Making the most of a week-long stay at my parent’s home in
the Black Forest, I joined my brother in a short trip to run the Belfortrail,
taking place in early November in the Alsatian’ Vosges near Belfort, just a 2h drive away.
Belfortrail starts in the small town of Giromagny and makes a loop over the
Ballon D’Alsace and, infamously, up a 400m-of-climbing-in-1k ski slope called
Piste Schlumpf (translates to smurf).
Just 7 days after finishing the CCC in Chamonix, I was back
at the starting line of a 100k ultra-race: The Mozart 100 in Salzburg, a 108km/4700m climb course in the scenic Wolfgangsee area. As I
hadn’t expected to actually make it into the CCC and only got in through the 3rd
additional draw, my 2021 race planning had included the Mozart 100 as season
highlight. After the CCC I was a bit skeptical of recovering quickly enough to
have anything remotely resembling an enjoyable experience in Salzburg, but I ended up quite
able to walk again after a few days, and the bragging rights for finishing two
100k ultras in 7 days are nothing to be scoffed at. I had run a shorter version
of the same course in 2019 (Race report here) , so for more than half of the total distance I was
on familiar terrain which I already found to help tremendously in terms of planning and
motivation at the CCC. My brother also had signed up for this race, his first 100k after
about 8 years.
And then, suddenly, it was the morning of the 27th of August and the race I had been looking forward to virtually ever since I started running anything longer than a half marathon was about to start. I had picked up a slot for the CCC a couple of months earlier in a first-come-first-served reassignment round, after getting unlucky in the lottery and online contests several times over the course of 2 years. Technically, the 100km Courmayeur-Champex-Chamonix race which is part of the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc race series came a couple of years ahead of schedule for me, but after two races just a bit short of 80km and 5000m climbing I felt fairly confident that the addition of a half-marathon and a Zugspitz ascent would not completely derail any race, mental or fueling strategy I had cooked up so far. Furthermore, except for the initial climb up the Tête de la Tronche, I already knew all of the course from a 4 day Trail du Mont Blanc speed-hike in 2020, and particularly the first 20km from a week of pre-race acclimatization hiking around Courmayeur.
The KAT 100 Marathon trail is part of a larger trail running
event in the Austrian Kitzbühl-Fieberbrunn area with the eponymous KAT100 100
mile run as headliner. Attracted by the relative proximity to Munich and never
having been in this particular area of the Alps, my brother and I decided to
give this race a shot. For me this early August race was supposed to serve as a preparation for the CCC in late August which I was fortunate to enter through a last minute
first come first served signup process in June.
I learned about the Brixen Dolomites Ultra Trail from a Facebook post in which a fellow runner was looking for a team partner as his original choice had deserted him. The race, which can only be run as a team, goes through areas I’m somewhat familiar with from previous vacations, so I thought that it was the right opportunity for me and my brother for a very extended and long 18h hike, getting back to Brixen in time for the award ceremony. However, my brother took the easy way out by rupturing a ligament for the third time in two years three weeks ahead of the race, so now I was the one looking for a running blind date in ultra-runner Facebook groups. Fortunately, I quickly found a former Iron Man triathlete who had started venturing into ultrarunning a couple of years ago, completing iconic races such as the UTMB and Tor Des Geants. Thus, I thought that if anybody needed carrying or convincing to finish, it was going to be me.
