Ultra Fiord
The Land of Fairies and Trolls:Struggling Through the Course
Anne-Marie Dunhill / 20.04.2015
The unseasonably heavy rains in the lead up to the race had had the race director concerned about the state of the course. About two kilometers after the first of countless river crossings the terrain became muddier than it had been before. At some points runners were knee-deep in the stuff and Kerrie Bruxvoort said afterwards, “I was trying to describe the mud to my husband and I just couldn’t. It wasn’t normal mud, it was like evil mud that just sucked you in and wouldn’t let you go. When I tried to stabilize myself by grabbing onto a nearby branch, I realized it was not a branch, rather a thorn bush. So I now know that there are degrees of mud and next time someone says it was muddy I’ll be like ‘oh yeah? Let’s compare mud’!”
Although the terrain was relatively flat the runners had to negotiate peat bogs as well. The racers were running through part of the Magellanic moorland (part of the Magellanic ecoregion) which is the largest in the Southern hemisphere. It was impossible to run at any point of this section; Britt Nic Dick (USA) said, “We kinda worked out a system by looking out for the different colors of moss because at one step you would be stable and on the other have your foot thigh deep in the bog and it was impossible to know which step would be stable and which on which step you would sink. However in the end no system really worked and it was long and hard.”
After an hour long zodiac journey the press reached the Hosteria Balmaceda. At one point our zodiac “tanked” and now we know how to dislodge a zodiac in this situation as we all stood in the front of the boat and rocked from side to side singing to get the correct rhythm. The clouds were low hanging and oppressive and the colors were muted grey, browns and green; the only vibrant color came from three bright pink flamingos floating on the fjord.
It felt as though we had entered another world and this SleepMonsters reporter now understood what was meant by “the magical world of the fiords.” It wasn’t the magic one would conjure up whilst reading a bed time fairy tale in which a winged fairy appears and sprinkles magical dust. No, this was the world of trolls. It was harsh and raw and the elements demanded that one make oneself as small as possible: they demanded humility.
Drop bags were at the Hosteria Balmaceda and runners coming in had tasted the first bites of the recipe that the Ultra Fiord was dishing out; river crossings, mud, peat bogs and bushwhacking. They had not yet reached the hardest part of the course.
Xavier Thevenard dashed in around 11:27, asking his Asics team managers what lay ahead. They bluntly told him that it would be more difficult from this point on as the race route would be entering the infamous mountain passage that Stjepan had searched so hard for and his team had spent so much time clearing. It looked like Xavier was having the time of his life as this race corresponded to the type of terrain he had been wanting to explore and he had an angelic smile on his face. When Laurent Ardito told him what lay ahead he laughed and said in French “C’est un truc de malade, je ne vois pas comment ça pourrait être plus difficile, on avait de la boue jusqu’aux cuisses!” (That was some crazy stuff, I don’t see how it could be more difficult, we were thigh deep in mud!)
Hoards of runners on the three distances began to arrive at Balmaceda and searched for their drop bags and food. There were only four volunteers here, giving out food and water and noting down racers numbers. Once inside the large common room where runners were sheltering to eat and try to dry some items of clothing next to the wood burning stove, it quickly became obvious that four volunteers wouldn’t be enough to meet the needs of the ultras runners.
Journalists and Max the intern who was acting as the media “babysitter” quickly pitched in to help. Eduardo Silva of Chile’s FullOutdoor went behind the bar to serve hot drinks, Max gave his socks to Candice Burt who needed another pair and SleepMonsters did the soup run. All journalists present have had extensive experience covering adventure races and they knew that that this race was outside of the usual ultra trailer experience and was difficult without a support crew. (I still have mud underneath my fingernails from scraping layers off Nikki Kimball’s compression socks before we jammed her feet back into her shoes.)
At this point runners on the 100 miles had been racing for over twelve hours and at no point had their feet ever been dry. Nikki Kimball and Kerrie Bruxvoort were still racing together and Nikki joked to Kerrie saying, “Girl, your mascara is running!” To which Kerrie replied, “Oh man, and a photographer just took my picture! I didn’t put mascara on for this race, it’s from a couple of days ago.” Kerrie then proceeded to cut off the bottom of the running tights she had changed out of, as makeshift compression socks: bodies were beginning to swell. Candice Burt asked Max to throw away the shoes she had been wearing, saying that they were new at the start of the race.
Krissy Moehl was quietly changing in a corner and when asked about what she thought about the race so far, after a long pause she replied, “You know, I guess I’m a runner and you couldn’t run that.” Britt Nic Dick graciously thanked everyone around her before the two women headed out again onto the course.
Nikki and Kerrie had finished their respective preparations and both were trembling uncontrollably although their actions were precise and their chatter as consistent as it had been until this point. Downing another bowl of the delicious bean and butternut squash soup which is a local specialty, Nikki said “I’m very worried about hypothermia because I had it once and it put me in the hospital for a month and cost me a lot of money.”
Patagonia is a place of raw emotions that seems to bring every one up and intensely magnify it. Matias Bull had a brief meltdown at this point. He was exhausted after all of the work he had done to host the Trails in Motion, as well as covering the first part of the 100 miles for Trail Chile before being dropped off at the Hotel Rio Serrano at 05:00 to sort his kit out for the 08:30 start. Our eyes met and he started to sob. A quick assessment of his situation: are you injured, what hurts, what are your fears?
Once we had established that he wasn’t injured but that the demons in his mind had kicked in, the solution was simple and went like this: “Tell your mind to shut the f*** up. It’s going to be hard, you’re going to suffer and be even more miserable but you are going to do it.” The verbal kick in the pants did the trick and he quickly got his bag together and headed back out.
The Ultra Fiord race ended for several runners at Balmacedo. There was a 15:00 cut-of at this point and Stjepan spoke to each racer who arrived close to this time to assess if they would be able to contend with what lay ahead and he took the decision to bar several runners from continuing at this point; either because of their physical state or because they didn’t have the proper gear in their drop bag
Prior to the race start Jeff Browning had analyzed the route as best he could and told fellow runners that this portion of the race would be relatively easy but the real kicker would be the mountain section after this point. Racers were water logged, tired of fighting through the mud and peat bogs, unable to run any section of the course up to this point and nowhere near their estimated timings.
The most difficult section of the Ultra Fiord was yet to come.
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