Pierramenta 2010 - good things come to those who wait (Running)

Tuesday 16 March 2010 08:44AM

Up until last week’s Pierramenta, of the 7 ski mountaineering races I’d done, only one had been on the full course. All the others had been shortened due to weather and avalanche danger. It became a bit of a joke between my race partner, Ben, and me, that they never run “parcours A” when we turn up.

The Pierramenta more than made up for that. Four days of stunning weather, amazing courses and fantastic racing. The courses were more technical than anything I’d raced over before, with very steep, serious descents, long exposed ridges and sections of scrambling with your skis waving around and getting in the way on your back.

Our performance in each stage seemed directly related to how much steep descending there was, with our worst stage being the first day (lots of steep, icy and exposed descents, a total of 2700m ascent and descent in 17km) in which we were over 50% slower than the winners, and our best being the second day, which had the same amount of height gain but in double the distance, so no gnarly descents for us to lose big chunks of time on, and we managed just over 30% slower than the winners.

Overall, after nearly 10,000m of ascent spread over 4 stages, we were 63rd out of 151 finishing male teams, bang on 14 hours, almost 4 hours behind winners Kilian Jornet and Florent Troillet. Not bad for a first time, but pretty psyched to go back and improve for next year!

Now, while keeping options open for another crack at the Ramsay round on skis, it’s time to re-adjust to normal life again after 5 weeks in never-never land (the Alps).

A guy who finished 100th made a series of short films from the first three days that give a good feel of the race. day 1 , day 2 and day 3.