Ultra Fiord
Into the Fortress
Anne-Marie Dunhill / 21.04.2015
After the 15:00 time cut-off the press and race director left Balmaceda and headed back to the zodiacs. As we had not had maps or a schedule prior to the race (and still didn’t have a printed map) it was once again a case of “Grab your stuff, we’re heading out. Where to? The finish of the 70 km. When do you expect runners to arrive. Not sure. How long will it take to get there? About an hour and a half. Cool cool.” The weather continued to be relatively clement in that the wild Patagonian winds hadn’t kicked in and runners were “only” dealing with rain and cold.
The Asics team managers and photographers had asked for an earlier zodiac in order to reach the end of the 70 km race which was at the Estancia Perales located on the shores of the fjord. Little did they know at the time how long they would have to wait for their runners to come in.
This section of the race was to be the jewel in the crown of the Ultra Fiord. SleepMonsters interviewed Stjepan Pavicic in October 2014 after the Ultra Trail Torres del Paine to confirm rumors about his new race. At that time the race didn’t even have a name nor a traced race route, it was merely a vision. This is what he said about this section in the article entitled “Sharing Dreams of Patagonia” : http://www.sleepmonsters.com/v2_races.php?article_id=8674
“I have an idea in mind, part of the location is like a fortress, I mean really like a fortress. We are looking for a crack to penetrate through this area, in fact we will be going out searching with heavy packs and all of our equipment this weekend. It is an area where glaciers were in the past so there are a lot of verticals.”
Stjepan Pavicic is a trained geologist who knows how to read the terrain at a glance and he and his team spent weeks searching for the passage through this section. In the end it would take 80% of their time to clear the 25% percent of the race route that this section entailed. Once they had found the passage they needed to clear by hand the 4O km of unmapped terrain. Thousands of race markings had been created; an intern named Sam had spent days making little wooden posts with reflective tape melted on the top, as well as the plastic tape that marked the route at eye level.
So at this point in time at Balmaceda, SleepMonsters knew that there was a section going through a mountain pass that was going through completely virgin territory. That it had been difficult to find and much time had been spent clearing it. We could see at this point that the runners were wet, muddy and tired but coping with an experience that judging by their comments clearly fell outside of the normal limits of what they were used to in ultra trail running in their own countries. Please always bear in mind that the creme de la creme of the ultra running community are here and their collective experiences over years of competing around the world has helped to shape the sport. Their words are not marketing hype or public relations; they speak from a solid place of vast experience.
However, no one, not even the race director, knew how long it would take the runners to clear this section; Jeff Browning had an inkling prior to the race, based on his vast experience, but even that did not match the reality of what happened in Estancia Perales.
It was the defining moment of the race and the press was heading into it, barreling along the fjords to reach Estancia Perales.
SleepMonsters
