This turned out to be an extremely tough race (as expected) and in the end Ken was the only one to complete the entire course. That said a valiant effort was made by all. We all managed to make the first cut-off, but only Ken, Susan and Sarah managed to make the 30.3 in under 4hrs 10min in Wengen. The elevation and strict time cutoffs did us in.
The day started out well it was a sunny and beautiful but ultimately the heat probably added to the difficulty.
We caught the train from Wengen to Interlaken at 7:13am which got us to Interlaken at 7:54 for a 9 am start. We managed to get seats but the trains were standing room only all the way.
We snapped photos of the group near the start line, and then lined up for the portapotties (Toi Toi). It didn’t look like they had nearly enough but the line up went fairly quickly.
The starting festivities were very Swiss, flag twirlers, and a group playing Alpenhorns. Just after the starting gun went off, two or three paragliders flew directly over.
We strategically lined up for the start about half way between the 5:30 and the 6:00 pace bunnies (not that we expected to finish in that time, but the cut-offs were based on gun time). The poor pace bunnies had backpacks on with about a 10 foot pole sticking out with a large flag attached.
The first 10km felt like a regular run as it was fairly flat. We were trying to keep the pace conservative as we had been warned to save as much energy as possible for the second half of the race. It was a bit of a juggling act though as we had to run the first half faster than we might have preferred due to the 2 :25 hour cutoff at 19.6 km.
The cheering along the route was great, bands with giant cowbells, steel drum bands; community bands (some in fantastic costumes). It turns out that German for “Go” is “Hopp”, so all along the way were cheers of “hopp,hopp, hopp, hopp.”) Please people – I can barely run, no way am I hopping!
We had thought that the first 15 km was flat but shortly after 12km the course started to rise (the start was at 586 m and the first cutoff at Lauterbrunnen was at 800m with most of the elevation gain after 13 km). Soon the 6hr pace bunny passed us. A couple tried to keep up with him for as long as they could, but by the time we started to go up the switchback to Wengen the bunny was long gone.
The 30.3 km cutoff in Wengen was at 4:10. It was relatively flat to 26 km so it was important to keep a good pace to give ourselves as much time as possible for the steep section from 26 – 30 km up to Wengen. Imagine the Grouse Grind on steroids – it was definitely a struggle at this point. We were already walking any hills and Susan’s legs were starting to cramp. Too bad we didn’t know about the magic bouillion.
The sweeper bike caught Carol just outside of Lauterbrunnen and he was coming for the rest of us… He caught Leanne somewhere on the hill to Wengen and Mary just before the 30.3 cutoff. After some wishful thinking he caught up to Susan and Sarah at the 33km mark. But Ken made all the cut-offs and continued on to the finish.
We had read that as long as you made it past 10 miles, you should still get a medal and shirt but they didn’t know anything about it at the Wengen checkpoint. Mary headed from the checkpoint back to our apartment on the other side of town. On the way she ran into our spectator contingent and Leanne, Mary walked with Leanne back to the 32.5 km cutoff so she could turn in her chip and then we all made our way to the train to head up to the finish area.
The train was standing room only, which was ok initially but when Mary and Leanne tried squatting down it was a bad idea because then they couldn’t stand back up without getting lightheaded. Leanne and Mary ended up sitting in the door way of the car all the way up.
Meanwhile Susan and Sarah had made the Wengen cut-off and were headed to Wengernalp for the 37.9km cut-off. Susan had already stopped at the first aid station to deal with leg cramps twice. By the third time she was not willing to have anyone touch her. Sarah was hot and continued to complain about being thirsty. Needless to say that by 33km when the sweeper came by both were really happy. They continued on to about 34.5 km so that they could hand in their chips and claim their medal, a cotton t-shirt and bouillon- a little too late to make a difference! It was a special moment when Susan and Sarah had a private medal ceremony with the first aid staff. They walked back about 2km to make it to the nearest train station and Allemand.
We finally made it up to the finish area at Kleine Scheideg, this was a fairly awesome sight – crowded patios, hundreds of people lining the finish up on the ridge, hundreds of other people waiting for trains. We battle our way up the hill to the finish area, we had to swim against the streams of people coming down from the finish. We were hoping to find some water at the finish area. The finishers chute was blocked off but we were able to beg a couple of cups of the sport drink over the fence. We took some pictures of the finish and then headed back down the hill to see if we could find the rest of the folks.
Sarah went to the finish area to hopefully watch Ken cross the finish line. She was too late and found him in the line up to get a free beer. I guess we will have to rely on the free finisher video to see his major accomplishment. Thank goodness someone got the full experience of the race!
Mary, Carol and Leanne lined up for t-shirts and medals. After much explaining and begging we were able to get finisher shirts but no medals.
Of the group of six of us that ran the race only our one token male runner, Ken was able to actually finish. He said the moraine section from 40 – 42 was amazing and amazingly difficult. He said it was even steeper than the section from 26 - 28 and the path was about a foot wide. At that point everyone was just trudging along single file. Some impatient guy tried to go around the line and slipped and almost fell off the moraine, had two people not caught him by the wrists and pulled him back up onto the path he would have been toast. Ken said he learned many new German swear words as people berated the fool who had slipped. Amazingly he finished in 5:52, he looked quite fresh at the finish though he did have the grace to say he was hurting.
The line up for the official food, banana’s etc was stupid long so we passed on that and just went and bought beer and found a spot to park ourselves in the grass. We ran into our Irish friend Mike Kelly from the International section of the start line. The beer was so good we had another (Susan had three) before finally calling it a day and catching the train back down the hill. The train trip seemed to take forever.
For those of us who didn’t finish, we have concluded that we could attempt this race a dozen times and not get much further than we did today. Possibly a cooler day might have helped but the mountain section is extremely difficult and is certainly not meant for lowlanders like us.
It was a good day and a great excuse to visit a really beautiful (really expensive) location. We have a couple of more days here before continuing on to other scenic locales.
Next marathon stop Cork, Ireland (June, 2013) - thanks Mike for the recommendation. Mmmm - Guinness.
