Engineer, firefighter, gardener and bee-keeper. These are the professions of first three classified of Tor des Gèants® 2017 to whom they devote themselves with passion and capacity. The same passions they put in their daily workouts that are necessary to compete at high-level Endurance Trail.
A sport of great fatigue in which you only win a cup and a lot of applauses and affection. But of course you can not “weigh” your passions with a balance; they need to be fed with dreams and sacrifices and totally lived.
So are doing the other 564 competitors still in race of this International Trail that involves the entire Aosta Valley and “represents” it in all the 66 countries from which the athletes come. Once archived the first positions (at 8 pm of Thursday 50 trailers passed the finish line),Tor des Gèants® 2017 is ready to welcome - in the next two days - its most genuine protagonists (still 500 on the road), those who live the deepest emotions, they are more committed and only aspire to one prestigious award: a simple finisher t-shirt to wear and preserve with pride.
Same aspiration for those racing at Tot Dret, a reduced version of Tor (130 km but the same final trails) which naturally represents a race on its own, more competitive, for athletes with a stronger competitive spirit. For someone the 38 hours available to run the entire route seemed to be narrow, but the timings, fixed after field tests, are well aligned with other similar races. The Tot Dret is a running race in the mountains for everyone; Tor, for many, is above all a great adventure to live.
To establish program variations - what happened this afternoon, with the enlargement of the time deadlines of one and a half hour, an option naturally provided by the regulation - is only the weather, which today was quite crazy, with snowfall at high altitude, strong winds alternated with sudden sunburn but also freezing cold.
This unexpected weather slowed down the rhythm of everyone. The first of Tot Dret should cross the finish line of Courmayeur after 9 pm this evening.