In July 2010, I was flying from Chile to Brazil for work. I was reading the in-flight TAM airline magazine and saw an article about a 3 day ultra race through the Andes Mountains. The article was promoting the 2011 edition, using pictures from the 2010 race. Each year the route of the race is changed to different locations - all in the Chile / Argentina border area. However, I was hooked. The problem - I was 2 months pregnant at the time and was due 1 week after the 2011 race. So, there was no way this was going to happen. However, I couldn't stop thinking about how amazing this sounded. Therefore, in June 2011, with a 4 month old at home, we applied for the 2012 race. And... we got in. It was so far off that I didn't really think much about it. I was more concerned with surviving as a working mom, recovering from a c-secion and broken rib, and living away from family with an infant. However, as the Fall came, and we moved to Birmingham, we knew it was time to start really training hard!! Thank goodness we did because we needed every ounces of muscle to complete this race!!
It was 3 days (4 including the day it took to get to the starting point) and 73.5 miles. We walked / hiked / ran / waded through rivers and lakes each day for 4-8 hours. I conquered my fear of eating those nasty little energy Gu packets because I really didn't have a choice when you are trying to make it that far with little to no food!
It was an experience of a life-time, maybe even life changing. Would we do it again?? Probably not. It would be hard to recreate what we just experienced. I think the unknown and the bits of fear, confusion and anticipation made it that much better and helped us finish!
Below are photos from our pre-race adventures.
This is my plate the night before the race started... lots of pasta and Argentine meat! It might look gross, but it tasted delicious. It was the meal every single day, so it got old pretty quickly. However, after running each day, you could have fed us anything and we would have eaten it.
We haven't even started the race at this point and it was exhausting! We carried our bags to camp 1 - on a ferry for a 1.5 hours and then to the camp. It would have been an injustice to complain about anything because he scenery was incredible. Everywhere you looked, you were surrounded by the Andes Mountains. If we ever do anything like this again, we will definitely bring 2 large backpacks. The race use to have boxes that you put everything in for your team and then the organization transported everything. However, the Chilean customs squashed that this year due to the time it took to clear customs in the past. So, I had my nice suitcase that I was dragging through the middle of a jungle. As you can see from the picture, at first, I was trying to carry it everywhere. By the end, I didn't care and was just dragging it from point A to point B! :) Oh well, lesson learned!
The race still hasn't started at this point. We jus left Argentina and crossed the Chilean border on foot. I thought it was funny because on the immigration form, we couldn't check airplane, train, bus, car... we had to check "other - on foot".
We had to wear these bracelets the entire race. We thought it was so they could keep up with us in case we disappeared into the wilderness. However, we learned that it was to make sure we didn't eat more than our share! :) They scanned the bracelets before each meal while we were in line!
We had just gotten registered and we had our race gear. The organization gave us a race shirt, long-sleeve cold gear shirt, Columbia polar fleece, neck gator, bowls / plate for food, water bottles and some other stuff. We spend hours packing our bad just right and had every single pocket full. Now, we had about 25 lbs of other things that we had to find space for in our stuff... we just started unpacking t-shirts and leaving them in the hotel before we left. Someone in San Martin de los Andes has a nice collection of KD and FIJI t-shirts. Maybe, just maybe, it was time to get rid of some of those anyway.
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