Race week has opened in Courmayeur for the TOR330, the Tor des Géants, which starts on Sunday 13 September and runs through to 19 September. The field is set at 1,100 athletes, selected from more than 1,900 pre-registrations submitted from 86 countries, and they will leave the Aosta Valley town in two waves. The staggered start is a practical concession to the opening climb, which funnels the entire field onto singletrack within the first few kilometres.
The course is the reason the race has the reputation it does. It covers 330km with roughly 24,000m of vertical gain, following the Alte Vie 1 and 2, the two high-level routes that ring the Aosta Valley, and crossing a succession of passes above 2,500m. There is very little of the runnable valley-floor terrain that lets athletes recover their legs on other long ultras. The elevation profile is a saw-tooth from start to finish, and the cumulative climbing is comfortably more than double what a hundred-mile mountain race demands.
What separates the Tor from most races at this distance is that it is not staged. There are life bases at intervals where runners can access drop bags, eat properly and sleep, but nobody is told when to stop. Every athlete manages their own sleep debt against the clock, and the decisions made in the first 48 hours about whether to bank distance or bank rest tend to determine who is still moving well on day four. Crews and pacers are restricted, so the race is largely self-directed.
That format produces a distinctive front of the race. Athletes who lead the Tor are rarely the fastest mountain runners in the field; they are the ones who sleep efficiently, eat consistently and avoid the two or three hours of mismanagement that quietly ends a race in the small hours. Finishing rates are respectable for the distance, but attrition is heavily weighted towards the middle of the week, when weather at altitude and accumulated fatigue arrive together.
The race sits within the wider TORX week in the Aosta Valley, which also stages shorter distances over the same terrain, and it arrives a fortnight after UTMB has emptied Chamonix. For a section of the ultra-running world, the Tor rather than UTMB is the target race of the European season: less televised, less commercially saturated, and a considerably longer week in the mountains.