Tre Clime di Lavaredo

Report of the 2024 Lavaredo Ultra Trail 120km race

Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, 11pm. 

Waiting for an hour in a vague rank I intend to hold. Shoved, nudged, grabbed, shouting in my ears, day-old breath, a fart, spit. I go inwards. Clapping, music, tre, due, uno, mass walk of tripping feet and stubborn shoulders, mate, there’s time enough for that.

Distorted faces and angular arms and furious thrill, kept from their beds to see the beginning of our long night, the noise is enormous, I smile to see it but hold on tightly to my steady inside calm quiet. You cannot go with this. Fireworks. This is not how it goes. 

Click clack of trekking poles on the rocky ascent, seeking soft, seeking space, everyone wants to be ahead of themselves. Tilt downhill to sweet pine air and time, giving way to a sheer drop and mountain shadows. I don’t fear what I don’t see and open up the pace enough to trip you okay I’m okay thank you graze. 

Chasing and being chased down zzzzzzz, starlit with headlamps, we can see where we’ve been and where we will be. Too fast too early, but it is a sweet relief and a childish joy. Skip dance float over rocks and roots that I don’t know, hold firm, hold lilting light.

Ospitale. We shove and bustle, oontz oontz, catch their eye, two gin and tonics and a rum and coke, I crave home, I crave our quiet queues, I crave my own quiet, I crave daylight. I give the rinds of two orange segments to the mountain and run again. 

Up forever and sweeping down, like climbing a slide - wobble, careful now - but hot summer skin sticks to the plastic on the way down. Already the crest is not a relief, it is dread, it is curiosity, it is a heavy hurt around me. We plant poles in shuffles, leapfrogging at pedestrian paces but with a runner’s intent.

I am begging for the sun. I can’t stand the dark anymore, inside or out. Hateful self-talk and taking so much energy to flip it around, every time. 16 hours of being awake, 33 years of being awake, wanting to sleep, wanting to scoop the tiredness out of my brain like clearing a sink. Grated carrot, onion string.

Look! I see it from under my cap with a narrow path stutter: the sky has turned blue! The shadow mountains finally have form. “THANK GOD!” I say to those around me, and we run up the next hill. Giddy glee. Not impossible so long as the sky lightens. 

Rolling single track that is a sweet flow of spritely bounds and kind pauses. In love with the interchangeable feet and cap ahead of me, in step for miles through forest air and green forever, playful roots and if it was this, always, I wouldn’t be able to stop. 21 hours, 33 years, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

But I’m starting to know. The dark sits in my gut. I can’t stomach enough food to make it go away, the long day bled into the longest dark, sighing, trying, lying to myself night. The lies go both ways: you can’t do this. You can do this. 

Stumbling sideways weak you are so weak you have been so weak, all of that for nothing, where has any of that hateful compromise left you, here, a fraud, a fool. You are doing so well. Just hold this and you’ll be fine. 

But the mountains decide, not me. 

I can see where I’m going and I can no longer see where I’ve been. Tre climes - three juts of mountain in the landscape - impossibly far. No. I know. I think of Chìr Mhòr in Scotland and the gentle, kind way I planted poles and took one rock at a time. But I was alone then. I am still chasing and being chased. I want to step to the side and breathe but there’s no side. This is all too much too soon - hours, years.

My yawn my stomach my knees my lungs my feeble inadequate sinew and bone. I owed this beauty more than this. I owed myself more than this. So keep going! You are still here! For god’s sake, pull yourself together, swat it away but swatting forever I am so tired of trying not to think. Of days and months of trying not to think. If I stay long enough I will lose the power of thought, I just need to stay. 

I do lose the power of thought. I plant my poles for the last step up to tre climes and I am all feeling. A man sat, his face has become his hands, his shoulders domed. I sit beside him, I am desperate to be beside people, I who would always rather be alone cannot bear to be alone in this, and my face is wet my breaths shallow at altitude, but trying, so much endless trying, steady yourself shhh shhhhh. I open my face to see a man smiling at me, his smile is a laugh, and he’s right.

I know it. 

And I am too stubborn in my propensity for failure. 

So I take my time. 

Still in love with the daylight. Enraptured by the layers of blue mountains, of a river twinkling around a corner and of the power of the sun on my back. I want this wonder all day.

But I know. 

Cimabanche: 18km. I worry that I can’t even make it that far and it’s too early for that kind of thinking, and that’s how I know. 

Still, I fly down off the mountain: my race is now 66km long, not 120km. I am giggling delight until my legs have had enough, my stomach has had enough, and there’s still too much to go and oh boy I have really blown it now but what an honour, what a ride, what an absolutely insane thing for us all to plaintively have done, I am seeking sea level and I am glacial awe and who else dares to look around, look up, I am passed and I smile, I help a man squeeze a bottle into his backpack, I loll beside a fence with some men refilling water, no after you, I am in no rush, I watch a slug writhe and bulge in absolute ecstasy and I smile to see it, to see it all, to be part of it all.

But still, I know. My time here is limited. I slow to stretch it out. 

This is the choice. I become what I feared. 

My lungs are less tight down here and there’s a cycle path that he would love, that I would love, that I would love to run down but I surrender to my limitations. I choose a run/walk situation, timed, it passes the time. My soft stroll winds up to city stride, overtaking, dodging, and I’m over halfway, hear the cow bells? Is that Cimabanche? Spectators celebrating our arrival? Ah, no, it is actual cows, but then the finish arch is just beyond and I don’t know how to leave. 

It is an ill-fated love story.

It just wasn’t the right time for us. It’s not you, it’s me. I still care a lot about you and I want you in my life, but - 

We saw in the dawn together and you held my limbs like I was a ghost but also like I was a friend. I wish that was enough to repair the sleep-sick stomach, the travel-tired tendons that fought back the small, exhausted tears on the bus away. 

Impossible, I lie to myself again. It was impossible. 

I walk around Venice with barely an ache in my body and loathe and love and am healed by art and ideas. 

It takes a long time to grow young. I wish for a lighter centre of gravity. With time, this will come. 

I feel the dark in the light and know that it wasn’t the finish line at all. Time expands and contracts. I see the greatest lie of them all: that it was ever the end.