Tre Rifugi Mountain Relay

I was first asked to run this relay in the Italian Alps during WOC2011. When one of the original team dropped out Anne Buckley called me up to see if I could ‘pop over’ from Chambery to fill the space. I thought about it then but it would have meant missing the WOC banquet and taking an extra day off work so I had to turn it down. However I didn’t forget about this interesting sounding race and when I was asked to take part this year I signed up straight away.

Refuge #3: they were selling beer at 9:30am when I arrived. Maybe to help calm the nerves?

The race, which is featured in the excellent “World's Ultimate Running Races” book, is a three leg relay. The first leg starts with 2km of gentle climbing from the village of Collina to the first “rifuge” then climbs steeply up to the second at the changeover on the Austrian border. Second leg is the real showpiece of the race, a steep scramble up a sheer rockface followed by a technical trail run to the third of the three rifugi where the final leg starts. From here it’s all downhill back down to the valley floor.  Every year a British team is invited to take part by the hosts and this year it happened that all the guys in the men’s team were Scottish so we ran as Team Scozia.

Second leg basically traverses this rock face: not for the faint hearted!

Robbie Simpson is spending the summer in the Alps and has been getting some great results including 5^th at Sierre-Zinal the week before Tre Rifugi. He powered up the hill to win his leg by 10 seconds – read more over on his excellent blog. Finlay Wild is also spending some time in the Alps while he is between GP jobs and used the skills which saw him recently break the record for the Cuillin Ridge to power away from the opposition. He handed over to me with a minute lead which made my job on last leg fairly straightforward.

θ >> 0.  θ ~ 40°?

Straightdown might be more appropriate. I knew the first 200m would be the hardest descent and I was glad to get them done before I heard the cheers from above signalling the opposition starting. From there it was a slightly less steep sprint down alpine meadows and into a twisty singletrack path through the forest. 

Nice smooth track back to the valley floor. Not.

The race is incredibly well supported and all the way I was cheered with shouts of “Bravo” – slightly different to the usual “Dai” that you get in Italian races when you’re not leading. “Die” might have been a bit closer in some places as you leap off cliffs and drop offs with no idea what’s coming next.

A relatively short time later I dropped out of the trees and onto the road for the final 2km to the finish. By my reckoning I dropped 700m in that first 10 minutes: over one metre per second. Not quite free fall or terminal velocity but pretty quick nonetheless! 

Out on the road I could run a good fast pace on the gentle downhill and I knew that the victory would be ours. That said, the tiny little rise back into the village (10m?) felt like a mountain and the soles of my feet were burning up. In the end we won by the same minute margin that I had at the start of my leg, and sure enough I had two new blisters on the sole of my heels. The Red Cross even laughed at my feet when I went to get patched up – my heels have only partly recovered from the same affliction at Snowdon.

The girls finished second and also had two fastest legs so we fairly cleaned up at the prize giving and even spent some time signing autographs for the locals before heading off to enjoy some classic Italian hospitality at the after party – local food, beer and music with the organisers.

 All in all a great weekend away in the mountains – after spending so much time in the Alps last summer it was good to go back for a wee reminder of what a great place they are – especially after spending 5 weeks in the somewhat flatter Finland earlier this summer.

Travelling all the way to the Alps to run downhill for 17 minutes got me thinking about different sports and where they are best done. Here’s a diagram of my findings:

As this clearly shows you can run anywhere. This is not surprising as the oldest and most versatile of physical actions. But while there are plenty opportunities to run on the flat and on undulating or even uphill only courses there are precious few downhill only opportunities – while for disciplines like mountain biking and skiing these are some of the most popular disciplines. Well the good folks of Scottish Hill Running have spotted this gap in the market and for the next three Wednesdays are putting on a series ofdownhill only races to find the best "doonhiller" in the country. I’m not sure it fits in my training plans this year but it looks like a great laugh!

A short video showing the start of my leg:

Longer video of the whole event
Many thanks to the organisers of the race for inviting us over and making us feel so welcome!

World Games: The Races

The first of three blogs on my World Games experience - my view of my races.

Sprint: Easy and Hard, Fast but Slow

Of course it looks easy, because it was. Any beginner with a few Saturday afternoon introductory events under their belt could have got round without too much bother. But that doesn't mean it's not a valid race. When it's easy it just means you can run more of the course at top speed and the margins become even tighter. And thus, it was also a hard, hard race. The sun was directly overhead and temperatures in the shade were in the 30s. On the long route choice legs I felt slow and tired but unlike at WOC where I panicked a little that I was too slow this time I just relaxed <this is as fast as I can go, so I better just go at this pace and accept the end result>.


Sprinting. Photo: IOF


At the spectator control I heard I had the new fastest time, one second ahead of Khramov. <Ok, that's good but there are still lots of top runners who started after me and Khramov hasn't been on top form this year>. By now I had nearly caught my one-minute man Martins Sirmais of Latvia. As we ran to the 16th control he turned in too soon. I knew he was too early and I carried on to the gap in the thick green where there should be a path to take me to the control. I turned in as soon as the terrain changed - grass now rather than thick bamboo. But this isn't much like a path - and no control at the end. <Damn.> Panic reaction- back out and find the path, back in 10m further on and hey presto, there's the control. <Damage limited.>


Excerpt of the Sprint map. 16 cost me a medal, I didn't notice the green dot in the rough open was separate to the green and turned in before it.


But not enough. That mistake, which flashed past in the blink of an eye, almost certainly cost me my first international medal. I finished in 6th place, a mere four seconds behind bronze medalist Jerker Lysell. My split at the spectator control held up well with only eventual winner Mathias Kyburz going faster.

Usually 6th place would gain recognition as a "podium" result however at the World Games only the top three are rewarded so I had to take consolation for my lost medal by celebrating my first "pseudo-podium".

Sprint map: without route - with route

The next day was the middle distance in a recreational park SW of Cali. I tried to race it like a double length sprint but I lost some time fighting in the green and in the heat. Despite this I finished in 14th place which I was reasonably happy with.

Middle map: part one without route - part two without route - part one with route - part two with route


In Colombia thicket means THICK!

Finally came the relay which was probably the biggest aim of the week for the British team. We know we can sprint, we know we are all in good shape (all getting a top 10 individual result at both WOC and World Games) and we know the new Mixed Sprint Relay is a discipline where we want to fight for medals in the coming years. But none of us have ever run a sprint relay before so there was still an air of uncertainty as we lined up on Sunday.

I ran the first leg, the same as at WOC. However my tactics at WOC were quite different. In the technical Finnish forest I wanted to be near the front but not leading so I could observe the race and benefit from the other teams. In a sprint situation I thought that other teams could be more of a distraction than a benefit so as we set off I had a simple mantra to follow: "Get to the front - and stay there."

This turned out to be easier than expected as the planner had made the gaffling at the start quite uneven - something I am not impressed about but more on that in a later blogpost. So after four controls I only had Gernot Kerschbaumer (AUT) and Carl Kaas (NOR) for company. A small miss on the fifth where I misread the uncrossable fences meant I was chasing again but quickly caught up in the green at eight. I was clean from there to the finish and Gernot and I were able to run away from Carl. I was leading as we crossed the line but I think Gernot actually managed to sprint past me to handover first.

The next hour or so was a bit of an emotional roller coaster. First Cat dropped the Austrian girl and extended the gap to the other big teams to over two minutes <We could do this! It could be gold!> before getting reeled in a bit by the spectator and then passed when she made a mistake near the end <but it's only Switzerland and Sweden ahead, and the Swedes don't have a complete team>. Once Scott was out news came through that the Norwegian team were disqualified <one less team to worry about> and I learnt the Danes had lost big time on leg one when Tue got a thorn wedged in his big toe <definite medal on here with Nogs and Swedes out and Danes behind. Not much we can do about the damn Swiss now but the silver is there for the taking>. Then news came through that Scott had dropped time at the radio controls. Kyburz was pulling clear and the Scandi teams were breathing down our necks. Scott held on to send Tessa out in 2nd place with the Czechs and with Maja Alm of Denmark hot on her heels. <get away from the Czechs and its a fight with Maja for the silver - but a medal feels almost certain>

I could barely watch or listen, I was so nervous as she set off and the news that the Czechs had made a big mistake early in the final leg didn't help much either.

I was listening 5 minutes later though when the commentators announced that there had been another disqualification.

Us.

<crash>

Scott mispunched on a gaffled control in the woods (#6) when he ran down a ditch and didn't see his flag and carried on and found the wrong one. In the dark jungle it was easy to mistake a knoll for a boulder and several teams did - us, Norway, Sweden and Czech Rep all MP'd on this control. With 26 controls in <20 minutes checking codes, which were only on the descriptions on the map is tricky. On my own leg I only managed to check some codes as I was half way through the next leg. Clearly this is something we need to work on before next time.

Tessa would have finished in the bronze medal position, had she been allowed to finish at all, but I had to go and stop her at the penultimate control so as not to confuse the spectators or TV audience.



Sprint arena nestled at the foot of 4000m mountains. Security advice was that we shouldn't go exploring as the "farmers" might give us a frosty welcome.

There wasn't much we could do but accept the result. I had bittersweet feelings when the Austrians were presented with their medals: happy to see some new faces on the podium but deep down knowing that it could so easily have been us. It just serves to remind us that come sprint relays in the future we have to treat them with the same respect and focus that we do individual sprints, making sure we do everything right to get the best result we can.

Map: no route - route