Swiss Jura Marathon

Swiss Jura Marathon

I am in Paris and making my way tomorrow Saturday the 4th to St Cergue for the start of the race Sunday Morning. I arrived in Paris because this is where the points could take me; I beg and borrow points for flying to friends and this is the closes that I could get to Switzerland.

I never been to Europe so this is a treat. Paris is so alive. I am only shocked at how expensive Europe is. My other races have been in remote mostly developing countries so my money lasted a lot longer, I did get to see Johnny Depp on Champs Elysses on the premiere of his new movie Public Enemy, so I guess it’s all worth it broke and all.

I have been so nervous about this race, it’s the last one and I was having trouble sleeping at home. My kids are out of school so I took them to Houston to meet their father for summer vacation, he lives overseas but has a place in Houston, so they see him usually during holidays.

The race starts Sunday at 8am and it will finish Saturday around 3pm. There are about 63 competitors and 11 of them are female. Most of the participants are Europeans but there is a Canadian Rob Fransen from BC. Daily distance ranges from 47K to 53K and the daily climbs are between 1410 and 2020. At 350K and 11,000 feet of elevation it will be a very though race. It also has a very strict time limit, around 7 hours max time limit. There are also great things about the race, I will not be running with a heavy pack like in Gobi or Namibia, they also feed us at night and the menu looks amazing, I will be able to shower daily and have a massage as well. There is also a friend coming to watch the end of the race, for the first time I will have somebody to cheer me at the finish line. 39 year old Nicola Fontanesi from Italy was a tent mate in Gobi, at 6’3 he looks more like a volleyball player than a ultrarunner but he is light and faster than me, we used each other as pacers, he never wanted to finish behind me, an ego thing and I knew that if I finish not far behind I was usually top 20.

The race is low key and we will be sleeping on school gyms and such, if I have cell reception I might be able to twitter at http://twitter.com/utrarunwild but I will not have access to email so I will not be able to blog until the end of the race.

Wish me luck, I hardly feel ready for Swiss Jura, maybe because my short time at home was hardly enough time to recover from my last three races that where back to back, with everything that was going on in my personal life and my kids end of the year activities kept me busy as well. There are times however that I am amaze of things that happen around me, I was approached at Notre Dame by an older lady, she came straight at me and without hesitation gave me a gold ring, she spoke in French of course, I panicked and told her I didn’t speak French she then spoke in broken English, she told me she wanted to give me the ring because I was lucky and pretty, the ring is a wedding band, I didn’t know what to say, well, define lucky, there are many times that I feel extremely lucky but this is a wedding band after all, being divorced for the last 9 years I am sure that I am not that lucky at relationships, but she just kissed both of my cheeks and left, I kept it, she did say lucky so I am taking it with me to the race along with my the lucky charms that my kids made for me. Author Tim Rice did say, “We all dream a lot - some are lucky, some are not. But if you think it, want it; dream it, then it's real. You are what you feel.”