We’ve just got back from Chamonix and one of the most epic running races on the planet. After a totally un-textbook 24 hours spent failing to acclimatise, pissing about in a glacial river and eating ice cream, Nick and our team-mate Darren took on the Ultra Trail Du Mont Blanc. Running through France Italy and Switzerland, the route is 105 miles long, includes enough mountain climbing to see you up and down Everest and has the casualty rate of a small civil war. To demonstrate just how brutal it is, the pre-race handbook comes with 17 pages of maps; this year, the winners from 2003, 2006 and 2007 only made it to page 3.
“You don’t want brie 10k in. But at 130k you love it.”
Over the next 41 hours the following events occurred: Nick and Darren took tea – the Frenchman stirring his cauldron with a tree branch assured them it was “the French way.” The mountain police appeared in the clouds after visibility reached three metres on the Col De La Seigne. American superstar Scott Jurek got lost, then got dropped. Nick nailed enough Coke and coffee to make La Ville Des Glaciers seem runnable. Legendary UK snowboard photographer Dan Milner shot lots and slept little. (Thanks Dan!) Darren saw jaguars. Nick wondered quietly whether it was acceptable to stone a guy to death to get his orange juice. Spanish prodigy Kilian Jornet won again. And the Alpine gods quietly freeze-dried Nick’s IT bands while he was still in Italy (at that point you know it’s game over) but kindly waited until Darren returned to France before doing the same.
“The whole race was like being on an escalator of shit.”
Looking somewhere between a cross-country skier minus his snow, and a war-hero coming home minus his legs, Darren stormed back into Chamonix using his poles as crutches and the French crowd went crazy. With a film crew running behind him and Van Gelis blasting out in front, he crossed the line with the immortal words “I think I might have taken a few too many drugs lads.”
After a handshake from Rene Bachelard, and an un-broadcastable interview with French TV, he was rushed straight to the medics, who having checked the reflexes in his knees with their little rubber hammers – and finding there were none – quizzed him carefully on whether he might have “taken any pen-killeurs?” Admitting to just half the actual amount of pills the Frenchman was heard to mutter “Son of Neptune!” under his breath, before turning to his colleagues to announce quite pragmatically “zis guy…he must be fucked.”