For the first race in 2023, I combined a visit to my parents with a trip to the nearby French Alsace where I had managed to score a 4th place at the Trail du Grand Ballon. This time, my brother and I had signed up for the nearby Trail du Petit Ballon in March, which hosted 4000 starters across all distances and 900 runners in the 52k distance in Rouffach, making it one of the largest trail running events in France.
Due to a small mistake during signup, I was running as a female athlete with surname "Hendelu", and was half expecting to either not get handed my bib, or to get disqualified upon reaching the finish line for misgendering myself. But I at least passed bib distribution, and spent the last 20mins until the start at 8am unsuccesfully looking for a WC, not feeling French enough to make use of the abundant shrubbery.
The first couple of km ran through undulating wineyards which smellt like the locals were using it as outdoor toilet, but that's apparently how good wine is made (I know why I'm a beer guy). We fortunately started pretty far in front, as a 200m section of single track led to a massive traffic jam for the bulk of runners. It appeared that a mud track with -5° slope was already pretty technical for some contestants.
After about 8k, we ran through a very picturesque village called Soulzematt, after which the climbing up the Petit Ballon started in earnest and the poles came out. On the uphill, I managed to almost dislocate my shoulder while vaulting a fallen tree where I should have used my size to my advantage and ducked under it. But at least this gave me a fairly atypical running pain to focus on for the next few km. The going was still good until the second aid station at km 20, where I took a couple of minutes to do some slow bottle refill magic (still need to work on my pit stops in shorter races), and then started power hiking up the final section to the summit.
The summit had an interesting routing choice, where the course first passed by the top, then dropped down about 50m to the aid station, and then went back up, with both legs running parallel for a couple of meters. Timing would have it that my brother was inbound just while I was outbound, and we both gave a quick wave and continued on our separate journeys. My brother was looking strong, but it turned out that he had forgotten half his food at home (4am is a bad time to check gear completeness), bonked hard and also had to fight a nasty nose bleed for 5km. He still managed to finish and eke out a respectable time as well.
My plan for the day was to take it easy on the uphill, but go for it on the downhill, and music-supported this worked very well. The terrain was very runnable, and I even managed to score an 8th place on a 1km Strava segment, 5th place for the day, behind luminaries such as Shenge Sherpa and Matthias Krah.
The final section were some rolling trails already in hearing range of the finish line, before a steep descent back into Rouffach. I managed to come 37th in 5.18h, having made good almost 50 places since the summit, whereas previously I was typically the one getting overtaken on the downhills. Overall, this was a very nice race to start the 2023 season, and I can only highly recommend it for fans of runnable forest trails.
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