TDS is Happening Too

There’s something spectacular and almost mad about this UTMB week. There are so many different events starting and finishing and going on at the same time I can barely comprehend what is going on. I stand in awe of the Polettis and the team around them as they build something incredibly beautiful and wonderfully complex. In an article by Doug Mayer published in Trailrunner Magazine Michel Poletti is quoted:

In an interview once, Michel Poletti paused, asking if I had seen a photo of a mutual friend that was making the rounds. He was climbing one of Chamonix’s famed needle-sharp aiguilles, one foot on each side of a razor sharp ridge—a perilous balancing act, big air on each side. It was his metaphor for trying to move ever up, while balancing business growth and heartfelt values.

And while I want to comment on the main points of the article in a later post myself, I wanted to point out this one sentence as I found it fascinating and challenging at the same time. As a business owner myself I know too well the allure of “just adding one more thing”. An event goes off without a hitch and immediately after the successful conclusion one dreams of adding more, improving, and growing, but not every time this is the right call. But here in Chamonix, watching what UTMB has built over the years and is continuing to grow I am just in awe that it all works together and fits. I don’t see people running around like mad, I see no stress. Just folks everywhere doing their thing, amidst the regular tourists, the mountaineers, the locals and of course the racers and support. TDS is one of those additions to the UMTB week that’s sort of hard to fit into the narrative, the official description and explanation of the event is even complicated:

Beautiful, technical, wild, demanding, there are not enough adjectives to describe the TDS. Acronym for “Sur les Traces des Ducs de Savoie” (following the footprints of the Dukes of Savoie), the TDS links the Aosta Valley to the Savoie, allowing you to discover the villages of the Tour du Mont-Blanc and the mountains that surround them.

There’s a romance the French have with their language and in branding that sort of is hard to grasp. In the US we would either just name the race by the distance or give it some comical name that’s both silly and also a bit tough sounding (Mad Rabbit 100 or something…). But back to TDS. The event isn’t like PTL which is REALLY different as a team race and with barely any route-markings. But it also doesn’t go on the trails of the main UTMB route like CCC and OCC. The race goes the opposite direction, starts in Courmayeur in the middle of the night (quite literally at 11:50pm) and uses more technical terrain, resulting in a slightly shorter race than UTMB but considered harder than UTMB itself. This year for the first time folks running it are awarded with 4 Running Stones, but the race is not officially part of the World Series Finals. It also doesn’t require a lottery and took awhile to sell out.

As I type this the first finisher are less than 15km from the UTMB arch in downtown Chamonix, the race has been going for over 18 hours and of the 1,874 starters there are already 443 DNFs – and that’s on a day that has seen incredibly favorable weather – not like last year.

These courageous TDS runners have been battling the mountains all night and all day, while I have been floating around Chamonix, eating gelato and enjoyed being a tourist (and picking up my bib for OCC), and then I sort of remembered that this event is going on and I should probably head to the finish line to cheer the first runners in – but first, more gelato. Live tracking can be found here, more info on the race here.