It's Friday night at busy Murtel cable car station in Swiss Alps. The doors open and a zombie drags his feet inside. His corpse collapses on a bench. He lies down on his back eyes closed while liquids slowly spread from a soft flask on the floor. Onlookers shake their head: another one bites the dust.
That zombie is me. I'm at the highest point of Swiss Irontrail 214km (133 miles), but not even halfway through. We had started 4am in Davos. We would have to run a counterclockwise loop with over eleven thousand meters of elevation gain to finish in the same place before 6pm on Sunday.
Quitting is not an option. You have to suck it up and design a way forward. I would have to descend down to Maloja by the big lake. There would be a house with a warm meal and a place to nap there.
I would regroup there and finish my longest race ever.
After eating and sleeping in Maloja I kept on going relentlessly. There were uphills and downhills. It was hot and cold. There were easy roads and technical trails. My feet sensed the terrain instinctively and adjusted automatically.
After another day and night I crawled up the final steep slope before Davos. It was extremely hot and I kept on cooling myself off in streams. Three figures stood on the cliff high above watching my struggle up.
It was Andrea Tuffli, who has directed Swiss Alpine events since 1986. I ran my first ultra-trail in Davos back in 1995 and returned many times for various races. He and the other two guys cheered excitedly, high-fived me and grabbed my arms.
"Congratulations! Do you always finish every race you start?", they asked. "No, but if you let go my arm I might finish this one", I joked and laughed. I kept on laughing the whole 5km downhill to Davos with people clapping and shouting everywhere, and tears of happiness pouring from my eyes.
3 comments:
Congratulations!
What a huge challenge this must have been... and the nature there looks amazing!
Great work, spectacular achievement!
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