So this
will be much ado about nothing – taking almost two months to write about my
last two races – the Nendaz trail and the Glières trail – and pretty much
skipping over them. Thing is, there’s not much to say about the former and I
would not recommend the latter for anyone, like me, who thinks that too much
technicality just kills the pleasure of trail running. I mean, it’s one thing to be working your downhill skills –
and another to be scared of falling and slipping a disk or dislocating a shoulder
just by walking; one thing to work your heart pump uphill and another to be on
all hands and knees having to use a rope to get to the top of a mountain. And
what was with the speed goats?! I mean, I was doing this race with my friend
Anthony, his first ultra but certainly no stranger to endurance events, having
finished two Ironman triathlons – and pretty quick too, with a finishing time
of 11h17 and a sub-40mn 10k – and yet here we were not even half the race
straggling in the last 10%... Needless to say, Anthony was none too pleased and
I was very disappointed I had chosen this for his first trail run.
That said,
if I hadn’t done the Nendaz trail a few weeks earlier, I might have begun to
wonder if the time barriers and required speed at trail events weren’t getting
a little to ridiculous. I mean, I might be getting a bit old, fat and slow –
but still! Fortunately there was the 30k fun run Nendaz trail that I’d done a
few weeks earlier with my longtime running companion Cyril where I was passing
people uphill (a first!) and still felt I had something in reserve – and it was
blissfully not-too-technical, with very runnable downhills on 4x4 tracks. A bit
too “woody” (i.e. most of the race takes place below the tree line) but very
scenic.
