When I wrote the Pierra Menta prologue post I fully anticipated having time each day to do a brief recap of that day’s stage, but despite only racing for a few hours each day, I didn’t really have time?! Turns out stage racing is suprisingly time consuming, especially when you’re pretty blown after each stage…..
So I had gotten some sort of GI issue; whether food poisoning or something else, I was very much illin’ for a day. But the next day -the eve of the race – I seemed to have recovered as quickly as I got sick, and was optimistic enough to go to the pre-race briefing the night before and act like I was gonna be able to join Colter the next day. I was nervous; the first stage was the longest skimo race I’d ever done at 8300 feet of vertical, and it was in all likelihood going to be followed by the infamous 10,500 foot day, but…whatever, let’s give ‘er a go, with the mutual assurance between us that our respective potentially suboptimal states (Colter was having a slow recovery from RSV) could result in us taking longer than we probably anticipated coming into the race.
The stages started between 7:30 and 8:30, and the deal was that you needed to get up early and have a hearty breakfast and get a little bit of diggesting done before the gun went off and everyone (literally) ran off the line. So each morning was a pretty early start; fortunately the hotels that the Pierra Menta contracted with were willing to forego their usual 7:0 or 8am breakfasts and have plenty of food ready to go at 5am.
We walked and skinned the ~3km to the starting line as our warmup, where we realized that they were sending folks off in waves: with 300 teams/600 individuals even the best skin tracks would be overwhelmed with mass starts. But the waves were pretty close together, and for stage 1 they didn’t necessarily know who was gonna be fast, medium, and “slow” (not really!) so the early skin tracks were sure to be a bit of a frenzy. And sure enough, the whistle blew and despite the fact it was the first of four long days, everyone – including us – sprinted off the line for the few-hundred yard climb to the first transition, which in turn was another frenzy.
One problem that I had was that since I hadn’t really raced since 2020 my gear was pretty dated, and let’s face it: I’ve had a lifetime of using either dated or beat-to-shit gear. So I tried to make an effort to update without spending a ton of money, and between buying new andborrowing stuff I felt like I was okay. Part of that new stuff was new race skins; they were from a reputable brand that had a new “hybrid glue, which I didn’t really understand too much but they’d been fine when I’d used them training. But what I didn’t realize is….they’re finicky. “Finicky” and I typically don’t go well together, so when we raced out of the bottom transition I went about two hundred yards and….both skins fell off. Before the race started Colter and I nervously joked that we’d endeavor to not be dead last, but….about 5 minutes into the race, I was indeed…..dead last! I had hollered to Colter but he didn’t hear me and assumed I was hot on his tail, so finally when he looked back and saw….not me, he stopped. Fortunately my transition of two skins probably only took about a minute and I told myself that it was not only a long day but a long four days so I didn’t panic, and gradually got back into the fray and started moving up, but the traffic was tight and I knew that we were losing yet-more time dealing with that rather than knocking it around with the folks we should be near. But so it goes.
Each stage generally started with a long climb, typically in the 2500-3500 foot range that took us up into the alpine, and the weather that day was partly cloudy with a lot of flat light; a typical day in the Alps. So we could only catch in-and-out glimpses above us, and what we saw was amazing: skin tracks of long switchbacks heading up to either a steep couloir that was being booted straight up or continuing on to a high ridge, and little ants marching quickly and continuously the whole way; a sight that will probably be my most-lasting vision of the race, since it was so common. And people were movin’; typical backcountry skiers probably climb in the 1500 vertical feet an hour range, and in training on “Our Run” in Austria I was climbing in the 3000 feet/hour range, and the best guys are well-over 4000 feet an hour. So the ant lines were definitely in motion!
Then came the descents. The Pierra Menta course setters did not mess around on the terrain; virtually all of our descents were either steep or terrible conditions or both, and by the time the coupla/few hundred folks in tront of us had gone down them they were scraped down to ice and “moguled”, though I put that in quotes because they weren’t moguls like you see in ski resorts, they were more huge ruts with steep exits that you either stayed in or desperately tried to jump over – usually unsuccessfully – as fast as you can, and no matter how fast we felt like we were going, someone was blowing by us like we were standing still. And in our zone that was fairly crowded trying to avoid awful head on crashes with people was desperate; as you’re focusing so hard on getting down, you also have to have 360 degree vision because everyone else is careening down just as out of controlly as you are! It felt pretty desperate. At least with the clouds moving in an out the light got painfully flat, with only the shadows of the monster ruts to use as reference points.
I had heard that Pierra Menta was famous for its long, challenging descents, and I focused a lot in training on doing as much continuously-long descending as possible to brace my quads for the onslaught of agonizing pain, and felt like I was more prepared for that than I’d been in the past for Powder Kegs. But even at that, the quad burn and desperate turning and straightlining and trying to keep from breaking skis, poles, knees, and legs was excruciating! But Colter’s telemark training fared him well and I was (mostly) able to keep up, so we at least held our own on the descents, but at every bottom transition we’d gasp out the same thing: “that was gnarly!”
On and on the day went with skinning, booters up 45 degree chutes, and desperate descents, and after 3.5 hours we finally, happily hit the finish line. We had tried to not go too hard on the first day, but we both realized that it’s hard to not go hard when…..it’s really, really hard! But that afternoon as we recovered we both agreed that while we were tired, we weren’t fully blown up, and it seemed realistic to do it again the next day.
We set the alarm early again, but….about an hour before that I awoke with my arms wrapped around my abdomen which was weird, but I realized quickly that it was an involuntary reaction to…..my gut was churning again! WTF?!? I couldn’t believe it. I raced into the bathroom and was dismayed to watch all the energy and hydration efforts I had made the day prior literally get flushed down the toilet. At breakfast I had no appetite yet tried to force down food, but I was gagging on it and literally had to spit out that vital energy. I of course drank a lot of tea, water, and OJ, but…..it happened four more times in the two hours before the stage started. For better or worse, though, I felt okay; not like I had the other day, and once again Colter and I sorta shrugged and said: “Well, let’s give ‘er a go!” If I’d been at home I woulda stayed at home and not skied, but as it was I was about to mount up for probably the hardest single day I’ve had in many years….what could possibly go wrong??
The start of the second stage involved running through town and up into the hills all on pavement for probably over a mile total; apparently that’s a PM tradition
I again tried to go at a hard moderate pace, and generally it seemed to work; we were still kinda near a few of the folks that we’d been near the day prior, and things were going okay. But wow, it seemed to be interminable; 10,000 feet of vert never comes very easily. Though it had fortuitously snowed about 10 inches the night before, the day was sunny and warm, and I was trying desperately to keep hydrated and caloried up with the knowledge that it was hard enough to do so, much less with a compromised system. The race directors had said that there was a feed zone, but as we went through it we realized that it was just a formal place where coaches could give feeds/water to their athletes; it wasn’t a nice little marathon-style aid station with dixie cups and gel shots. But there were lots of spectators, and whether it was against the rules or not I didn’t give a shit: ask for water! and a few gave it to us; one guy was actually marching on foot alongside me uphill as I sucked water out of his Camelbak hose.
But it wasn’t enough, and I knew it. Colter fed out the tow line from his pack and we hooked it up, and that helped, but a coupla times when he’d say “only about 1500 feet to go on this one” or somesuch I started whimpering and gasping, and then the leg twitches began, and shortly thereafter the gasps and whimpers became wails as my hamstrings cramped and I literally screeched to a stop. Colter couldn’t really do anything besides stand there listening to me yowl and wait for my cramps to subside, so there we were as the ants came trundling past us on the skin track as I tried desperately to massage my locked up leg muscles. At that point the only positive thing I could think of was that at least I wasn’t shitting myself as well.
But the cramps did subside …til I had another bout, but that was within shuffling-striking distance up to another band of spectators, one of whom was willing to give me his water bottle; I got that down along with some calories I still had, and I got a bit revived. I started to worry about cramping on the last desperate 4000 foot descent, but I hoped that the cramps would be limited to the climbing muscles, which turned out to be true, and after nearly five hours of racing we crossed the line and hugged, and very sincerely told Colter that I literally could not have done it without him.
All stage races – including the Tour De France – have cutoff times to cull the field on each stage, and the Pierra Menta is no different. I was psyched that we made the cutoff times (in The Tour the gruppetto forms on the big climbs where the sprinters and other sub-prime climbers ride as a critical mass so that the race directors won’t pull them out, but in the Pierra Menta there’s no place to hide, and plenty of teams didn’t make the cut). And not only that, but we actually only lost a coupla places; it was apparently a hard day for everybody!
After stumbling back to the hotel we had a nice big lunch and embarked on a solid recovery afternoon, but I knew I had dug a deep hole, and the next two days were gonna be even harder than we anticipated they would be at that point. At the race briefing that evening they put up the profile of the next day’s stage and….it was 9200 feet. The rest of the racers groaned along with me; gonna be another long day.
To Be continued….
IN the meantime, here are a coupla fun 3 minute summary videos that they produced between the end of the stage and the 6pm briefing:
Stage 1
https://youtu.be/HjAxjihrOrA?is=itd0Tzb_JCQoXUQY
Stage 2:
Good to see you are having a relaxing “retirement”
Holy crap, literally, tom! You are either the toughest mofo on the planet or crazy! Can’t wait for your next installment!