Swiss Alpine Mountain Marathon

The Swiss Alpine Mountain Marathon is held every year in July in Davos, a small town located between the exclusive ski resorts of Klosters and St Moritz. There are various events held in Davos throughout the week leading up to the Mountain Marathon, including various shorter races and a large running exhibition with stalls selling shoes, clothes, various strange powders and potions and nutritional supplements that are supposed to help you ran faster. There were also stalls advertising other races held throughout Europe, which looked very tempting.
The week culminates in the Swiss Alpine Mountain Marathon, which is actually a choice of 3 different events, a 78k, a 42k or a 30k race. I had opted to do the 42k race and I joined up with a summer training camp held by Mike Gratton, the winner of the 1983 London marathon.     
Meeting my fellow runners was an adventure in itself. I thought I was a running "anorak" until I met some of them, it was truly terrifying!. There were about 20 of us, with myself and a runner from Liverpool doing the 42k, Steve Seaton (Runners World editor and adventure racer extrodinaire) and Sir Ranulph Fiennes (Arctic explorer and super hero) doing the 78k. Everyone else had opted to do the 30k.
There seemed to be two ways in which people approached the holiday, those who were there for the race and barely seemed to notice their surroundings and those who were there for the holiday with the race falling into the category of "that's Saturdays problem, I'll worry about it then".
The race organisers had laid on a trip to St Moritz by train accompanied by a Jazz band with a lovely reception, with food and drink, held by the lake in St Moritz for all the runners.
Like a true Fife AC hill runner I got stuck into the goodies laid on for us only to realise that few others were drinking anything as we had a 5 mile trail race to run that evening. My fellow 42k runner had decided to miss the reception in favour of a training run around the lake at St Moritz! Pity really as I beat them all in the race that night.
Before the main race on the Saturday I had plenty of time to check out the marathon course and acclimatise to the altitude. For the first 3 days that I was in Davos I found that my fingers and toes had swollen up due to the altitude. Top Kenyan athletes such as Joyce Chepchumba use Davos as a base for their altitude training. At 1500m (approx. 4500ft) above sea level Davos is not extremely high in terms of altitude but before fully acclimatising it was noticeably harder to breath when running fast or uphill.
On the second evening there were a series of 5.5km road races held through the town centre giving everybody a chance to take part in the weeks events. It was fantastic to be able to watch Joyce Chepchumba and the other elite stars race. The course was lined with people creating an amazing atmosphere. Swiss and German spectators are very enthusiastic. They shout "hup hup hup" at the runners, which I am told translates into a mixture of "well done, nearly there, keep going" and is usually accompanied by the ringing of a cowbell (by mile 22 of a marathon the novelty value of this starts to wear off!)
By Saturday the nervousness of some of my fellow competitors had reached fever pitch and they weren't even doing the 42k. Steve Seaton had told Sir Ranulph that he was entered in the 42k when in fact he was entered in the 78k. When questioned as to how Ranulph would feel about this, Steve's response was "Its all the same to Ranulph". This proved to be true. The 78k starts and finishes in Davos and the 42k starts in Bergun and joins in with the 78k race to finish in Davos. The 30k starts in Davos with the 78k and finishes in a little village outside Bergun. As we started later than the 78k and 30k runners, we were able to watch their races from the window of the train transporting us to Bergun. The downside of this was that we were starting our race at about midday when the sun was at its hottest.
Having checked out the mountainous sections of the course I hadn't bothered with checking the start in Bergun so when the gun went off everybody ran off in the opposite direction to what I was expecting. Oops! This actually turned out to be an advantage as the course was quite narrow to start with and it meant that I was able to get away quickly and not be caught in the bottleneck as over 1000 runners and walkers made their way through the village of Bergun.
From Bergun the next 15k takes in about 5000ft of climbing, firstly on tarmac and then on mountain tracks. The heat and altitude began to take effect on me almost immediately and I was struggling to hold down any fluid that I was drinking. The race organisers are pretty strict and have doctors at various parts of the course and they pull anyone out of the race who they feel is not fit to continue so I was furtively throwing up behind boulders hoping not to be seen. Not a great start.
As I climbed higher the air temperature cooled and I felt better very quickly. I reached the Keschutte pass, the highest point of the course at approx. 8000ft a lot faster than I had expected to. At Keschutte you are at the snowline and all around you can hear the roar of the winds around the very high peaks and the melting glacier water rushing down the mountainside.
There was a big aid station at Keschutte with all the supplies delivered to the mountain by helicopter. Here I was able to take on a lot of food and water before descending into another small valley before the final 1000ft climb up to the Scalletta Pass. This had a bit of a sting in its tail as the climb was not straight up to the pass but followed a path that zig zagged its way up the hill.
On reaching the Scalletta Pass the course descends sharply to Durboden down a rocky mountain track. I assume hill races in Europe don't involve as tricky descents as they do in Scotland as I was able to pass a lot of runners on the descents and I am not the best downhill runner, to say the least.
The last seven or so miles from Durboden followed a gravel track along the Dischma Valley into Davos. I had also made the mistake of not checking out the last 2k of the course was met with yet another hill when I was least expecting it. Oops! (Again) 
The last few hundred metres of the race went through the centre of Davos and finished on the track in the sports centre. My eventual position in the race was 34th out of 230 women to take part. An Ethiopian athlete won the race and runners used to living and training at altitude took the other top placings. I was also in front of my fellow 42k runner from the training camp by nearly half an hour.
The following day we had to go back up to the Dischma Valley to pose for a photo shoot for Runners World Magazine. The picture was supposed to show us running up and down the valley, which was a little trying being the day after a marathon. However, It's the closest I'm ever going to get to being a magazine centrefold!!!
It was a fantastic week spent running and walking in beautiful surroundings, real picture book stuff. The races themselves were held on good mountain tracks, there were no really steep climbs or descents, no heather, bogs or scree and the tracks were all runable.
The highlight of my week? At the end of my race Sir Ranulph Fiennes bought me a pint - heaven!

Louise Provan