Road to Tor des Geants 2024 - Part 1
During the 2022 Tor des Geants, I resoundingly said I would not do the race again. I told myself out loud. I told my wife. I told my wife to repeat my words back to me when my goldfish brain forgot.
Welp, here I am. Signed up for Tor 2024. I couldn’t stay away from this epic race. The mountains are so big. The course has unparalleled beauty from wire to wire. The culture around the race and support from the Aosta valley is incredible. And I forgot most of the really hard parts.
I also have a big, scary goal motivating me – to go under 100 hours. In addition to being a nice round number, it is a difficult but hopefully achievable goal for my abilities. About 3-5% of the 1100-person field goes under 100 hours in most years. To the best of my knowledge, only 9 Americans have done it, 3 of which are Barkley finishers.
It is of course silly and arbitrary at the end of the day. No one but me will really care if I go 98 or 102 hours. I will still be some 25-30 hours behind the winner. But I suppose you hold on to whatever lights the fire. Going sub 30 hours at UTMB held a similar appeal to me and pushed me to train harder and get stronger. Whether I hit sub 100 or not, the quest will undoubtedly make me a better and stronger athlete.
I constructed the 2024 calendar with complete focus on Tor. Here is how I laid it out with the rationale behind it:
HURT 100: I usually keep mid December through February at low volume with more focus on speed. After a fall marathon block, I felt I had all the speed I needed for Tor. HURT was a race I long wanted to do and would be a perfect slingshot into Tor training. I had only a 3-week training block for HURT and was pleased with 27 hours and 11th place.
Terrapin 50K: this one was really more for fun with minimal taper / recovery. It was a good run with sub 5 hours and 5th place, but I didn’t have my best day and was off my PR. That was ok though and to be expected.
Southern States 200: I felt I needed more experience at the 200 distance before the next round of Tor. Southern States sounded like a cool inaugural race and would be a great way to practice multi-day sleep and fueling strategies. I did not nail my sleep strategy the first two nights and suffered mightily with a hip flexor issue going into night 2. With all of that, I was happy to come away with 66 hours and 4th place. I also learned a ton to implement for Tor, and hopefully my big mistakes were at this race and won’t be repeated at Tor.
Gritchell FKT: I decided not to race after Southern States in April so I could fully optimize training for Tor. A long FKT seemed like a great opportunity for a big training stimulus while having more flexibility than a typical race. I choose Gritchell, which is near the Hellbender course and about 100 miles with 24K vert and lots of technical terrain. The route was even tougher than I expected, and I picked a hot and incredibly humid day for it. I managed to get the FKT by a mere 11 minutes and had more good takeaways for Tor.
While I am happy with these results, I also feel like none were quite at my full potential. But hopefully I am saving the best for Tor! I feel fresh and ready for the last 6 week training block, which is a good sign and exactly what I was aiming for.
I’ll write a post soon on the high level training structure of this year, including what I’m doing differently vs. the 2022 build.