The Ultra Tour Monte Rosa (UTMR) is a group of races held
over a few days in early September, traversing around the Monte Rosa massif in
north western Italy and ending in southern Switzerland.
The race director is Lizzy Hawker, a trail running legend,
with a series of impressive victories on the world stage, including the nearby Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) on five occasions.
Lizzy used the UTMR route in her training for the UTMB and, according to
Lizzy, it’s 30% harder than UTMB.
What attracted me to this race was that it was a challenging
event, in this location, and you could do it over three days (some did the
longer 170km route over four days or either as a single stage). The organisers carried your bags to the next
village where you would stay that night in a small hotel with a proper cooked
meal and a good night’s sleep. That
much, luxury.
I did the 3-day event over 116km, with 8100m of ascent and
8400m of descent. Among those numbers,
the notable ones are 8100 and 8400. They
tell the story of long climbing days and tenderised quads. In fact, they don’t tell all the story,
because of the altitude factor. There
are three mountain passes to cross of over 2800m and two more over 2600m, plunging
down to villages as low as 1200m. This
means lowered oxygen levels, which in turn means elevated heart rate,
diminished performance and, maybe, altitude sickness.
But it also means impressive views of towering mountains,
glaciers that you feel you can almost reach out and touch, alpine pastures with
delicate flowers and flowing braided rivers, rock fields made of giant’s dice
and trails that cling to precipitous mountain sides that you daren’t look down.
Each of the three days involved a mountain pass, dropping to
an alpine village (where there was an intermediate cut off and an aid station),
climbing another pass and then down to the final village for the day.
The first was the short day (29km). An opportunity to measure yourself against
the conditions, test your equipment and fuelling strategy, experiment with
pacing and get used to moving quickly through the mountains. The day was perfect; hardly a cloud in the
sky, with just enough breeze coming up the valleys to keep things comfortable.
The mountain passes were marked with Buddhist prayer flags;
a sign that this was indeed Lizzy’s race.
From those high points, the massif revealed itself with dozens of high snowy
peaks stretching into the distance.
It was a fairly comfortable shakeout day with a relaxed cut-off
time. The body felt good and there was energy
in reserve for the two days to come. We
spent the night at the village of Gressoney-la-Trinité.
Being a stage race, there was the opportunity to get to know
your fellow runners. We eat a communal
dinner at the hotel and breakfast together in the morning. We swapped tales of the day just gone and
speculated on the day to come; we questioned those who had done the race before
for nuggets of information.
The second day (46km) began with a steep 1100m climb over
the first 9km to reach 2900m. The sun
had gone, the wind was rising and the temperature fell as we reached the top of
the pass. Three layers on, gloves and a
warm hat and I was still cold. My numb fingers
fumbled with getting food from my pack.
Getting down the hill meant a rise in temperature, but slow
going as the technical, twisting, rock-strewn descent allowed few opportunities
to establish a regular running pattern. On
and on it went, dropping further and further.
An Ibex peered at me shyly from behind a rock on the way down.
At the bottom of the hill was the pretty town of Alagna and
the next aid station. The Walser people
have inhabited these alpine villages for centuries, with the first migrations from
Germany going back as far as the 13th century. The Walser have their own dialects and
customs, farming goats and cattle for milk and cheese and maintaining gorgeous,
flower-filled villages. Now and then,
you see wood carved faces, a sign of ancient cultural beliefs.
Now the winter sports industry has a strong presence in this
area, with ski lifts running up the valleys out of each of the villages. Still, it’s not very intrusive and you look
past to see the vistas around without too much distraction.
The day’s second climb followed a paved path created by the
Italian army in the 1920's over the top of the pass at 2700m. Large stones had been hewn from the
surrounding rock in a massive engineering effort. The technique to get up the hill was to leap
from large stone to large stone as the early gentle gradient of the track
became substantially steeper as we reached the top. The temperature dropped again into the low
single digits. We were wrapped in mist
and my breathing was laboured. The views
of the previous day only suggested themselves from time to time when the cloud
parted, only to quickly close again.
The steep, technical descent gave way to open fields, as
serpentine rivers laced through the valley and a nice, runnable section led to
the finish at Macugnaga, still in Italy.
I made it in within 40 minutes of the cut-off time.
The third day was slightly shorter than the second day (44km),
with less ascending and descending. But
it proved to be the most difficult stage for me, mainly because of the conditions
and the intermediate cut off at Saas Fee.
The first climb to Monte Moro Pass was another 1500m ascent over
7km to 2800m. Like the day before, the
temperature was cold and you definitely felt the effects of the altitude. The golden Madonna at the top of the pass
marked the border between Italy and Switzerland. I just wanted to get off the hill, but icy
slopes and large boulders acted to slow the descent.
While the intermediate and final cut off times of the
previous days hadn’t been that much of an issue, today was different. I was aware there was still some way to go
before Saas Fee and the cut-off was six hours.
I needed to up the pace coming down the hill and, when I reached the
bottom, there was still a 5km incline to reach the aid station. I was working hard and the pace I had to
maintain on this uphill sapped my energy.
I made it with a few minutes to spare, hands on knees, chest heaving. It would have been gutting to miss it and
plenty of good runners didn’t.
Someone said the previous day that, if you met this cut-off,
you should make it to Grächen within the overall 12 hours. Although there were no more big hills, it definitely
wasn’t over, as I climbed out of Saas Fee onto the Hohenweg path that wound up
and down along the high trails above the valley for the next 17km. In retrospect, these narrow trails were fairly
treacherous, with drizzling rain now falling and slippery rocks and shifting
scree slopes, coupled with fatigue, you were a small misstep away from tumbling
down the valley. Progress was quite slow
and it was hard to work out how much further there was to go.
Then the path began to steadily descend as we reached
Hannigalp aid station. There was 3km to
go and I had an hour and a half to do it.
I had made it.
Lizzy greeted me as I arrived in Grächen and put the medal
and scarf around my neck. My total time
was just under 30 hours and I felt great.
