My racing program requires a total reschedule as I've been denied the freestart at Swiss Alpine that was promised to me last July.
Well unfortunate things like that do happen occasionally, but the way they cut the route after the aid station was a bit weird. I mean it's not nice to spend five minutes eating and drinking and then when you continue be told that you missed the time limit by a minute. Especially not after having been forced to stop for about 20 minutes as there were way too many runners on the single trail. All the K78, C42 and K31 competitors had started together at 8 AM in Davos, resulting in a chaos 10K later.
The only reason I was able to face the disqualification relatively calmly was that the RD Andrea Tuffli personally promised us a free entry 2009, which was confirmed with a friendly handshake. He also confirmed this in the news section of the race website: "All participants taken out of the K78 race will receive... a free start for 2009".
When the registration for Swiss Alpine 2009 opened, I enquired (in English) how to get in. No answer. I thought maybe it's a language issue, so I emailed them again in German, asking how to register for free. This time I got an answer stating that I don't qualify for a free start because I reached the Bergun checkpoint after 11:33 AM. That's doesn't make sense to me at all, as I've already been granted a free start, and the cutoff time for the Bergun checkpoint (39 km) was 12:50 PM.
At this point I have no idea what races to do. The main reason I wanted to finish this race was to earn the missing two points for the UTMB in September 2009 (all applicants need four points to qualify). So I had to let my dream of participating in UTMB go as well.
By the way, there's a brave German guy nicknamed Powerschnecke (Powersnail) who came to the Chant cut off point about five minutes after me, and somehow got through the officials closing the road, and finished the K78 race with ten minutes to spare in 11:50! Actually he seems to have arrived a bit late at every checkpoint, and for this reason he was often denied food and drinks, sometimes even water! What's more, the race officials shouted at him, saying he is a cheater, criminal, or worse! To me what Powerschnecke did is a really inspiring performance - wish I had been able to follow him! You can check out his awesome photo report here (in German).
2 comments:
That's really sad and frustrating. Not very nice that they don't live up to their word--that's one race to avoid in the future!
Hope that this may ultimately create some new opportunities for you.
Exactly. Time for plan B. Luckily there are lots of alternatives to choose from. I was thinking maybe it would be fun to race shorter road distances instead of trail ultras.
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