The major attraction to the Trail de la Colmiane was that it was free as in at no cost. Of course there's free and free. Given that we had to drive over 100km (and climb up 1300m in the process) and spend a night in a hotel near the start this wasn't really free. But I'm not going to complain about the costs incurred as the trail was spectacular and well worth doing - once!
If you go to the trail website you learn that this is just the second year that the race has been run, though since there were some 300 participants I suspect it's not going to go away. Maybe they'll start charging the racers next year...
On our drive up the weather turned nasty and rainy which made us a little nervous. A week ago the "Grand Raid de la Mercontour", which was run not far from Colmiane, had 3 fatalities and we didn't want to end up dead. However the weather cleared up considerably as we arrived at the hotel in St Dalmas Valdeblore and the waitress reassured us that the forecast was for good weather on the morrow. She was right. The sun was shining brightly as we arose and breakfasted. After that we checked out and drove around the corner to the sports field where the run started and retrieved our run numbers etc. Then we stood around for half an hour while the organizers got everything else sorted out. Finally a few minutes after the official start time of 9:30 we were off and running on the flat first kilometer back into the village of St Dalmas (in Valdeblore not to be confused with the other two St Dalmases in the area) The flat didn't last long. We were soon climbing and no longer running. This was not really a great surprise - if you took a look at the height profile:
Of course the problem is that even the profile picture doesn't really do justice to the climbing. We humans aren't really geared for gradients steeper than 10% or so because lets face it most of the earth is pretty flat. But the Alps are not most of the earth. After a couple of km we passsed a flock of sheep and left the lower wooded slopes behind as we continued our ascent. Our reward for the climb were great views and a refreshment stop, followed by even more climbing and great views and more climb and lakes and snow Oh and then we saw the highest point on the trail and it was still a long way up but the views, whether we looked backwards, forwards or sideways were still great. And the view down to the little alpine flowers wasn't too bad either Once we reached the first peak and then descended we got a view down to where we had started 1300m below The rock turned back to grassland as we descended from the second lower summit but it was still pretty tricky to run down because while, from a distance it looked smooth, close up it was rather more lumpy. After another refreshment stop we joined a track which was, for the most part, a lot easier to run down than the grassland had been, but it was still tough because it was steep and there were plenty of loose rocks. Eventually we ended up in civilization at La Colmiane ski station and then it was time for the final ascent and descent and into the finish. During this part of the trail it coult have been marked a lot better. I didn't get lost, but that was because I could see people ahead of me most of the time, my wife did get lost because where she was the competitors were rather more spread out.
And then it was back home to recover and look at the results. My average pace was just over 6km/hour or just a hair faster than 10mins/km. For reference that is about half my usual pace. In fact it took me about 2 hours to do the ascent and a further hour and 20 minutes or so to descend. Even the latter is pretty terrible - 10km in 1h20 instead of the 40-50 minutes I do on flatter tarmaced surfaces! But then I don't get quite the same views when running on the local roads...
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