by Jill Homer
As Beat geared up for his Alps adventures, I reconsidered a race I had signed up for earlier in the year, and subsequently backed out of (but didn’t remove my name from the roster) when I decided to race the Tour Divide. The Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc is a 104-mile foot race around Mont Blanc, the largest mountain in western Europe. The route crosses through France, Italy, and Switzerland over a multitude of mountain passes that add up to more than thirty-thousand feet of cumulative elevation gain: equal to climbing from sea level to Mount Everest. The race organization gives runners forty-six hours to complete the race, which sounds like an amble, but most certainly is not when steep grades and technical trails reduce an all-out effort to two miles per hour. In mountain racing, thirty-minute-miles are absolutely a respectable running pace.
Of course, my body was desperately overworked and under-trained. Most of my spring training had been on a bike. Seventeen hundred miles of the Tour Divide is an exhaustive effort even without pneumonia, and lung recovery was slow. My fitness remained poor in early August, just three weeks before the start of UTMB. I told everyone who asked that I would not be racing in Europe. Even Beat heard a noncommittal, “Let’s see how I feel before the start.” But in my daydreams, UTMB had redemption scrawled across its daunting elevation profile. The Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc is another one of those races frequently touted as “the toughest in the world.” I wanted to run it untrained, eight weeks after quitting the Tour Divide and still recovering from pneumonia. What could go wrong?
At this point, many readers of this book are no doubt rolling their eyes at my hubris. On the surface I may appear as another endurance masochist taking misguided moon-shots to defy my own decline. If I must be truthful, this was part of the draw, but only a small part. Even if the race itself was a disaster, there was so much beauty to witness, interesting people to meet, joy to savor, and pain to endure. There was so much life to experience. Languishing in a French hotel room when this opportunity was right in front of me — this, I convinced myself, was the poor choice. So a few days after Beat set out for his two-hundred-mile odyssey, I lined up with twenty-five hundred fiercely fit international runners in the central square of Chamonix, France.
And yes, there were disasters. The disasters were small, but they started early, just three miles after the gun went off at six in the evening. All of Chamonix erupted in cheers as thousands of runners surged into the streets of this upscale mountain town. The temperature was eighty-six degrees: unseasonably warm for late August. The crowd was thick, and most runners seemed to sprint off the starting line. Although I intended to pace myself, even ten-minute-miles — my typical pace for short trail runs — siphoned me into the back of the pack. I groaned and took longer strides to boost my speed, but I was so focused on monitoring my breathing that I failed to recognize the early signs of stomach distress. By mile three, my gut was gurgling, and nausea moved through my body in unwelcome waves.
Slowing my stride was necessary but futile; the damage had been done. I hiked up the first twenty-five-hundred-foot climb while fighting off dizziness. The long descent loosened my bowels to the point that I was trotting awkwardly with my cheeks clenched for nearly an hour. My eyes darted everywhere in search of a private nook, to no avail. With hundreds of other runners surrounding me, I was too proud to squat next to the trail, and too rushed to bushwhack into the woods. By the time I reached a bathroom at the first checkpoint, there were smears of blood across my backside. In my desperation to prevent a messy accident, I failed to notice the considerable chaffing that rubbed my skin raw.
Even though I still had control of my breathing, nausea and open wounds just thirteen miles into a hundred-mile race do not bode well. I cleaned myself thoroughly with antibacterial wet wipes, which evoked a searing pain so intense I can only compare it to pouring acid into a third-degree burn. Once I finally stopped seeing stars, I limped into the darkened cattle fields, holding my breath to block a nauseating aroma. After becoming so dizzy I nearly passed out, I hunched over to vomit a small amount of clear liquid — I’d only ingested water since starting the race — and then coughed until I could walk again. I was barely holding myself together.
At the second checkpoint in the French resort town of Les Contamines, I staggered toward a bench and laid on my back. I still hadn’t eaten anything, and hoped fifteen minutes of rest, some broth, and maybe some plain bread would help me get my stomach back. Just as I laid down, a woman approached me and pointed sternly at her watch. A voice over the intercom spoke in several languages before translating the message to English: “We remind you that you must leave by twelve o’clock.” I glanced at my phone. It was 11:55.
Disheartenment sliced through my raw gut. I was only twenty-two miles into UTMB, and already running against cutoffs. If I failed to meet one, I’d be pulled from the race. If I wanted to not fail, I was going to have to chase these cutoffs with my sour stomach, questionable lung capacity, and searingly painful butt wounds for every one of the next forty hours. There would be no time to rest.
But oh, what redemption I’d achieve if I overcame the odds! As I shuffled away from more cow pastures with a John Wayne-like gait, I made frustrating calculations that only served to flood my system with stress hormones. Overcoming every issue without accumulating more seemed highly unlikely, and yet I cringed at how devastated I’d feel if I quit. But if I didn’t quit, there were so many worse ways to fail.
Still, humans are strange animals, and the chemicals that respond to sickness and stress also fill our bodies with elation and awe. The rocky trail rose above tree line, offering the route’s first unobstructed views of towering mountains surrounding a cirque. The full moon cast limestone cliffs in luminescent shades of silver, with contours so deep they hinted at a fourth dimension. In front of me, a steep pass rose like a fortress wall, rendered black in the moon’s shadow. At the apex of the pass, a star-filled sky appeared to drain into a single stream of white light. It was the headlamp-lit procession of a thousand runners marching up Croix du Bonhomme, nearly three-thousand feet higher. They appeared to be floating, like fallen angels ascending toward a heaven they would never reach. The scene was dystopically beautiful, and for long minutes I marched in awe, free of frustration and fear.
By the bottom of the pass, I was again grinding my teeth in agony as I mopped up fresh blood with wet wipes. The open sores between my butt cheeks rubbed together with every footfall, and were becoming deeper and more painful as the miles ground away at my skin. My stomach had settled enough that I could take in a few handfuls of candy, but this new energy only serve to highlight the searing pain that was not going away — not as long as I kept moving.
It was mile thirty-three. I was avoiding failure math at this point. The checkpoint already looked like a disaster-area refugee camp, with most of the other runners slumped on benches, bandaging bloody feet, lying face-down on the grass, or hunched over bushes, vomiting. We were the back of the pack — the sickly animals struggling and stumbling just to stay with the herd. There were twenty minutes before the cutoff, and I could almost feel the hot breath of imaginary wolves bearing down on this sad place. Those still sprawled on the ground were next in line to be picked off by the wolves. I gulped down chicken broth and waddled out of the aid station, refueled mainly by fear.
The sun rose over the next pass as the back-of-packers crossed into Italy. The pass after that was an expanse of table-sized boulders that required crawling. In my rush down the other side, I caught my foot and tumbled headlong into a minefield of sharp boulders. Usually when I trip, my anxious brain interferes, causing me to tense up and slap the ground like a dead fish. Here I was so resigned to fatigue and pain that even that terrifying pull of gravity didn’t prompt an emotional reaction. Instinct directed me to tuck and roll over the rocks, and I more or less landed on my feet without hitting anything sharp. For several seconds I froze in this crouched position, overcome with disbelief that I just unintentionally cartwhee
led over a boulder field and somehow emerged unscathed. My shoulder throbbed and I was frightened to start moving again, convinced that after the shock subsided I’d find a broken bone. Finally, a British runner who witnessed the fall from two switchbacks higher passed me.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No,” I wheezed, then cleared my throat. “Actually, I think I’m fine.”
Renewed adrenaline propelled me over the next few passes as the day heated up. The cutoff wolves fell a few paces behind. I had more than an hour on them when I reached the halfway point in the Italian village of Courmayeur, so I took advantage of the extra time to tend to my feet and eat a plate of pasta. I should have continued moving, as the temperature topped ninety-seven degrees by the time I returned to the trail. I was back at the cusp of the time limit and facing not only a massive climb, but also the slow-moving procession of the back-of-pack.
A narrow trail funneled runners upward through the pine forest. Trees provided thin shade while keeping the crowd condensed into a hunched, sweat-soaked assembly line. The fixed pace felt unconscionably slow, but every time I tried to pass people, I became so winded that I had to stop and catch my breath. Beige clouds of dust swirled from a sun-baked trail that two-thousand runners had trampled into fine powder. I pulled a buff over my mouth to prevent dust from entering my lungs, but I couldn’t contain the wheezing.
This was a familiar spiral. While I had suspected it from the beginning, I remained incredulous that my airways were still so reactive two months after contracting pneumonia.
“This is a mistake.”
The forest ended abruptly at a sharp point on the ridge. Above that elevation, the trail contoured a grassy slope with views of the granite spires and glaciers of the Mont Blanc massif, still ten-thousand feet higher. This is the postcard view of UTMB, so majestic that it’s distracting to all but the most self-absorbed runners — which most of us are by hour twenty-one. Only when I stopped for “oxygen breaks” could I remove myself from my own distress for long enough to experience what it was I came for. I lay on my back in the tall grass and watched the mountain’s dark clouds dissipate into the blue sky overhead.
I made the next checkpoint’s cutoff, barely, just as a volunteer was urging a seventy-year-old Swiss man to put down his plate and leave before the clock ran out. The caliber of athletes at the back of the pack continued to impress me — a lot of them were young, strong-looking men with no visible injuries, and their presence among those who were struggling bolstered my conviction that this race was in fact very hard. But the older runner impressed me most of all, because he put down his plate of food and marched out of the tent with a fierce look on his face. I later learned that he arrived in Chamonix minutes before the final cut-off, becoming the oldest UTMB finisher ever.
I was more resigned. My face was not fierce. In all likelihood, it betrayed the fear I felt as I hiked toward Grand Col Ferret with my back to the setting sun. Was my breathing going to become progressively worse? Would I spiral back to pneumonia, with days of gasping in bed? The early discomforts of the race — bloody chaffing, raw gut and a bruised shoulder — still gnawed at me, but I’d become wholly preoccupied with concerns about my overall health. Continuing to hike up yet another pass after an entire night and day of hard breathing couldn’t be doing my lungs any favors, and yet something inside my brain balked at the notion of turning around and quitting. The effort was futile, and I knew that, but I was going to see it through to the bitter end. At least, I was going to see Switzerland.
But I didn’t see Switzerland, not really. The pass that marked Italy’s border with Switzerland was still beyond my line of sight when awareness began to fade — again slipping into survival mode as my brain shut down unnecessary emotions to conserve oxygen and energy. I remember the nearly full moon rising into a purple sky, and then darkness clamped down as I shuffled downhill. This was still “running” — it was all I had left from my deflated fight-or-flight instinct. But I didn’t make it all that far before two race volunteers who were sweeping this section of trail caught up with me. And this was it. I’d reached the back of the race. The cutoff wolves culled everyone behind me. I was next.
Eventually I caught up to another wounded deer of a runner, and the sweeps circled around him while I shuffled ahead. The trail contoured a steep hillside, with a rocky surface barely wide enough to fit two shoes. The woods below were thick and quiet, as black as a bottomless hole. I fantasized about walking off the ledge and disappearing into the darkness — not a legitimately suicidal thought, but more a method of imagining away the discomfort and discouragement. I still had to get myself to the next point of civilization, whether I met the time cutoff or not. The sweeps had said my chances were not good.
“You’ll need to really run,” were the words he used in an abrupt French accent.
“I’m doing the best I can,” I replied, which is a phrase I often say to myself when I’m about to fail.
But I couldn’t honestly say I was doing the best I could. My legs were still strong, and I hadn’t been out of breath since I started descending. Still, there were worse scenarios than failure, and I needed the cutoff wolves to take me out before my ego caused any more damage. There was relief in this again — shame and relief — as I shuffled toward the shuttered village of La Fouly, where I missed the cutoff by fifteen minutes.
In that amount of time, the aid station had been cleared and most of the tables removed. A volunteer directed me in broken English to join the other culled runners on a bus. I misunderstood his instructions and limped to the village bus station, where there was no bus scheduled to arrive for ten more hours. The Swiss village was too small for taxis, and hotels were closed for the night. Beat was participating in another race and my parents, who were also visiting Europe for the week and touring Zermatt that day, had no reliable means of communication. For twenty minutes I sat in the abandoned bus station as my leg muscles stiffened and my core became chilled in the cool evening air. Finally it dawned on me that no one was coming, and the runners’ bus already left. Eventually my parents would find me and drive me back to Chamonix, but at the time I believed I would have to remain there until morning.
It’s these ridiculous scenarios — shivering in sweat-soaked Lycra on a bench in rural Switzerland, having not slept the previous evening, after running and hiking seventy-one miles with more than twenty-two-thousand feet of climbing, and wheezing while I pondered how to keep myself warm — that bring out the most critical introspection.
“This has all gotten out of hand,” I thought as I removed a pair of gloves and the last bits of food from my pack. “I need to take a step back from all of this and figure out what I’m actually trying to accomplish.”
The goal of endurance sports always seems to be bigger, tougher, and scarier. The numbers don’t matter as much as the escalation. The more we participate in endurance challenges, the farther we need to push ourselves to reach the threshold of the unknown, wherein we find the optimal experiences we seek. The fear, the joy, the pain, the passion, the love — we feel it all so much more intensely on the edge of livability. It’s this intensity that brings us back, seeking ever-greater challenges.
Modern life is steeped in the mundane, built around the assumption that the edge of livability is a dangerous and uncomfortable place we would all do well to avoid. If this is true, how did the most comfortable and safe society in the history of human civilization become so anxious, hateful, and fear-driven? I know I tend to succumb to anxiety when I’ve become too comfortable. Sedentary routine brings out my worst characteristics, which have nothing to do with becoming fat or unfit, and everything to do with a dulling of experience. A gray hue washes over my days and I slowly become more complacent, less imaginative, more fearful and less content.
When these negative emotions take over, I wonder if this is how others experience life — the strangers who rage at me from their cars, obsess
about products, panic over trivial setbacks, or seem fixated on their outward appearance. Why do we get so worked up over trivial details? How much perspective have we lost in our focus on comfort?
Comfort, I’m convinced, is the enemy. Adversity keeps us sharp, which is why we seek salient experiences, even when our own safety-driven consciences deem these activities unnecessary or insane. We go to the edge because that is where we feel the most alive. Still, it makes sense that our pursuit of this edge of livability would eventually go too far, and we’d fall into an unlivable condition of long-term injury, illness, or death.
The poet T.S. Eliot coined a phrase popular with endurance athletes: “Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” This remains true — but how often do we genuinely assess the costs of that risk, and contemplate what will happen if we truly go too far?
Maybe too far is having permanently shredded lungs. Or maybe it’s simply being cold, exhausted, and alone on a bench in Switzerland, loathing myself in ways that comfort always managed to dull.
Chapter 4
Pursuit of Experience
Just beyond this mire of self-loathing, illness, and failure was my Alaska dream, inexplicably intact.
After Beat and I returned from Europe in late September, I made an appointment with an asthma specialist and tentatively ventured back into training. My Iditarod fitness plan was conservative but time-consuming: Moderate-intensity efforts increasing in duration until I re-established a firm base of endurance. The March bike trip proved I wasn’t strong enough to manage a fully loaded fat bike in difficult conditions, so I also joined a gym and incorporated twice-weekly weight lifting. The doctor confirmed that my lung function was abnormally low and prescribed treatments for exercise-induced asthma.