Columbus Grand Trail, Santa Maria, Azores (77k, 3700m D+)

As we missed out on the S1 Trail Corsa della Bora in Trieste this year my brother and I decided to test the Winter climate on the Azores and signed up for the Columbus Grand Trail which takes you fully around the island of Santa Maria and to its highest peak (Pico Alto, 587m). Despite the onset of the Corona virus panic and plenty of stranded Chinese tourists in Portugal, we got to the starting point in Vila do Porto on Santa Maria without issues on the evening before the race (daily flights go from Lissabon to Ponta Delgada and from there to Santa Maria and other Azores islands).

While the general weather forecast promised the worst for the weekend, race day was actually quite OK with temperatures around 15°C, occasional strong squalls and a few rain showers. I had high hopes for this race as the top 3 finishers in 2019 had ITRA scores comparable to mine, and a time of less than 10h seemed easily achievable. It was also the first time I participated in the main (i.e. longest distance) race of an ultra-marathon event with all the accompanying glory. Starting at a humane 6am, the race first went down to Vila do Porto's harbour, and then over fairly steep hills on single trails along the coast to Praia Formosa. As I'm fairly night blind, I decided to latch on to a group of (presumably) locals in the front pack who seemed to know what they were doing, or at least weren't stopping every 50m to look for markers and avoid tumbling off cliffs.

After Praia Formosa, the first steep climb from the beach to island plateau started which dispersed the pack of around 10 runners which were within sight for the first 8k. En route to the next dip down to the sea, a sunrise happened which made the entire trip worth the effort. The trail was already becoming increasingly muddy and rocky, foreshadowing what lay in store in the second half of the race. I'm not much of a downhiller, particularly not in dim conditions on poor trails, so runners I had distanced on the climb started to catch up and pass me. We ran by some impressive vistas of waterfalls and coast line until hitting the second aid station (I completely missed the first one in the dark), again at sea level.

Here, I learned that a) Isostar tablets tend to disintegrate when they are kept in a tube and shaken for 22km, b) filling the resulting powder into a soft flask is a task not easily performed in stormy conditions. After another climb up the cliffs, the next 10k to the third aid station were pretty uneventful, except that I tried to go right around a church when the official trail went left, for which I received angry admonishments from a fellow runner just looping the church the right (left) way round.

While I arrived at the 33k aid station marking the beginning of the big climb up to Pico Alto from sea level (1200m of up and down stretched out over a distance of 20km) with about 6 other runners, I hang around a bit to refuel and was the last to leave. At this point I also received a text from my brother that he had just dropped out of the race due to a sprained ankle which was about to be expected given that he had both broken his left foot and torn some tendons on two different occasions in 2019, and trail conditions were not conducive to safe and stable running.

On the climb I passed a few of the runners who had only dipped in and out of the aid station, particularly a guy looking about 20 who started throwing up 300m after the station and 20m into a 1200m climb. After reaching the top of the cliff, things got pretty lonely as the field was by now so far apart and runners evenly paced that I did not encounter other runners until the next aid station at km 43. On this segment, the trail started to deviate from what I had downloaded onto my watch as the organizers changed the route the evening before the race, probably in a last-ditch attempt to meet the ITRA criteria for a 4 points event by adding distance and altitude. This also meant that at one point the course did a 9k/500m climb loop, with the start and end of the loop being 200m apart (I like to make measurable progress in some way and thus loops are a heavy drag on my morale).

Reaching the aid station during a strong rain shower, I spent about 10 minutes eating crackers and drinking mineral water to fight the onset of nausea. At this point, I had run through my edible supplies (one chocolate bar), the cookies I like to take along were soaked and turning into a paste in the bottom of my backpack, and I had found out that protein bars are probably more appropriate for weight lifting than for ultra running (eating half a bar felt like weighting my stomach down with rocks). While our drop bags were available at this aid station and full of chocolate and other easy calories, for some reason I decided that asking for it would be too much an effort and continued on a handful of crackers, two bananas and the weak brew handed out as "isotonic".

On the final climb up to Pico Alto, things slowly began turning into Type 2 fun and I began to question my life choices as both the race and the trail started to look increasingly bleak. The ominous wall which had more or less eluded me in the last 4 races was finally starting to materialize in front of my eyes. I was passed by a power hiking local athlete with whom I could not and did not want to keep up. A sign in the previous aid station put the distance to the Pico Alto aid station at 9km, so after 12km of struggling through actual rivers which ran on the trail and paths consisting of deep mud, I started to worry that I had for some reason missed the station in the mist as I had already passed the top of Pico Alto where the aid station was supposed to be. Given that I would still need to hike back another 25km to the starting point after a disqualification my mood became pretty sour, and I even considered to cut our vacation short (we had planned to fly on to another island and spend 6 more days on the Azores) and give up running altogether.

This is the actual trail

 

However, after 13km and significantly beyond the peak of Pico Alto I ran into an aid station where volunteers confirmed that they were the missing Pico Alto station. Most likely the course redesign had also moved the aid station, or the volunteers had just decided that given the weather they did not want to sit on top of Pico Alto for 10h and set up their tent further down the hill. After a short break during which the main counter to my growing caloric deficit was a glass of Cola, I continued down the trail just when another runner arrived at the aid station. This runner would pass me about 15km from the finish line, costing me a top 10 overall finish. But, judging by photos of him on the last 10km, he really suffered for it.

The course was pretty much downhill to the next aid station at km 64, passing at one point through a field of red lava sand which hung on to the profile like glue. I was reduced to a 7-8km/h pace with a heart rate cap 130 by now, and volunteers urged me to sit down and eat something when I arrived at their station. I mistook this for just Portuguese hospitality and a desire to get rid of their supplies as I only considered the 20 and 40km racers which had come through before me, not the 60 ultra-trail racers still behind me, so I just filled up my water supply, took a banana and was off again. At this point, I also had given up on making it to the finish line within 10h, which was the goal I had hung on to for most of the race.

 The trail now ran fairly flat for 10km next to fenced-in airport installations, but was still quite muddy and rocky so just turning off the brain was not an option, although greeting stragglers from the 40k race with "Good morning" at 3pm was a good indicator that I was probably not at the top of my mental game. Hitting the final aid station 5km before the finish I grabbed a chair and a piece of cake and tried to recover enough to make it home before the 11h mark.

Eating something with lots of sugar had an immediate positive effect, so after 5min I started the home stretch and made it through in a reasonable time, even running the last 2km at a 10km/h+ pace. I arrived at the finish line after 10:46h, placing 10th male and 11th overall, and, according to spectators, looking like a ghost. The race was won by Tofol Castanyer (winner of e.g. the 2018 Zugspitz Ultra) in an incredible 7:36h. After the race, some food and rest and petting plenty of Azorean cats, I rescinded my intention to head home ASAP, and we spent 6 more very pleasant hiking days on Santa Maria and Flores as my brother's injury turned out to be not as crippling as the previous ones.

Overall, I found the Columbus Grand Trail to be a very well organized race on a fantastic island with very friendly locals, but despite the trail never climbing above 600m it is definitely not to be underestimated, particularly in wet conditions.

 

Official race website: https://www.azorestrailrun.com/columbus-grand-trail
Official race video: https://youtu.be/UgLZaEFvDSo
Course profile: https://tracedetrail.fr/en/trace/trace/101978