Buckle up buttercups, it’s a long one.
In December I had a brilliant idea, arguably one of my best. I was going to run the Transylvania Ultra, an 80-kilometer ultramarathon in Romania with 5000 meters of elevation gain. The racecourse started and ended at Bran Castle, the alleged home of Dracula and wound up and down the peaks of Bucegi National Park. As I spent the spring postholing through snow and slogging through mud, it seemed like less of a good idea. And standing underneath Bran castle in the pre-dawn dark and realizing the Portaloo’s were already out of toilet paper, it seemed like a terrible one.
The countdown to the start was in Romanian, which, as I don’t speak Romanian, added a fun element of surprise. Then again, it was an ultra. There would be plenty of time to catch up. I shuffled forward with the rest of the field.
The first 2 kilometers were on paved road and people got their pre-race jitters out in the time-honored tradition of running at an unsustainable pace. I got my personal jitters out by passing the people who had bear bells on their pack so that I wouldn’t have to listen to the jingling for the next 16 hours. When the course turned onto a gravel forest road it started to go uphill. Then it kept going uphill for another 8 kilometers and 1400 meters of climbing. Once the trail turned to singletrack it was a conga line with no place to pass and bottlenecks at fallen logs blocking the trail. More critically, there was no discreet place to pee. To the other runners that saw my bare bum, I am deeply sorry.
I moved up slowly in the field and ended up in the middle of a pack of Belgians. Normally German HusbandTM reminds me to eat every half hour. If he isn’t there, my running buddy Willi does. In the absence of either, the Belgian headman took up the task, shouting “Eten, jongens!” every half hour.
I ran with the Belgians until we reached tree line and soon after, the summit of Saua Tiganesti. This was where it got fun. The trail was a more runnable gradient with technical single track and patches of snow. In the fog, I couldn’t tell snowfield from the clouds. Racers ahead of me looked like they were climbing into the sky itself.
At the first checkpoint, volunteers wrapped up as though for Everest scanned bibs. The volunteer who scanned mine waggled his eyebrows and announced “Technologia!” Much respect to them for being out there in the cold. For cold it was. On a high point at the full mercy of 60 kilometer per hour winds that made for a felt temperature of -5 Celsius.
Many people stopped, although I couldn’t tell if that was to refuel, re-layer, or rest. My hat blew off but a volunteer caught it.
“Careful, it will blow forever,” he cautioned once he handed it back.
The first descent on the snow was carnage. Many runners were not comfortable on snow and slipped, slid, and slowed. One runner was on the phone, presumably with mountain rescue.
“She slipped,” the runner said, and other runners repeated it, the rumor whipping around me with the wind.
I, however, was in my element. Glissading over snowfields, passing whole lines of people at a time. Training on technical trails in Eisenerz I had rued runnable terrain, but those roots and stones were excellent preparation for the rutted rocky singletrack the course followed.
At the first aid station, I refilled my bottles with a sports drink and then climbed up the basin to the infamous snowy chimney Hornurile Malaiesti, another 800 meters of elevation gain. According to the course map and the official race media, this was one of the most scenic sections of the course. Unfortunately, the fog hid everything except for 20 or so meters in front of me. Once again, I was surrounded by Belgians, this time talking in vivid detail about how stinky of a crap they needed to take. I passed them quickly to be safe. I don’t think they knew I could speak Dutch.
The climb to the top of the chimney was steep, but traction was good enough that I didn’t need spikes. It was a case of putting my head down and grinding up the climb, which I do well. If it had been icy, it would have been a different story. As it was, people still got off course due to the low visibility. A group of people did a sketchy traverse from one side of the chimney to the other as they had taken a wrong turn and gotten cliffed out.
The conditions at the top were horrific. Cold, windy, slippery, and with low visibility that made navigation a challenge. From here, it was 5 kilometers of ridge running fully exposed to the elements to the next checkpoint. This was where it got dangerous. My hands were frozen and I didn’t want to cool down more by stopping to put thicker ones on. Every time I tried to eat the wind would whip the food out of my hands.
Runners would disappear and reappear into the fog as we all tried our best to stay on the course. Up there in the snow, there was no trail to follow, only posts wedged into cairns.
The race directors received a lot of criticism after the race due to the number of people who had to be helped off the mountain by Salvamonte, the local mountain rescue. That said, this was a mountain race in the late spring, with mountain conditions. They did send out weather forecasts and warn runners that conditions were tough. They did not, however, require runners to bring poles and microspikes, and I think they should have. It was very clear to see which runners had experience on ice and snow and which didn’t. In conditions like that, fitness isn’t enough—you need to be surefooted, have good balance, and know how to move on slippery terrain. Runners that don’t live in the mountains were woefully unprepared.
After the Batrana checkpoint, I was underneath the cloud cover and it felt like a completely different race. Now the course descended through the most beautiful part of the course with a wild stream and some scrambling to get through rocky sections of trail.
At the Pestera aid station, German HusbandTM was there to refill my bottles, lightly scold me for not eating enough, and force feed me some oreos. The aid station was full of the large, furry stray mastiffs that are ubiquitous in Romania. German Husband told me to take my gloves off. I balked. I had barely thawed out and had to go up to the alpine ridges again, with wind chasing the clouds across the summit. From the bottom of the sunny it was hard to believe how extreme the conditions at the top had been
Here the 100k and 80k courses diverged. Now all the runners on the course with me were direct competitors. Not that it mattered much, as I only saw a couple of other runners around. I had no idea where I was relative to everyone else. At the top of the climb, a volunteer gave me directions to follow the slightly confusing course. As the directions were in Romanian, they were not super helpful.
After the initial climb to the ridge, the next section of course followed a cart path over high plateau. Fields of crocuses carpeted sprung forth between the brown grass that hadn’t returned to life yet. Here and there I splashed through snowmelt and pushed through patches of dense white pine. Glad I read the course directions, or I would have missed some of the turns.
A friendly creature met me and jogged to the aid station with me. Still not sure if it was sheep or dog. Whatever it was, it accompanied me after the next check point for another 3km until it decided I was running too slowly and it ran off.
The course left the plateau and descended through forest to the next aid station, Bolboci, where German Husband was waiting for me. I wolfed down a bowl of soup, then filled bowl with oreos. After that I was off again for a half kilometer of tarmac and then climbing through forest once more. For this next portion of the course I tried to catch up on the calories that I missed in the first part. I slowly reeled in other runners and ran together with a runner from Bulgaria for a 10 kilometer stretch.
I felt the bonk coming on during climb over ridge to Moiciu de Sus. My pace slowed on the gradual forest road descent and a few runners passed me again. At this aid station, I took a longer break to refuel. My legs felt heavy, I was having digestive issues, and I was really questioning why I felt the need to sign up for the 80 kilometer distance when I could have done a shorter race and have been done already.
This was the psychological low point of the race for me. The runners that I had so carefully paced trotted by me, and the climbs that felt so powerful were now a slog. The course went through a forest and as dusk settled in I was acutely aware of being in the country with the highest brown bear population in Europe.
At the last checkpoint, German HusbandTM was waiting with fresh bottles and a hug. I rallied and felt pretty good for the last 5 kilometers. Like during my last 80km race, things can go bad, but they can also turn around.Running to Bran castle with lightning and thunder in the distance was spectacular. Bats fluttered overhead, catching moths attracted to the beam of my headlamp. Oddly peaceful until the storm was over me, then an absolute downpour to the finish.
I foraged at the buffet and grabbed some pasta for later. German HusbandTM suggested I take a pickle. This was a mistake. Too acidic for my tender stomach, and I paid for it later when I vomited in the hotel.
If the race had been tough, recovering from it was worse. It took over an hour for my breathing to slow down to normal again. I vomited (presumably from the pickle) and then had extreme chest pain any time I coughed, swallowed, or moved. I also caught a cold, which meant that I was doing a lot of coughing. After worrying that I was having some kind of cardiac event, I gave in and went to the ER. There, I was diagnosed with an irritated esophagus and hypochondria. The race was great, but spending 2 weeks eating toast and wincing every time I moved was not.
In more uplifting news, I lost my first toenail! It’s somewhat of a rite of passage for a runner, and after 20 years of running with a full set of 10 the imposter syndrome had fully set in. Admittedly, I did lose this one when I kicked the foot of the hotel bed after the race.
