Ultra Volcanique 2024: 77 kilometres through the Chaîne des Puys#
Cycling is my discipline. Trail running, generally, is pleasure: I go for the terrain and the atmosphere, without looking at the clock. The Ultra Volcanique of the Trail de Vulcain is the exception. That one, I raced.
77 kilometres, 2,811 metres of climbing, eight hours and nine minutes, and weather that turned the race into something else entirely.
Volvic, before dawn#
Start on 3 March 2024 in the early morning, at Volvic. It is the long format of the Trail de Vulcain, and it crosses terrain with no equivalent in France: the Chaîne des Puys and the Limagne fault, UNESCO World Heritage listed since 2018. Eighty volcanoes lined up over thirty-five kilometres, fifteen minutes from Clermont-Ferrand.
Which is to say I was racing at home, and that is a pleasure in itself. I train on these paths all year, I know every rise and every bend, and they are fine, beautiful things, these Auvergne volcanoes. You can have run elsewhere, on more prestigious or higher ground: nowhere else do the cones line up like this, as far as the eye can see, with that quiet self-evidence.
What I did not know was what the sky had planned. The conditions were dantesque from start to finish: wind from everywhere (not one direction, all of them at once, as only the Auvergne plateaus know how) and snow arriving very fast on the high ground. A March morning on the Chaîne des Puys can look like the middle of winter, and this one did not hold back.
Lemptégy, Ceyssat, the Puy de Dôme#
The route strings together the landmarks that define the massif. The Lemptégy volcano at kilometre 22, a breached cone quarried for fifty years, whose interior you now run through in the open air. The Col de Ceyssat at kilometre 42, at the foot of the giant. Then the Puy de Dôme itself, high point of the race at 1,433 metres on my watch, and that day, the point most exposed to the wind and snow.
Back past Lemptégy at kilometre 52, the Volvic station at 65, and the last paths to the finish.
I finished fifteenth.
The event’s cut-offs give a sense of the format: four hours to reach kilometre 22, eleven and three-quarter hours for kilometre 65. I covered the full 77 kilometres in eight hours nine. On a course where you are given almost twelve hours to reach kilometre 65, finishing the whole thing in eight, in that weather, is a different race from the one the rules envisage.
The frost#
With the cold, the wind and the snow, stretches of the Chaîne des Puys had turned into an ice rink.
Somewhere along the route, a patch of black frost put me on the ground. A proper fall, the kind that cracks and leaves you two seconds of doubt about the rest of the day. I got up, checked that everything still worked, and set off again. On a day like that, falling is part of the terms of the contract; what matters is what you do in the ten seconds that follow.
The loved ones, in the descent#
And then there was them.
People close to me were waiting along the course, others at the finish. Meeting them in the middle of the Puy de Dôme descent, in the wind and snow, at a point where the race was starting to cost, was brilliant, there is no better word. You hurtle down, you spot familiar silhouettes at the edge of the path, you hear your name, and the descent suddenly becomes much shorter.
Finding them again at the finish, after eight hours in that washing machine, ended the day exactly as it should have ended. Racing at home carries that privilege: the people you love can come and watch.
It pulsed hard#
I have often wondered why this particular race put me in competition mode when other trail races leave me alone. The answer probably lies in the terrain: on a trail I am discovering, I look around me; here, I know every path, every flat section, every loose stone. So only the effort remains.
And there was effort. What I take from this day, beyond the wind, the snow and the fall, is that it pulsed hard: an average of 156 bpm for more than eight hours, with peaks at 179, and 5,810 calories. That is not a strolling pace, and it was not a day for strolling.
To this day, it is my finest trail race, for the performance, for the self-surpassing, and for the course. 77 kilometres at home, among World Heritage volcanoes, in winter conditions, with loved ones in the right places. There are more ordinary Sundays in March.
Photo credits#
The finish photos come from the Trail de Vulcain organisation. The Chaîne des Puys illustrations come from Wikimedia Commons and remain under their original licence:
- Puy de Lemptégy quarry: Rémih, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Puy de Dôme summit esplanade: Espirat, CC BY-SA 4.0