After thoughts on OCC

A few bits and pieces have come to mind since writing my race report. So here are some more ramblings.

🌄Altitude:
For some reason this year I really struggled with adapting. Last year my first little run around Chamonix was hard, but that's all it was. I just felt slow and heavy. This year I struggled to get my breath at anything more than walking pace. Arriving on the Sunday I didn't get out for a run or hike until the next day and it was just horrible. I came back really quite alarmed at the difficulty I'd had breathing and was very concerned about how I'd manage at nearer 2000m during the race. I went out again on the Tuesday and again found running extremely hard going. I might have got up to 1400m for a short while but that was it. It felt like this race was going to be a disaster.

👟Kit:
Shoes have been a nightmare ever since Inov8 changed how they size their shoes and trying to find a trail shoe that is wide enough, grippy but not too aggressive has taken up far too much of my time. A random visit to the Climbers' Shop resulted in my introduction to the La Sportiva Akasha. It's like a more comfy version of a Roclite really- pretty much an all-purpose trail shoe that will see you through most things except proper mud. The sizing is a bit weird- the shoes come up short so my size 5 feet are in a 6.5, but the fit is great and I really can't fault them at all. I finished OCC having kicked  a few big stones and all my toes (and nails) are intact! No blisters, no hotspots either.

Race pack/vest was interesting. I'd managed to get all the normal conditions compulsory kit into my Salomon Sense Ultra 8 but I was concerned that if we had a call for cold weather kit or to take additional water I wouldn't be able to get it all in so I bought a 10l pack from Decathlon just in case. I went out with it a couple of times with kit in to see if it would be ok and it seemed fine as long as it was fairly full- unfortunately Decathlon don't do female-fit packs and I find that unisex ones can be a bit too long for my already short torso.
The day before the race, packing for registration and the kit check, I kept missing the pocket in the Salomon pack when I tried to put my phone in. Only it turned out I wasn't missing the pocket- an entire seam on one side had just gone! Seriously unimpressed as that pack has only done 3 races and a few training runs and it cost a small fortune. I am so glad I had the Decathlon pack with me! It was fine through the race and it even just about held those rather long 500ml Salomon bottles.

🍪Nutrition:
Nutrition didn't go to plan at all. I was fine for about 3-4 hours eating from my snack stash but after that I just didn't really want to eat. However I've learned the hard way that if you get to that point you just have to force food in, even if it's only a bite or two at a time. So at the CPs where there was food I'd eat a piece or two of fruit; I tried some kind of cake but I really didn't like it and the cheese looked all sweaty. Once again it was the sugary goodness of full-fat fizzy Coke that saved the day! Interestingly I didn't see other runners eat on the trail at all- I know OCC is only a short race in terms of distance but a lot of runners will have taken more than 8 hours to finish and if you're out that long then surely you need to eat more often than the couple of aid stations where snacks were on offer.

Mental stuff:
Mind over body they say. They also say that running an ultra is as much about the mind as it is about physical fitness. In this case I don't know what the truth is. I definitely hadn't done the training I'd hoped to do and although I felt reasonably strong I was not happy with the lack of miles and hills. Because of the Wales disasters I had zero confidence in my ability to tackle a mountain race. And yet I still finished. You could argue that I must have felt a least a bit ok about it all because otherwise I wouldn't have been on the start line and I guess that's a fair point. But I felt like I had to show up and at least try. I have failed at so much this year and the idea of failing by not even showing up and having a go really didn't sit well with me.
I honestly had no goals other than to see what happened and try not to die, fall over on a descent and break something or fall off a mountain. I actually didn't care if I came in last although I thought it would be a bit sad to have put all that effort into finishing and then come in so late no one would be there. As the race went on and I kept finding it a lot less technical than I'd dreaded, I did relax a bit. I still had to spend 99% of the time focusing on my feet and not falling over but it was a relief to find I could actually run!
At the end, I seemed ok. Endorphins, the utter astonishment of finishing in daylight and a good 3 hours quicker than I'd expected kept me going for a while as did knowing I had to crew the fella next day in CCC. But mentally that race took so much out of me. I didn't really have time to recover because of crewing the next day and night, then the disastrous 2 days of trying to get home and then being straight back into the kids, school, uncertainty about work and an emotional maelstrom of things.
I don't think my mental state before the race was what made the aftermath so hard- it's so difficult to explain what it's like to run but be in fear of every step. I heard Hilary Allen talk about her return to running after her horrific accident at the race in Tromsø and she mentions very early on having a run on some nice smooth road whilst her brain screams at her constantly: don't fall over, don't fall over. That is the reality of every run for me, particularly anything vaguely technical. I can't describe how exhausting that is. Maybe I could try to retrain my brain and thought patterns. But the reality is that although working hard to get strong has seen improvement in my hips, my spine remains fragile and continues to deteriorate. If I don't concentrate every step and end up falling over I might not walk again or worse.

Well, whatever crap this year has thrown at me (and there's been rather a lot of it) although I've not got the training done that I would have liked, I think I'm mentally ready for the next race in a few weeks. In fact at the moment I feel like I'll welcome the inevitable pain and darkness. I've never run an ultra with a goal in mind (other than finishing) so it's going to be a new experience and I know I'll have to deal with some tough times if I want to achieve what I have in mind. Let's see...

An Imposter

Quite a bit has been going on over the last few months. As far as running goes I've had two dreadful sessions up in Snowdonia where I discovered my vertigo is a significant problem and that anything involving even slight exposure, high up scrambling or very steep technical descents leaves me unable to move through fear and dizziness. I was moving slower than an arthritic tortoise in those Welsh mountains.

So OCC loomed huge and terrifying, confidence levels were at zero because of Wales and I was so scared I seriously considered not going to Chamonix at all. Even when I got there thought I wouldn't bother registering for the race and I'd rather jump off the Christ the King to make it all stop. The railings around Christ the King are too high for a short-arse like me to climb so that bit didn't happen.

But I did register for the race.

In the few days before OCC I wasn't nice to be around. I was consumed with fear, doubt and the feeling that I was an imposter which always settles on me in my visits to Chamonix. I'm not a mountain runner and I felt a fake being there at all. There was also the matter of making sure I was ready for crewing duties the night after my own race. The fella didn't seem too concerned about running CCC other than wondering if his knee would play up, after all he'd basically done it all before last year at UTMB. But I was unsettled because of the lack of prep I'd had for it. I take crewing very seriously because you have the potential to make or break a race for your runner. Ultimately of course it's down to the runner but if you get stuff wrong as crew you can really mess things up. So I was stressed because of fear, stressed because I felt under-prepared as crew and stressed because I felt I hadn't been able to properly focus on my own race. A perfect storm of messy stuff really and it's taken its toll in various ways.

However, 4.15am alarm on 29th August followed by tea and coffee then head torch on to walk to catch the bus to Orsieres. I was anxious about walking unfamiliar roads alone in the dark but Paul had heard me get up and walked down with me before heading up for sunrise on Brevent; I was even fretting about having to use my head torch before the race as I knew I'd be finishing in the dark with a nasty technical ascent and descent- suppose the battery ran out and the spare failed?

Horrid bus journey on narrow switch backs up and down and  I arrived at Orsieres in daylight. There were almost 2 hours until the race started and it was hard to know what to do. I wandered about a bit then found a church near the start line and popped in to ask St Jude Thaddeus to look kindly on me. An early morning service was happening so I stood and listened to the singing. Although not religious now, I suppose I will also be a bit of a superstitious Catholic and also hearing prayers sung in Latin is a sound of my childhood so oddly reassuring. I felt a little more peaceful when I left and found a spot to wait for the race to begin.

The race started and I let everyone hare past me. Although I wanted to be near the front to avoid too long a wait to begin the first climb I knew if got my heart rate up very high straight away I'd be toast so I gently plodded along to the sound of cowbells, cries of "Allez allez" and "Courage!", and the noise of thousands of feet. All I could think was somewhat akin to Arthur Dent: so this is it, I'm going to die.

Huge queue to begin the first proper climb. It was so frustrating because the ascents are my strong point and I hated losing so much time knowing that so many people would overtake me on the downhill. I found a few places to pass people but the queues and pushing and running poles shoved in my face were unfortunately the story of the first 2 big ascents. 

The sun was out and it was already warm. La Giete is a lovely ascent- pretty steep and awkward underfoot in places but I was never scared by being too close to steep drops. There were gorgeous black cows and the magical clonk of cowbells. One cow was quite friendly and came up and nuzzled me as I went past so I stopped to stroke its forehead and it followed me for a short while after that.

About halfway up to La Giete

I'm not going to write about each checkpoint or much of the race in great detail- most of it is already a fuzzy memory because of the mental effort I needed to sustain to stay safe whilst trying to cover such terrain as fast as I could. However I do remember getting to the top of the first proper climb grinning wildly and saying loudly "That was easy" which made the spectators there laugh. It wasn't easy but it had been nowhere near as difficult as I'd expected and the sense of relief that I'd completed the first ascent was enormous. 

All the descents except the final one from La Flegere have got muddled in my head but I remember doing ok, running quite a bit although often rather faster than I wanted due to the pressure of people right on my heels and trying to push past- I wasn't trying to stay in front but rather I was so scared of being pushed over. This is probably a good place to mention that the feel of OCC was that of a city road race. People had no pole etiquette, there was a lot of running too close to others, a bit of elbowing going on and it was crowded most of the way round. Other than myself I didn't hear a single runner say please or thank you in any language to the volunteers. As a race experience it wasn't much fun.

A lot of the Swiss side of route was really quite pleasant with a lot of runnable bits on the descents. I hated the interminable zigzags into somewhere (probably Trient) and had to sing to myself to get through them but mostly I was just waiting for it to get really hard and have to negotiate steep bits on my backside. 

No recollection of where this is or even of taking the photo!

I kept staying well ahead of cutoffs and I kept being able to run far more than I'd expected. It never took much time to get through the checkpoints but I was careful to eat something at each one as after the first 3 or 4 hours I wasn't finding it easy to eat on the move- I just didn't really want to eat anything I had with me. Fizzy coke was going down well though!

Reaching Vallorcine felt like an important point- I was familiar with a few stretches from there and somehow I got there about 3pm, 35km into the race and around 21km left to go. This was way way ahead of the schedule I had in mind. However I really didn't feel complacent- I didn't trust how well it was all going.

                                            

At some point my fella messaged me and said he'd come out to Argentiere to see me. OCC has no crewing because it's such a short race but people can come out and spectate. However I saw lots of runners receiving aid and support from friends and family all along the route. It's cheating- don't do it. Anyway, Argentiere appeared. It was still daylight and although I was finding the heat quite intense I still felt ok and was looking forward to seeing my fella. I couldn't see him as I went into the aid station, nor as I left. He wasn't there. 

I didn't give myself time to be upset although I did feel angry. I used that to power me up the first nasty, gnarly part of the ascent to la Flegere. I stormed past people and it looks like I made up a lot of places on that stretch. But my heart rate got higher and higher. The fella phoned me but I couldn't really talk as breathing was now painfully hard and I was starting to feel a bit rough.

La Flegere is the most tortuous climb because once the gnarly bit is done you're out on a wide gravelly track which is a ski slope in winter. It goes on and on and is really pretty steep. You can see where the check point is yet it doesn't get nearer as you don't approach it directly. This was the low point for me. I felt so sick and tired and my heart was pounding as though it would burst out of my chest. I saw people stopping, bent double over their sticks and all I wanted was to curl up on the bare gravel and die. I didn't want to finish, I felt too dreadful. 

A quiet voice spoke to me: just keep moving, get to the check point, you can't stop before then.

I kept going although at times it felt as though I was barely moving at all. I fell into that checkpoint and burst into whole body heaving sobs. 

A guy next to me asked in broken English if I was ok- was I crying because happy or sad. The only kind words I had from a fellow runner all day. A volunteer made me drink some noodle broth from a bowl made of the bottom of a water bottle. She said it's good if you feel sick. It tasted awful- but I dutifully sipped at it. I phoned my fella then, told him I was in a bad way and that he shouldn't hurry to the finish line as I was going to be hours away yet. 

But I realised I was at la Flegere in daylight. It was around 5.45pm and I was there about 3 hours before I thought I would be. Ridiculous. Quite impossible. I must have missed part of the route or else my watch was broken.

I was suddenly beginning to shiver from sitting still so after a little more broth and some fizzy coke I set off. Maybe in Chamonix they heard me roar as I took the first few steps. I really bellowed. Probably caused an avalanche somewhere. Certainly I scared the runners nearby. 

The first tiny bit of that descent is really nasty. Just a few metres, but it's super steep and loose stones and gravel. A lady nearby didn't like my gingerly edging down so she rushed past- and fell over. That bit negotiated it was quite gnarly but mostly through the woods and a little more comfortable underfoot. A couple of times the trail seemed familiar but I put it down to fatigue. Earlier in the week I'd tried to recce the last bit and followed the trail part way to la Flegere, but it didn't match my GPX of the race route so I gave up. But then I saw a sign saying 'La Floria'. It was familiar! I knew all this bit and I knew that it really wasn't going to be too awful as long as I wasn't silly and tried to run too fast. It's an endless descent and if you want to run you really need 100% focus as it's rooty and stony and uneven.

I could hear the finish line even though it was still about 3 miles away. I ran every bit I could. Down the landrover track, over the foot bridge, I'm by the river. Now I'm running along the cordonned off bit. The streets are packed with people and they are all watching runners coming in. The shouts of "Bravo" and "Allez!" and the cowbells are faint and distant in my ears even though it's all around me. I keep running. Running and smiling. Running, smiling and mentally giving the finger to the Alps. 

You don't take a direct route to the finish- you loop around the streets first. And then I turn the last corner and it's there. I am actually going to finish this race, I'm not last, I'm running not crawling, I leap over the finish and am on my knees sobbing. 

OCC and all things Alpine are done. I'm through with that place and the whole UTMB thing. I'm a fraud there, I don't belong. The place and those races have taken too big a toll.

I won't be back, but for a moment you could hear me roar.