Shortly later, my watch beeped with the encouraging news that I’d covered the first kilometer in a time that was slightly faster than last year. The spot where they did the scan was where the route rejoined rue La Mollard – the initial few hundred meters had been changed compared to last year’s course and instead of going straight from Place du Triangle de l’Amitié to Rue La Mollard via a roundabout, the new route bypassed the church on the right, going up several sets of stairs instead.Īt the top of Rue La Mollard, a straight and even climb still on pavement, I passed my first competitor. Strangely enough, my bib (with timing chip) wasn’t scanned at the start, but maybe half a kilometer into the race. In my pocket was a 0.5 liter bottle of water and I’d emptied another one just like it during warm-up. I was wearing short running tights, a sleeve-less running top and well-broken-in Brooks Cascadias.
I couldn’t get my heart rate down below 130 just standing there. There was no line whatsoever as I crossed the start line and waited for the next 20-second count-down. Did people just try to wait for cooler temperatures, or had many of them not started at all? The opposite was true, with the speakers almost begging people to line up at the time they were supposed to start. With 800 spots available for the vertical kilometer race (up from in 2015), I was expecting there to be lots of stress at the starting line. I walked 3km to the starting line in that heat, kept my warm-up quite light, and hoped for the best. On Friday at 2pm, the temperatures in Chamonix topped out at almost 29☌. I drove 630km to Chamonix on Thursday, with my car reporting temperatures of up to 36☌. But then as Friday came closer, the weather forecast changed. Lows of 10 degrees, highs of 20 degrees, risk of rain showers. The week of the race, the weather predictions were dire. But then several track&field events took away my focus and I ended up doing less than half the vertical mileage I’d done the previous year. The previous year, I’d reached my beginners’ goal of finishing in less than one hour. Otherwise, why bother, right?įor the second year in a row, I was in Chamonix, France for the “KM Vertical du Mont-Blanc”, a vertical kilometer race that ascends 1000m of elevation in around 3.8km. If you’ve done something once and then set out to do it again, the expectation is that you’ll do better.
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