrong. I’m not capable of running ultra marathons, my body can’t hold this much stress. I can never, ever, do this again. Time to quit running and spend my money on therapy. You can’t run from your problems forever. I was done.

It had started gloriously. I’d came into the race off the back of a horrible training spell where nothing would come together but, as we started the ascent out of La Val early morning, that faded away. I felt like my halcyon days had returned.

I was controlling my effort and still making good time. Hundreds of bodies moving in what seemed to be a single organism, first in a crowd but morphing into a long line. We were being lured into running fast through the trees but it felt so good.

As we broke the tree line a sharp inhalation of air rippled along the trail. Huge limestone walls flanked us and a towering couloir of white scree loomed over us, leading at what seemed an impossible gradient on to Ju de Sant Antone. Now we knew we were in the Dolomites.

A quick pause at the top of the pass to take it all in. Some of the most beautiful mountains in the world on every horizon. And then, the descent. Controlling my pace but consciously trying to stay in the zone.

The first aid station came and went in a haze of Coca Cola and orange segments. Six minutes. I’d allowed myself eight. Margins matter. I was inside three hours which was where I hoped to be.

It was on the climb out of there that I first noticed my energy starting to wain. I wasn’t in pain yet, but I was conscious of a shift in momentum and a slowing of pace. The sun was up now and I stopped at any opportunity to fill flasks and immerse my cap in cold water.

I paused at a mountain refuge to buy a can of coke and look out across the vista. A switch flicked. As I trotted out onto the trail again I knew my legs weren’t in a good way. On the long steep downhill before the next aid station I started to drop places as I struggled with the heat and my weary quads.

At Malga Ra Stua the course merged with the 120km race, going eight hours longer than us. They’d seen the sunrise over Tres Cime but had also endured 76km already. A lad from Toulouse came alongside and we chatted until the aid station entrance.

He warned me about what was to come. Dismay. A stream of words I can’t print here. A mumbled, “pardon my French,” before remembering he was actually French. Oh dear.

From this point on it’s less a race report and more a chronicle of my existential spiral. We headed out from there and up an undulating climb into Val Travenanzes.

It’s hard to describe Val Travenanzes in retrospect, not because I can’t remember its every detail but rather because they’ve seared themselves on the pain receptors in my brain.

If nature made its own blast furnaces, this must be the best of them. High, steep faces on both sides, the sun beating down on a bed of white stone along the valley floor. The traverse took seventeen days, or so it felt. We once again seemed to share a collective experience as faces set themselves towards the goal and tried to suffer with as much dignity as we could muster.

Murakami said pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Well unfortunately I must’ve ticked the added suffering box at registration.

I drop to the grass and stare ahead vacantly when a fellow Brit sees the flag on my bib and tells me to keep pushing. We just need to climb out of it and then there’s a descent. I dragged myself to my feet solely because he’d put the effort in to encourage me and it’d be awkward not to respond.

Approaching the top of the climb, I messaged a friend for a pep talk. It was getting too much. I knew Col Gallina was not far. I could cry on the shoulder of a volunteer and go home on an air-conditioned coach.

It was the inevitable end to eighteen months of everything going worse. The DNFs, the chest infection, the long recovery and my body not responding to training. I can only absorb so much stress and I felt with perfect clarity that this would be my last ultra marathon.

And that hit home. If this was my last, was I really going out with a whimper? In my head the words of Dylan Thomas rang out; “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I listened to my pep talk, put my sunglasses on, fished my earphones out of my pack, and put Erasure’s ‘a little respect’ on repeat. Because if running down a hill side with tears in your eyes and Andy Bell belting out ‘a little respect’ isn’t raging against the dying of the light I don’t know what is.

“I try to discover, a little something to make me sweeter,” come on Andy, prophesy. “Oh baby refrain from breaking my heart” I actually smiled and managed to pick up to a jog again for a few minutes. Might have even sang along.

Col Gallina lay somewhere about five kilometres away. I had to make it. And I had to somehow resist the clamour in my soul to call it quits.

Reaching Gallina, I had a little rice and bread. More Coca Cola, which I can drink at a prodigious rate, draining my cup then holding it straight back out for another hit. My physio had text on the descent and told me to take a break and enjoy the view, I tried my best to oblige. But then? Onwards.

Things felt better mentally leaving Col Gallina. My body still hurt but I knew it was the last big climb of the day. Tofana di Dentro towered behind as we climbed up to Rifugio Averau. It was a slog but as we came to the top I decided to go straight through the water station and get started on the next section.

You’re up at around 2400m of altitude again and a chill wind was breaking over the passes. I’d seen notifications on my phone about my position and, not knowing there were hundreds of runners still behind me, decided I was probably last.

There are few motivations as effective as wounded pride. I worked out my expected finish was midnight, four hours below where I thought I would be, but started to fight for places again. With both runs on the same course at this point you just have to pass everyone you see and hope that some are in your race.

It tried to rain. I told the mountain I’d been to Scotland, it could do its worst. I may have even sang a little of Flower of Scotland while the drops came down.

By the time I crossed the final col and saw the lights of Cortina sparkling in the valley below, I was taking some kind of masochistic enjoyment from the whole thing. 10km to go. I did the maths, if I could speed up just a little bit, maybe I could finish by eleven thirty. The game was afoot.

I alternated jogging for a bit then using long pole swings to try and increase my stride length. Into the aid station. Two cups of iced tea. Two slices of orange. With neither time nor need to top up water, I propelled myself into the woods and started to fuel on whatever I had left in my pack.

Every head torch was a challenge to speed up and overtake. At one point three cows joined the trail, trotting in the same direction as the runners. Three men tentatively trying to pass three huge cows, in the middle of the night, in a Dolomitic forest. It would’ve been funny if I wasn’t so scared of them.

We finally broke cover of the woods with two kilometres left, a Brit cheered me and told me I was doing well to still be running. The further we got into town the more the noise picked up. Cheering. Car horns. What seemed like every language in Europe yelling at you.

I turned onto Corso Italia and turned it up, fast as my bombed out legs could take me. Children high fiving. People whistling. Diners and drinkers applauding and then – then the finish line comes into view. A hundred metres of hoardings lined by people banging their hands on them, the campanile, the arch. I stretch out my hands and airplane it in.

Slower than planned. More painful than imagined. But finished. As Coppi would say, “it’s like wrestling a gorilla—you don’t stop when you’re tired, you stop when the gorilla is tired”.

It was an exceptionally hard day, there’s lots to process. But I’m pleased that I refused to quit no matter how bad it got. Maybe I do have more Ultras in the tank after all…