Crewing the 330km Tor Des Geants race

Following Kirsty around the Aosta Valley for 134 hours (mostly sourcing a lot of focaccia)

Salting some tomatoes, 100km in

Back in 2018 I spent a week fast packing the Tour Du Mont Blanc with my dad, a 100ish mile route circling Mont Blanc. We stopped in Courmayeur on our second night and found a race finish line set up, with runners trickling in to cross it.

“Must be a marathon or something,” we thought, although some of those runners did look quite tired. Then we looked it up and learned about the Tor Des Geants for the first time.

What we learned is that TDG is definitely not ‘just’ a marathon, but instead a 330km mega ultra around the Aosta Valley in Italy, covering what’s listed officially as 24,000 metres of ascent but is more likely to be 30,000+ metres in reality. It’s a single-stage race so the clock never stops. Competitors will grab an hour or two of sleep here and there on a communal camp bed when they pass an aid station or designated refuge, or take a ‘trail nap’ for a few minutes if they really can’t stay awake any longer. The course is pretty gnarly too, with…