My hardest race - the Mont Blanc Marathon

On 30 June 2019 I ran the hardest race of my life.

I use the term "ran" quite loosely here for a 42km race which I finished in under 9 hours. Walked, trudged, hiked, jogged, and yes, ran, along with the occasional sitting-on-a-tree-stump-protest is how I completed the Mont Blanc Marathon.

It was a race that got stuck in my head the summer of 2016 when I did a week-long introduction to trail running camp in Chamonix (https://www.tracks-and-trails.com/holidays/chamonix-trail-running-camp). I was looking for one final challenge before starting my career and figured I might as well give trail running a try. For anyone unfamiliar with trail running, it is essentially running on hiking trails and other non-road surfaces such as grass, mud, forests, beaches, you name it. One of the benefits of trail running is that you tend to be surrounded by more trees than people and it feels like an adventure.

I was hooked after my week-long stint in Chamonix. I had learned everything from how to tackle technical descents, the pros and cons of using poles, running across snow, nutrition, heart rate monitoring and pacing. In the back of my head I kept thinking about the Mont Blanc Marathon and it stuck with me for another three years.

At the time I signed up I was living in a city and wasn't entirely sure how I would train for a trail race on this scale. I had run an 8 mile trail race in Wimbledon, and a 16 mile one in Bath, but nothing compared to the staggering 2,700 meters of ascent and 1,700 meters of descent of the Mont Blanc Marathon. Despite being surrounded by flat pavement I figured that if I was creative enough I could make it work.

Most of my training consisted of hitting the regular mileage targets of a road marathon, combined with more hill training and hours on the step machine. After every run I held a plank for a minute and a half to throw in a brief core workout. I booked a half marathon in North Wales to add in a bit more trail running, and spent a weekend in the Brecon Beacons trying out my new running poles. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to store the poles in a way that wouldn't annoy me, so after a run or two I put them back in my closet where they now live.

I flew to Chamonix a few days before the race to give my body time to adjust to the altitude. When you're running at altitude, the air feels thinner and everything is just a bit harder. What I hadn't expected was the 40° C weather (104 °F). France was experiencing a heatwave and my race was going to be hot.

The day before the race I had a very upset stomach. Whether it was bad food or nerves, I hadn't imagined spending the day before lying on a bed, trying to get liquids inside of me. It made me even more nervous about getting dehydrated the next day. Fortunately, I was at the start line ready to go at 6.30am. The race had been moved an hour earlier due to a thunderstorm - nothing like pressure to finish early!

I took the first half easy. I knew that it was generally flatter than the second half, with the route taking us along the valley until mile 11 when we would hit our first and biggest climb, the Aiguillette des Posettes (2201m), a climb I had done previously in 2016. I found knowing what to expect was very helpful as it kept me calm and confident, but my knowledge ran out around mile 16. I'm not sure why I had failed to study the second half of the race but I soon found myself faced with the challenge of knowing I had at least two more big climbs and no idea of when to expect them.

Things started to get quite hot. I had a two liter hydration pack and refilled it twice. I was careful to keep eating throughout the race, roughly every 30-45 minutes, and my family smothered me in sunscreen around mile 18 which also helped. But mentally I had just begun to realise how hard this race was going to be.

When you are "climbing" in a trail race like this, you typically are power walking uphill unless you're one of the elite. About 80% of the other racers had poles which made me question my decision not to bring mine. There were 2,500 of us on a single track trail, meaning you could see hundreds of people stretching out before and after you. There was nothing particularly calming about it, especially when people started to show symptoms of dehydration, heat stroke and altitude sickness. I felt somewhat amused that here I was, restricted to the speed of the person in front of me, following hundreds of people up a mountain, when I thought this would be a peaceful, quiet, nature-filled adventure.

The other part about seeing hundreds of people in front of you, is that they form a zig-zag following the trail up the mountains. And if you try to look for the very start of that line, the furthest point in your view, you'll find that it is a never-ending zig-zag. It really is a mental game. You are pushing yourself to climb a mountain and you have no idea when the climb will end. If you're me, you're also not entirely sure how many climbs you have left because you really should have looked at the map before.

The hardest point in that race was when one of those zig-zags took me to a wide-open, 800+ meter long track of pebbles which went straight uphill. When I hit the pebbles I nearly laughed. They were hard to stand on, let alone run on, and it felt impossible that the climb was continuing when I had been moving uphill for what felt like hours.

I took it one stride at a time.

I knew that if I kept moving my legs forward, eventually the race would end. I just had no idea when.

Eventually, the race did end, and it ended the way I had come to expect it would, with a 5km uphill finish. I spent that 5km thinking, there's no way this is going to be uphill to the end. I also spent it questioning whether it actually was only 5km, because spectators kept giving us kilometer updates in French and I could have sworn the number "20" had been thrown about. I figured it was 50-50 odds, I had low expectations by this stage.

Lots of people started walking, but there was a part of me that felt that this really had to be it, mainly because my Garmin watch had never lied before, and I wanted to finish strong. I ran to the finish and saw my family there, cheering me on. I proudly had not fallen once during the entire race, but right before the finish line, a man ran up behind me to finish together, put his arm around my shoulders, and knocked me over. It's a bittersweet moment to see the finish line steps away from you, and to simultaneously watch the man who made you fall run across it, but I got right back up and finished.

That night, I had dreams that I was running uphill, following the zig-zag, wondering whether it would ever end. When I woke up, I was relieved, for the second time, that the race was over. It was by far the hardest physical challenge I have attempted and I was on a mental high for the week after, unable to quite believe that I had done it.

I can't tell you what I was thinking about during that race. I did not listen to music. I spoke to someone in broken French only briefly on the first climb. I waved to my family who came to watch. But apart from moments when I felt amused at who had planned such an insane route, I think my mind was blank. I purposefully did not let myself think negative thoughts. My sole focus was on moving forwards and perhaps all of my mental energy was directed into that too, just putting one foot in front of the other. It's such a minute movement when it's broken down into that, but even the smallest movement forward meant progress to me. As I didn't know where I was in the race for most of the second half, the only thing I knew for certain was that one more step meant one step closer to the finish line.

When things get tough, I rely on that mentality. If I know a certain action will get me closer to the end of something, I focus on that. I block out the fact that I don't know exactly when the end will come, or necessarily what other tasks I may have to do. It's all about keeping the mentality that one step counts and the bottom line is to keep taking it one stride at a time because eventually it will all add up

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