Ultra Fiord
Tension at Estancia Perales
Anne-Marie Dunhill / 21.04.2015
Leaving Balmaceda the remaining ultra trail runners left on the course headed into the mountain section. Alex Hammond, a Scotsman living in Bermuda who was running the 70 km described what followed. Alex was one of the “everyday” runners on the race, not an ambassador or high profile runner. He had heard about the race via a blog and decided that it would dovetail well with his race season. Coming here was a major expenditure for this architect; he explained that he’d spent over $1,500 on gear for this race. Because of customs duties and taxes in Bermuda he is obliged to order everything from overseas and if they don’t fit or if the requirements change, he can’t send them back. He said that he has no savings and no pension plan, he simply saves up for one or two major races and invests all of his money, adding that his pension will be his memories.
Alex said, “We went through yet another river crossing, I stopped counting once I’d reached the hundredth time through water. Then through another peat bog before reaching shale rock and scree. We then went down into a valley and it was slow going because there were large rocks like stepping stones. We started climbing and could see some peaks ahead and we thought that we would be going in between the peaks. We ended up hiking straight into the snow and across a snow field and it got steeper and steeper. There were no switchbacks, it was just straight up.
There was one safety rope and we saw a person in full mountain gear fixing another one when we were coming through. We got above the ridge line and once we were above the clouds we could see a glacial ice melt lake as well as a glacier. I stopped everyone and told them to get out their cameras. We were still on the snow and I could tell that there were crevasses by the discoloration of the ice.
At one point a man from the organization was indicating by hand gestures that we needed to jump across a certain point to avoid falling in. This was actually my favorite part of the race. I didn’t have the right shoes so I just skied down it, sliding on my butt when I could. Then the fog started to roll in but waited until the last minute to put on our headlamps because we wanted to get to a stable place before digging around i our backpacks. We started to get lost and we could see the headlamps of other groups of people to the left and the right of us; we were all trying to find the route and when I saw a group of eight go off in totally the wrong direction I started yelling like mad and they finally heard me and came back...”
While the ultra runners from the 70km, 100km and 100 miles were crossing this wild territory where no person has ever competed before, on a trail created especially for this race, the press had arrived at Estancia Perales and the pacing began. The Asics team managers Cathy and Laurent Ardito from France have raced and won a previous edition of the Patagonian Expedition Race (PER) so they had an idea of what their runners were facing on the 70 km race. They were also following some of the best runners in the world on their team.
Even so, when the timings for Xavier Thevenard didn’t coincide with their previous predictions they began questioning Stjepan in English about where their runners where and at what time they had passed through checkpoints Campamento El Salto and Campamento Los Bosques. The extremely remote location meant that even the satellite phone didn’t pass and these check points couldn’t be contacted so there was no answer to their questions and after Xavier crossed the finish line the pacing began in earnest, waiting for Sylviane Cussot to arrive.
Xavier Thevenard won the 70 km with an impressive lead. At the finish line after a bear hug from Stjepan he said in French that he’d never seen anything like this race before, that it was like the Dodo Trail in Mauritius but that trail was much shorter in comparison. He said that he never saw another person out there, that the wild life and vegetation was impossible to identify because it doesn’t correspond in any way to what we have back home. Talking about the race route he laughingly said that at some points he’d had to heave himself out of peat bogs using branches. He added that the trail was super technical. Brazilian runner Manuela Vilaseca was the first woman in on the 70 km and she said that she felt great, that she had eaten and hydrated well throughout the race and had enjoyed the course.
As Xavier headed up to the main house for a shower, the waiting game began again on the lawns of Estancia Perales. Night fell and only a few racers had been through, either finishing the 70 km or transitioning on the 100 km and the 100miler. Jeff Browning was the first runner through on the 100miles distance in daylight and once inside of the feed tent he said that he was in a hurry to get out before the second runner. He had been swapping the lead with the Chilean runner Emmanuel Acunaand he asked how far Emmanuel was behind him. No one could give him that information so he shrugged it off and said, “My feet have been wet for the whole race.” Holding up a torn glove he continued, saying, “I never fall on technical stuff and I’ve fallen at least ten times and I broke one of my poles!” As he rushed out of the tent and back onto the trail he threw a final remark over his shoulder to Stjepan; “This is one hard course!”
Walking back into the main house of the estancia we noticed a runner in the corner, wrapped in a survival blanket, with a group of people around him. We looked more closely and realized that it was the Brazilian runner/journalist Harry Thomas Jr. Harry has been deaf since age 17 following a sporting accident. My stomach knotted when I saw him sitting there with a pristine white patch taped over his right eye. Harry had slipped in the mud, fallen on a rock and the rock had projected a tree branch directly into his eye. When he fell, his fellow Brazilian runner who was directly in front of him turned around, saw the blood pouring out of his eye and emptied his bottle of water into the eye to flush it out and than patched his eye up and they made their way back down to Hosteria Balmaceda to be evacuated to Estancia Perales by zodiac. We all realized the potential consequences of his injury, the extent of which was unknown at the time and the tension went up another notch.
There was a small house where the estancia’s gauchos lived just to the left of the finish line and they very kindly let this journalist wait inside, wrapped the warmth of the wood burning stove. Other journalists who had been pacing outside soon congregated and we’d dash out whenever we heard the honking of the organization’s van that signaled the arrival of another racer. It was early evening and the tension had been mounting all afternoon; the lack of information on the location of the runners and the inability to get that information was a major contributing factor.
Asics team managers, Xavier and their photographers arrived in the hut and the tension upped a notch. They were very worried about where Sylviane Cussot was and were not able to get any information. Imagine a worried parent waiting up for their child to return after a night out and put it through the Patagonian magnifying lens and you have an idea of the tension in that hut. Cathy paced, Laurent was in and out of the hut, muttering and Xavier sat quietly at the table, calculating where she could be based on his own experience on the course.Cathy and Laurent are adventure racers and as well have crewed for years and their extensive experiences means that they don’t get worked up for nothing.
When finally Sylviane crossed the finished line they piled into their own private van and went back to Puerto Natales. We found out later that she had lost her way at one point and the battery on her headlamp had given up the ghost.
Krissy Moehl and Britt Nic Dick on the 100 km came through as well at around 22:30. Britt said that they had been joking throughout the “fortress” trek that they should have T-shirts printed saying, “I survived Ultra Fiord.” She had never once lost her radiant smile but at this point she looked a little bit dazed as if she wasn’t sure what she had just been through. When told that the last section in to the race finish in Puerto Natales town square was runnable and “only” the distance of a marathon, she said that she was “going to put her music on and ‘turtle’ her way in.”
After taking pictures of several runners crossing the finish line on the 70 km it was back to the gauchos hut to wait. Later on, around 00:30, in the headlights of one of the vans I made out the tall silhouette of Willie McBride (USA). Having DNF’d 30 km into the Ultra Trail Torres del Paine race last October he was back as an ambassador to settle some unfinished business. Right before the race start he’d dropped down in distance from the 100miles to the 100 km as he’d been apprehensive about the race and his girlfriend had been anxiously been waiting for him in the gauchos hut.
Walking into the small food tent I saw Willie sitting alone in a corner. He fixed me with an intense gaze and said, “I almost died out there. No, really, I mean it. Sophie (Cantilo) and I were trekking together and some frickin boulders dislodged above us on the glacier and almost hit us. Like it was really close man. If I’d been three feet ahead, I’d be dead. Sofi started freaking out and shaking and crying saying that she had a kid and she’s still up there, she stopped in one of the organization tents and refused to go on. I don’t want to die on a race in Chile, man, I don’t want to die anywhere on a race actually, but I’m surprised and wondering why Stjepan brought us down for this.” He was clearly angry.
His girlfriend came back into the tent with some of her personal supplies of food and he continued his preparations to go back out on the course. As he was leaving he said that he needed to talk about his thoughts so this SleepMonsters reporter walked about a kilometers out with him, accompanied by Max the intern who, as always, was awake and present.
Willie said that this race had caused him to put into question the whole ultra running scene. He is co-owner of a business based in Oregon, Animal Athletics, and he said that although the ultra running scene portrays itself as being welcoming to all levels and just wants folks to get out there and get healthy, he feels upset when he sees clients shyly saying that “yeah, I did such and such a race, but I only did it in this time, so not very good.”
He went on to say that he was also questioning what he perceives to be the drive to create ever harder and longer ultra trails. He cited Candice Burt’s race, the Tahoe 200 (miles) that he had completed last autumn, saying that she was creating a series of 200 mile races in the USA and that at this point he was wondering what the point was. When asked if what he was feeling was down to the raw emotions of the moment and whether they would change once bragging rights had kicked in, he replied, “I don’t know, we’ll see.”
At about 02:45 the Argentinian photographer Leandro Chavvaria and I left the gaucho hut and went up to the main house to find a corner in which to catch a quick nap as it was abundantly clear at this point that it was going to be a very long night. We had wanted to wait up and catch the arrival of the first women on the 100miles which is why we had stayed at Estancia Perales when the rest of the press crew had headed to the finish line but they still weren’t in yet.
Jeff Browning had a solid lead and Emmanuel Acuna wasn’t through yet so we knew that the passage through the fortress had been difficult. Max the intern crashed on a small chair in the kitchen; he hadn’t slept once in the past 48 hours. At 03:45 I heard an American accent and walked into the main room to find that Nikki and Kerrie had finally arrived. My delight at seeing them was quickly mitigated when Nikki looked me straight in the eyes and said, “They need to stop this race, somebody is going to die out there. We had to help a runner who was clearly hypothermic and conditions out there are crazy.”
She went on to ask where Enzo Ferrari was and we of course had no idea. She then let loose an angry tirade saying that she felt she had been brought down under “false pretenses” and that she couldn’t jeopardize her season for one race. The other exact quotes will remain off record because they were spoken in a moment of extreme mental and physical stress and could easily be taken out of that context but Leandro has it on film. Suffice it to say harsh words were spoken.
When asked what she wanted us to do, she used her extensive personal safety experience from the USA and said the following:
“There needs to be a list of who exactly has left the aid station at km 88. A list of who has arrived here. Ask the other runners who they were running with and who is accounted for. Ask the other runners who was ahead of them and didn’t pass. I saw a lot of cases of hypothermia out there.”
We gave all of the information to Max the intern and tried to convey Nikki’s message that there was a potentially lethal situation here. What we didn’t know at the time was that Jan Kriska who had been running in a trio with Nikki and Kerrie had already tore into Max, saying, “I have a buddy out there who has never run this distance before and if he dies, it’s your responsibility.”
Nikki and Kerrie withdrew from the race at this point.
Leandro hiked out a few kilometers to where he had phone reception and sent an sms to his colleague Adrien Gluck who was in Rio Serrano waiting for the start of the 30km giving him the points written on a piece of paper. Adrien relayed the information to Camila Perez, an intern working on the finish line and tried to contact the race director.
Leandro and I stood on the lawn and discussed what to do next. One of the highest profile racers in the world wanted the race to be stopped. A runner had said he and another runner had almost died on the course. There was no apparent communication possible with the cps further back up the mountain. The intern couldn’t reach the race director. By sending the sms we were no longer neutral, we were compromised far beyond just assisting racers at transition. But Leandro had raced a PER and knows Stjepan well, I had talked extensively with Stjepan and at no point had the intuition that he would callously jeopardize anyones lives and I understood his vision. I was dreading writing the article I knew that I had with all of the material from Estancia Parales. We had done what we could and what we did next was the only logical move; we went back to bed.
This was Stjepan Pavicic’s race and whatever the outcome would be, it was something that had never before taken place in ultra running anywhere in the world.
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