Craig Gilbert | [email protected]
She may not be King in the North, but there is dragon’s blood in her veins.
Jasper’s Kimberley Stark just finished the UTMB.
The Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc describes itself as a “dream-world adventure,” 2,500 people racing around the clock through the mountains of France, Switzerland and Italy from Aug. 31-Sept. 2. At 171 kilometres long with 10,300 metres of combined elevation to conquer, it’s the gold standard for elite racers and amateur enthusiasts alike.
More than 40 hours straight exercising in the alpine sounds like a fantasy to a select few, and Stark, the owner of the Bear Paw and Other Paw bakeries, is one of them.
“This was a dream of mine,” she said Wednesday morning in Croatia, which was Tuesday night in Jasper (she visited a site where the HBO series Game of Thrones was filmed after the race). “I thought, that’s fantastic: You go to Europe and run around this magnificent mountain. It’s like the Holy Grail of trail racing. It’s the one.”
It’s so popular competitors have to complete a series of races to earn enough points just to get a ticket in a lottery for bibs. Stark learned of the race three years ago. She earned enough points last year, but didn’t win entry. The tickets are cumulative, though, so in 2018 after completing another series of qualifiers, she had two and one of them hit.
“If you’re a world-famous trail runner, this is where you come to prove yourself,” she said. “The people who win are crazy. The men finish in 20-something hours, half the time it took me.”
Stark, one of only about 250 women competing, completed the race in 43 hours, 25 minutes and 22 seconds. More than 700 of the starters didn’t finish.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Stark said. “It’s that 10,000 metres of elevation. Sections of it are beautiful alpine running, but lots of sections of it are gnarly, very technical terrain. We had everything from minus 10 degrees and windy, high humidity and really cold, to 21 and sunny.”
Stark said the race had become a bit of a blur, but remembers summiting at least nine peaks.
“The first mountain, it’s insane,” she said. “At the top it’s not a trail, it’s like mountaineering, just rock and markers, and it’s in the pitch black dark rain miserableness.”
Still, there’s traffic.
“When we go running in the mountains in Jasper, one of the things I love about it is there’s no one,” she said. “It was really neat to look up at night because everyone has headlamps on, you see this switchback up and it’s a constant line of people and they’re all moving at the same speed just trying to get up this hill.”
With so many people, it was difficult to step out of the queue and take a minute to eat. Typically when racing long distances, Stark’s stomach starts to speak up at about 70 kilometres, but in France it gave her trouble at just 35 km in. “Super-nauseous,” she had trouble getting calories in, which sapped her energy.
“It was at the top of the first mountain,” she recalled. “I was keeping a solid pace, but because there’s that train of people, there’s nowhere to step out and have a bite to eat. It’s so gnarly and mountainous, and it’s dark and it’s cold. I was afraid, too, if I stopped I’d get cold, and that would be a problem as well. I made some errors and an error was that I should have found a moment to step aside, had a bite to eat and got back in the line and carried on, but I didn’t.”
Stark had a support team member, Danielle Vien, who had her own two-day no-sleep adventure racing from checkpoint to checkpoint on buses with thousands of other helpers.
“At some points, I’m literally falling asleep as I’m walking,” Stark said, “so to see Danielle’s face as I came into the checkpoints was amazing.”
She said a “trail angel” from Portugal also took time from his race to help her warm up and get some food in her stomach on the other side of that first peak.
“Sometimes there are other runners who will take time out of their race and help you, just because they’re kind, beautiful people,” she said. “It’s that group mentality when there’s that many people out there. It grows that community because you’re all in it together.”
Then there are the villagers along the course, ringing cowbells and shouting “Allez Kimberley!” (her name was on her bib) at all hours of the night.
“It was an overwhelming experience.”
Vien’s husband stayed home with their three kids. He was among a group of people like Joe Urie - well, not quite like Joe Urie - who tracked Stark’s progress via webcams and shared it around on social media.
“I didn’t realize so many people were following the live feed,” she said. “The support I felt from people in Jasper was overwhelming. I got to wave at everybody in Jasper as I crossed the finish line. Then I burst into tears.”
Stark took time to look up the number of women racing, and it amounted to about 10 per cent, which stood out to her.
“I saw a few other women (but) you definitely notice it out on the trail,” she said. “A lot of women do the 100-kilometre races for sure. And maybe there are a lot of women doing the 100-milers and who just aren’t interested in the UTMB, I don’t know.
“It’s clearly very doable. I’m not a superhero, I’m just a normal individual and I can do it.”
