The two Basque runners were raising their arms and cutting a path through the wave of spectators. As they advanced, the racket increased to a level verging on madness. I was so surprised and bewildered that I ran right past the provisioning station. “Cold blood, Kilian, cold blood.” I stopped and turned halfway and took a cup of water and a gel, but the excitement and clamor around me made it hard to stay calm. The route went straight ahead toward a steep field of grass and mud. In a race of this distance, I should have taken advantage of the incline to walk a little and pick up the pace before the climb, which was long, eating the gel and drinking some water, but here, that was impossible. With all the shouting, you don’t notice the effort you’re making. All you can do is run with all your strength because the people push you along with their energy.
Short races, those that take one to four hours to cover between 20 and 40 kilometers, demand a high level of concentration. They aren’t anything like the Fully Vertical Kilometer, for example, where one small error can cause you to lose everything and you’re in a perpetual bubble, but they can’t be compared to a long race, either, during which you have to keep pace and hope the exhaustion won’t be too brutal. In these medium-length races, you have to concentrate, that much is true, but even if you make a mistake, you always have enough of a margin to make up for it. You can start running tactically, watch out for the best moment to attack, reserve some moments to rest, or just recover your strength in order to speed up again. I was prepared for these parameters in the Zegama race, until I came out of the tunnel for provisions. From that point on, everything got out of control: the spectators’ excitement forced us to pull out all the stops before it was time and to tackle the last 20 kilometers as if we were competing in a high-speed race. It was a nightmare.
After getting past an ascent, during which I overtook the two Basques and opened a gap between myself and my pursuers, I began to hear a murmur even louder than the previous one. I looked up and couldn’t believe it: thousands of people were spread over the peak of Aizkorri, occupying every inch. I felt like an unflagging cyclist in the Tour de France, sweating buckets in the middle of July, opening the way toward taking the Tourmalet. The fusion between us, the runners, and the audience was absolute. I have never experienced such a unique feeling in any other part of the world. It’s very special.
After getting through the final pass with a strong advantage, I began to notice the guy from Segovia closing in on me, which forced me to run the last 3 kilometers at a bone-crushing pace. Finally, and with great effort, I crossed the finish line in first place, only six seconds before Raúl. Those six seconds—apparently short, but in truth eternal—allowed me to lift the trophy of the Skyrunning World Cup. Those six seconds gave me the ability to begin to live my dream. Those six seconds motivated me to win every competition I’ve won since then. They were the most valuable six seconds of my career.
This made me think about the fact that winning and losing are separated only by one tiny step, which always depends on minor details.
A few weeks before the Zegama, I had run the Giir di Mont, a 32-kilometer race in the mountains east of Lake Como, in Italy. The prize was a car, a Fiat Panda. (In those days, I was a nineteen-year-old kid who, when he wanted to compete in some faraway race, had to quit paying the electricity bill and live in the dark for a week to be able to cover the registration and the cost of transport.) In that competition, the favorite was the Mexican Ricardo Mejía, who had dominated mountain races for the previous decade: he had won the mythical Sierre-Zinal five times, the Pikes Peak Marathon a few times, and the year before had been champion of the Zegama. It was the second time I had competed against him, and it was barely a week since I’d won my first serious event in Andorra, in the Skyrunning World Cup, where two years earlier I had seen Ricardo for the first time.
That Giir di Mont ended up saving a last surprise for me. I began on the attack, with high momentum, and suddenly found myself ahead of everyone else. Ricardo Mejía followed me with his short but dynamic steps, always running, even on impossible slopes. And he overtook me. From that moment on we took turns, first him ahead and then me. I went ahead of him downhill, and he passed me on the ascents. At the peak of the final ascent, he had a two-minute advantage, and if I wanted to win, I had no choice but to hurl myself down the slope as if my life depended on it. When there was only 1 kilometer left until the finish line, I caught up with him, but I couldn’t shake him off. We were 300 meters from the end and stepped onto the tarmac. A slight uphill slope separated us from the finish line, and . . . from the Fiat Panda. Ricardo was way more experienced and smarter than I was, and without leaving me even a second to think about it, he sprinted furiously. He had saved energy during the last descent, and I had emptied my reserves by trying to overtake him. He shot toward the finish line. I watched him move away, unable to do anything. My legs refused to respond to my brain’s instructions. Those six seconds turned me into a loser.
For a few years, I believed mistakenly that a race was what happened between the starting shot and the finish line. I was blinded by the idea that competition was a binary game between winning and losing, between achieving a good record or a bad one. The need to get the best result prevented me from seeing that the most important thing about Zegama wasn’t the encouragement, or the carb-heavy dinner the night before, but the passion of Alberto and Ainhoa, creators and organizers of the race, for turning that village, those mountains, and that day into a magical time for its inhabitants. Or that the real celebration wasn’t the one on the podium but the one where everyone gathered around a table to talk—runners, organizers, and spectators alike, all having dinner together in the town’s traditional Basque gastronomic club. Or that in Giir di Mont, the competition was less important than the pizzas at Peppa’s place afterward. Not being aware of this was the price I had to pay before I could reach the levels of physical fitness and competitive instinct that have given me the knowledge and the mechanics to achieve success.
Hardrock 100
Darkness was falling when we glimpsed the Virginius Pass, rising almost 4,000 meters in the mountains of southern Colorado. Luckily, we had already left the forest, and despite the limited visibility beneath the trees’ shadows, the sky was still aglow. A small number of clouds were left, reminding us that a rain- or snowstorm could erupt to cheer up what was left of the day with lightning or hailstones. We were occupying the mountain’s territory, and it seemed to want us to know that.
The bright yellow of the rocks was quickly becoming muted, and a ridge towered before us crowned with hundreds of pinnacles whose silhouettes rose against the sky. Between two of those granite towers, in a gap little more than a meter wide, was hidden one of the few passes that cross those mountains directly, without requiring a substantial detour. In that pass, so narrow and inaccessible, was the highest provisions station in the race, and probably one of the highest in any race in the world.
A long tongue of snow showed us the way. The landscape was beginning to split: the snow was white, and everything else—rocks, trees, mountains—was black. We had run over 100 kilometers since that morning, and for the first time my legs were feeling tired. I could no longer make any pointless efforts, like speeding up to get through a more technical stretch or jumping a gate instead of opening it. The way up was tedious, and there was no marked path for us to reach the tongue of snow. We had to climb a slope of loose rock that kept us sliding back down with every step. I tried to move quickly and avoided putting too much weight on the ground in order to trick it. When I finally reached the snow, it was so hard—despite being the middle of July, in daylight, and at over 4,000 meters—that I had to do everything I could to tense my toes and make my sneakers stiff enough to drive in, even if only a few millimeters. I prayed that I wouldn’t slip and fall down. Meanwhile, the blue sky faded and became an almost transparent shade of turquoise with a yellow, then orange tint. Finally, it exploded into deep red, before fading into a blue so dark it was almost black
, after a brief but intense phase of purple.
I was able to revel in this display of colors just before arriving at the provisioning station. I was with Rickey Gates, an extremely talented runner from the US who could win both 10-kilometer and 50-kilometer races. He is a highly unusual specimen: you’re just as likely to find him finishing strong in the Sierre-Zinal race as riding his motorcycle on Route 66, his saddlebags loaded with supplies for a few months’ travel from Alaska to Patagonia, or looking for a place to sleep on a farm in Alabama while he crosses the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific with no assistance. I’ve known Rickey since my first Sierre-Zinal in 2009. He came in fourth. Since then, we’ve coincided in many races, from the Alps to Alaska, and he’s been my pacer in every competition where I’ve needed one. Usually, in 100-mile races in the United States, a runner accompanies you on the last 30 or 40 miles to set the pace. Though he can’t help you physically, or carry the food and drink, the moral support he offers when you’ve already run over 60 miles is incalculable. Rickey was my pacer both times I ran the Western States 100, and he also helped me out on the Hardrock 100-Mile Endurance Run, on a long night of relentless rain and lightning.
When the sky was at its reddest, at that moment when it becomes a crimson so intense that it seems almost unreal, we reached the station. Then, I heard a voice:
“Hey, Kilian, want a swig of tequila?”
On that mountain ridge higher than 4,000 meters, in a 2-square-meter space between the rocky walls of two pinnacles flanked by a void on each side, a man dressed in orange and wearing a climbing helmet was filling a metal glass with tequila from a glass bottle. It was Roch Horton, a veteran ultra-distance runner who, after running the race ten times, decided to take charge of this unique provisioning station for the next ten years. As he himself says, “Ten years of receiving and ten of giving.”
I still hadn’t recovered from my amazement when Rickey exclaimed: “I want one!”
“Okay,” I replied, still somewhat disoriented. “One swig won’t do me any harm. But just a little, eh? There are still fifty kilometers left, and my legs aren’t feeling so fresh anymore.”
While Roch poured our tequila and served up a couple of egg, vegetable, and avocado burritos, I noticed there were five other people in that strange place. They had brought a portaledge, a kind of hammock you can use to sleep hanging from a wall. They had put out cookies, cooked potatoes, sandwiches, burritos, and a poster with the menu of dishes they could prepare up there, even indicating if they were vegetarian or vegan. They also had a couple of portable stoves like those used on expeditions, pots for heating water, and frying pans to satisfy the runners’ tastes. We were all sitting on a mattress that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out how they had managed to get up there. They’d set it up on a stone wall they had built themselves during the previous weeks.
From that height, we saw how the darkness had spread into the valleys and was now rising and making the colors of the mountains and sky disappear. Meanwhile, Scott Jurek—seven-time winner of the Western States 100, three-time winner of the 246-kilometer Spartathlon, and two-time winner of the Badwater Ultramarathon, who had also triumphed in this race—explained to us how unique this provisioning station was, that it was the only one with a waiting list to volunteer. All the volunteers were Hardrockers, meaning they’d completed this 100-mile race at least once, and all of them had been specially invited by Roch. It’s an exclusive privilege to help out at Kroger’s Canteen, as the space is known. As much as or more than winning the race.
When I was twenty and participated in a 160-kilometer race, equivalent to 100 miles, what most intrigued me was finding out whether I could cover the distance in one go, and do so at a fast pace. My doubts were dispelled in 2008 in the UTMB, the Ultra-Trail that goes around Mont Blanc. What motivated me about the distance was just knowing if I could compete and win. I faced the challenge of the shortest competition, the Vertical Kilometer, in the same spirit, approaching it with the same training, strategy, and planning. But for longer races, this purely competitive approach and execution was a break from the norm, especially in Europe, where the Ultra-Trail was thought of as a discipline for veterans, to be faced with patience in order to make it to the end in one piece. Indeed, the winner of the last three races had been the Italian runner Marco Olmo. That year he had turned fifty-nine!
After doing longer trainings for a couple of months, I found I could run for eight or nine hours without eating or drinking. This meant I could travel lighter, without having to carry water between the provisioning stations. Studying videos and the partial times of previous winners, I deduced that if I could complete the whole 160 kilometers without walking, I would finish in nineteen hours and my victory would be assured. I prepared well for my long trainings with the minimum equipment necessary, and ran fast for the whole race. I was alone and up ahead by the twentieth kilometer.
That same year of 2008, in the United States, twenty-three-year-old Kyle Skaggs won the Hardrock 100. He was the first to complete it in less than twenty-four hours, and also in a minimalist style, running fast from the first kilometer. Today, with the current preparation and training, the fear of starting out light and fast has dissipated. There is no mystery to it; the difficulty lies in running fast from the first meter to the last. Long-distance running is also a unique and special journey every time. Sometimes it’s an inner journey—you experience emotions that intensify with fatigue, and your sensitivity increases; other times, it’s external, because you get to know mountains and landscapes deeply from the moment the sun rises until it sets, you accompany the animals as they wake, and they run with you by the light of the moon.
When I compete, I like to be first. I’m the most restless, the most competitive, the most impatient, as you know by now, but at the same time I’m convinced that the satisfaction of victory must be personal and private. I feel a certain aversion to the ostentation of competition. Showing off, taking the stand higher than everyone else, followers and losers, so no one can doubt that we are the best . . . In the end, winning is only internal, individual, inexpressible. It’s the same with defeat.
These ceremonies and symbols are what kills competitions. And at the Hardrock 100, they know this perfectly well. By eliminating them, it has become just a race, free from paraphernalia and unnecessary displays.
The day after the starting shot, everyone waits in Silverton—also the point of departure—for the last runner to reach the finish line and kiss the stone marking the end of the race. Yes, the stone. You won’t find the typical arch with a tape across it here. Instead, there’s a rough stone measuring 2 square meters, with the Hardrock 100 logo engraved on it: a mountain ram. After a light snack, the runners, volunteers, and everyone else at the race meet in a school pavilion to celebrate the awesome weekend they’ve just had. Runners who kiss the stone within forty-eight hours of starting to run, the established limit, receive a certificate. The checkpoint volunteers and pacers are also called together and honored. Everyone plays a role in this competition; everyone is equally important and necessary. Everyone celebrates their love of the sport and of the mountains. That’s what a competition should be like.
Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc
These days, skyrunning is a well-known sport that receives quite a bit of media attention, but ten years ago, only four dudes were practicing it. That all changed in 2006, when Anton Krupicka won the Leadville race in Colorado, one of the most prestigious 100-mile competitions. He was a twenty-something young runner whose surprise win came with a unique aesthetic: minimalist sneakers, short shorts, a bare, tanned chest, and blond locks blowing in the breeze. He also stood for the philosophies of living close to nature and rejecting conflict with others, since according to him, the most important thing was personal exploration. Anton’s victory and his message left an even greater mark than the incredible record set a year earlier by the extraordinary Matt Carpenter, who had dominated the Pikes Peak Marathon for nearly two
decades.
Two years later, Kyle Skaggs broke the record in the Hardrock, and later that same year, I won the Mont Blanc Ultra-Trail. A fresh new wind was blowing in the sport. The year 2006 also saw the publication of Born to Run, a book on the history of Mexican Tarahumara runners, who ran 100 miles shod only in simple sandals. It was the year, too, of the impressive Ann Trason, who killed all the races and beat all the men, and Scott Jurek, who never missed a long-distance race. With the book Ultramarathon Man, Dean Karnazes brought trail running to the attention of urbanites and entrepreneurs needing to disconnect and take on a challenge. This series of events, added to the races being organized all over the place, led to an explosive growth of the sport in the next few years. But despite this, men had been running in the mountains for centuries. In fact, there were mountain competitions as far back as 1040, when King Malcolm Canmore organized a hill race in Scotland as a way to select his messengers.
In 2002, when I was starting to run in my first competitions, the star of the moment was Fabio Meraldi, and that was precisely the season when he performed at his highest level. Alongside Bruno Brunod, Matt Carpenter, Ricardo Mejía, and Adriano Greco, he had run the most important peaks in the world in the discipline baptized by Marino Giacometti as skyrunning in 1993. I was in awe of these skyrunners, and from my teens I dreamed of competing with them one day. In 2007, I won the Skyrunning World Cup and the Pierra Menta. Then my curiosity was piqued and I wanted to try long distance. In Europe, since being established in 2003, the UTMB has been the race that all runners of this specialty view with a combination of desire and respect.
Above the Clouds Page 8