The Grand 2 Grand Ultra 2016 - crack on
I've spent the past week running 170 miles through the Grand Canyon competing in the Grand 2 Grand Ultra, America's only self supported multi day stage race. It has been a run of discovery as I battled through heat, storms, sand, cacti, hills, rivers and scrub following little pink flags for 7 days. Each night was spent with my eight tent mates in our increasingly fetid sleeping bags sharing our tales of the trail over freeze dried meals (and the occasional Minstrel that had been sneaked into my pack as a treat).
The premise of the G2G is simple - cross from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the top the Grand Staircase carrying all of your own food, sleeping equipment, medical kit, clothes and survival equipment in 6 stages. The stages varied from a 7.7 mile hop on the final day to a whopping 52 miles on days 3/4 - and let me say again, all whilst carrying your 20lbs of equipment and food for the week on your back.
The route for the race is awe inspiring. Camp 1 is on the edge of the North Rim of the canyon, with the Colorado river running along the very distant base. It is difficult to describe the enormity of the sight in front of you - it is simply on a scale that I have never encountered before. The course then takes you through Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park into the Grand Canyon. Everywhere you turn you see something that blows your mind through it's sheer scale, beauty or simply because you know you have to run up it. The 170 miles takes you through 9,800m of elevation change with a route profile that looks like a heart rate trace.
The weather was surprisingly varied - hot at times, cool at night with two storms thrown in for good measure. Even the storms surprise you with their intensity. One minute you are running with cloudy skies on bone dry ground and the next you are in a storm where the rain is so intense that it feels like hail, has caused flash floods around you and waterfalls on the rock formations surrounding you and has virtually cut off the next checkpoint with a fast flowing knee deep river.
The race has an awesome team of volunteers and medics. The medics come mainly from an ER background. I imagine they were secretly hoping for a real emergency to test their skills rather spending each evening patching up the feet of 10s of runners as they hobble from the finish line of the day's stage. The queue was out of the door every night and these guys were worth their weight in gold - sympathetic when you needed it, brutal when you needed a kick up the arise and a dab hand with a safety pin and a blistered toe nail to keep you on the trail. Their mission is to get you to the finish line and will only medically disqualify you if absolutely necessary - they are more likely to tell you to pull yourself together and crack on.
Home for the week was a moveable circus of 18 competitor tents, volunteer camp and media tent. It was certainly no holiday camp but the simplicity of it all was one of it's best features. No phone signal, limited outgoing email time and printed incoming emails only, a camp fire and hot water to prepare food created an 'us against the Grand Canyon' atmosphere as the group got to know each other and bonded in our common goal to get a complete the course and get a coveted buckle on the finish line. The finishers buckle is a rare commodity - the race has been run for 5 years now and only 500 have been handed out. Of 139 starters this year, only 116 finished.
Each day started at 6 with a blast of The Charge of the Light Brigade followed by a play list that wouldn't be out of place and in a Leicester Square bar on a Friday night. It's then a slow scramble as you try to maximise time in the warmth of your sleeping bag but still get enough breakfast with in you for the days running. At 7.30 we were evicted from our tent so the camp crew can begin the process of dismantling everything, ready to move on to the next site.
Focus and talk in the first half of the week as all about the long stage - 52.6 miles with 2,900m of elevation change. Not for the feint hearted and there was understandable nervousness on the start line as we all contemplated what lay before us, after having already run for in excess of 2 hilly marathons in the previous two days. 10km in, a very steep climb spread the group out and there followed over 19 hours of running, slogging, walking and shuffling. One of the highlights was the 5 km of sand dunes which James McKay and I crossed at about midnight. Colin Geddes was hiding at the top of the first dune doubled over in laughter as I screamed 'what the f?£k' at the top of my voice as I crawled over the summit. The sky was phenomenal- switching off our head torches (after having threatened to form a union and go on strike) we could see the expanse of the Milky Way stretched out ahead of us - breathtaking for somebody who spends most of his life in London with it's light pollution.
Having stopped to eat at checkpoint 6, James and I had an emergency meeting during which we decided to push on through the the final 2 checkpoints just filling up our water. Crack on and get it done. After the dune field, the final 3 miles seemed to go on forever, and as they were pretty much up hill, on a sandy trail, perception did perhaps match reality for once...... Having set off at 8 on Wednesday morning, we staggered into camp at 4:10 on Thursday morning - do not pass go, do not collect $200, just get straight into bed and try not to think about the 2 remaining marathons and final uphill stage.....
Eventually crossing the overall finish line 4 days later finish line was a truly elating feeling - something I've still got 6 days later. Pistol Pete from our tent summed it up when he said you haven't really experienced an ultra like this until you've been broken down by the emotion of it all. Looking out over the Grand Canyon from the top of the Grand Staircase, I may have shed a tear...
Colin and Tess Geddes have done an amazing job with this race - fast and competitive if you want it to be but full of challenges no matter how fast you want to approach it. It rightly earns 6 qualifying points for the North Face UTMB and has just been admitted to the Ultra Trail World Tour - one of only 14 races out of 4,000 applicants this year. They have just launched the M2M stage race in Hawaii and if the G2G is anything to go by, this will become an instant fixture on ultra runner's bucket lists.
As I sit on the plane waiting for breakfast to be served I have no shoes and socks on, my feet resting on my flip flops having been recently cleared of what one of the other competitors calls toe juice. To put it bluntly I have destroyed my feet, bruising all of my toes, infecting two of them, and have blisters in 10 different places. Good job I won't be in the office this week as I'm not sure my colleagues could cope with the sight of my deformed hobbit feet. Note to self, buy trainers 1 size too big next time.....
Some stats:
6 stages over 7 days
170 miles
Longest stage 52.6 miles
Over 9,800m of overall elevation change
