2020-09-13
Since many races were cancelled, this summer has seen a surge in popularity chasing Fastest Known Times (FKTs). One decides on some hiking, scrambling, and/or running route and attempts to do it in the fastest known time. The routes vary to include completions of long trails (e.g. the Pacific Crest Trail or the Via Alpina), speed runs up mountains (e.g. Mt. Whitney or the Matterhorn ), and completing sets of summits (e.g. The California 14ers or the big UK fell running rounds).
There are a reasonable set of guidelines, but in most cases the most important considerations are history and repeatability - to claim an FKT, you have to play by the same rules as the previous fastest person, on a route that people want to do.
One of the many ways this is unlike most other competitions is that there is no second place. There's only a series of increasingly fast times. Another, complementary, fact is that there is no limit of the number of routes that can exist, who can attempt them, or when. Together, these support my favorite aspect: cleverness and creativity are rewarded (good, since I'm more creative and clever than I am fast).
One particular opportunity for this is to establish a new route by setting what is known as an Only Known Time (OKT) - you do your best to confirm that no one has ever publicly claimed any time on an interesting route, and then record your own, as a baseline for future attempts.
Of the essentially-limitless number of possibilities, what qualifies as a route worth recording times on? Clearly some threshold of "quality" is required to keep in the spirit of things. Further, this is not purely an academic question, as the primary database for keeping track of these is run by a very small group of enthusiasts. The main qualification for establishing an OKT is that it will inspire - people will be interested in the record and some will try to break it. The story is an inextricable aspect - someone will wonder "How fast could it be done? How fast has it been done? What as it like? Could I do it?".
I submitted my first FKT a few months ago, for an unsupported (carry everything, except water) run on the Züri Oberland Höhenweg. I really enjoyed it, not just on the route but also in connecting with people afterwards, and naturally thought about trying another one. I had appreciated how being on the regional trail provided an obvious way to define a worthwhile route: someone involved with promoting Swiss tourism did the work to chose a relatively small number of routes which visit beautiful areas around the country, follow good trails, and are logistically convenient.
For my next objective, one route jumped out at me. Another Höhenweg (high route)! The Obwaldner Höhenweg runs for about 100km between Pilatus and the Stanserhorn, in the canton of Obwalden, right in the middle of Switzerland. This promised a beautiful location between Lake Lucerne and Lake Brienz.
Compared to the Züri Oberland route, this one is longer, higher, and more technical, but has in common that it's well-marked and on good trails. The route has a lot of up and down - over 6000m of ascent!
This being a route promoted for tourism, though, there was one less-than-ideal aspect, from a running/hiking perspective: it starts and ends at cablecar stations/restaurants/hotels at the tops of mountains.
An obvious feature of the route is that it's almost a loop. Further, there are plenty of great trails between Pilatus and the Stanshorn, the shortest of which add about 20km of distance and 1500m of climbing. I think there are many good reasons to attempt the FKT on this variant, as opposed to just the official trail. A loop is simpler in many ways. You can choose any point as your start/finish and can go in either direction. You can leave your car/gear/friends at a single location. You don't have to worry about the timing of the cable cars (or pay for an expensive hotel, or do extra hikes to get in and out). By closing the loop, one also does a nice circuit around the entire western segment of Obwalden. This canton is part of what was historical Unterwalden, one of the three original Swiss Cantons from the first Swiss Confederation famously founded in 1291. The Canton of Nidwalden splits Obwalden in two, leaving Engelberg and surrounding areas in a small, Eastern part.
Here's the official route page.
I made a first attempt on the route, starting just before 6pm on Saturday, August 22.
My rationale for starting at that time was to be able to do the first half of the route in the dark and then enjoy a surge of energy as the sun came up, propelling me through the second half and back to the train station with plenty of time to get home. This seemed reasonable, as it's what they do for races like the UTMB.
I hadn't previously run or hiked any of the route, outside of the very first climb from Alpnachstad to Pilatus Kulm.
The night portion went fairly well. I made it up Pilatus in PR time and moved quite quickly back down. After that, it was quite a miserable experience, in many ways. I was much sleepier than I had thought I'd be, and didn't have any caffeine except for the 20 mg in each of my numerous gels. Cows seemed to be around every corner, forcing many detours through muddy fields and over fences. It was a new moon, cloudy, and drizzly at times, so the night was spent in total blackness. I ran out of water for long periods. The long descent to the Brünigpass saw me slow significantly, and I made it there in about 12 hours total. The worst was that as I climbed back out of the pass and the sun finally rose, the clouds made it far less of an energizing experience than hoped, and my spirits didn't improve. I started to feel disoriented at Abgschutz and was ready to give up by the time I made it to Frutt to meet Francesco. Seeing him there, and enjoying the sandwich he got me from the grocery store, massively raised my spirits, and we pressed on for quite a while. However, the heat and pain in my legs eventually made me unhappy enough to quit, at a saddle about halfway from Frutt to the Stanserhorn. I (correctly) assumed there would be no water for a long time on the ensuing ridge section, and I was starting to feel wobbly. We descending back to the valley, and by the time I reached the bottom my knees were screaming from the steep downhill on weakened legs. All told I did about 75% of the route, in 22 hours.
I identified many mistakes I'd made:
Based on the experience, I decided to make some changes on the next attempt.
I finally caved and replaced my broken soft flask and hydration bladder with two new 500 mL soft flasks and a 1.5 L bladder. I got myself some fizzy electrolyte tablets, some peanut M+M's, and some gummy bears.
Armed with my lessons learned, I hoped for another weekend with good conditions. Two weeks later seemed good, but I didn't feel recovered.
Three weeks later, fortunately, had even better weather. This is probably the best time of year for hiking (in Switzerland, as in California), as it's getting cooler but not cold, the days aren't too short yet, the ground is relatively dry, and the weather becomes stable.
After some delicious pasta from Clara the night before, I took the first train on Saturday morning from Zurich to the Brünig-Hasliberg station, which would be my starting and finishing point.
I started at 8:07 and began jogging in the lovely cool morning. This part had been in the dark, the previous time, and it was interesting to see how different things looked. Throughout the whole route, I would be noticing and avoiding all the places I'd taken a wrong turn, previously. With daylight, one could usually just see a red and white marker in the distance.
I focused on making steady progress and enjoyed the scenery. I passed a spot which had been a (mental) low point before, where'd I'd sat down on the ground for a few minutes, just as it was starting to get light. I progressed up to Älggi-Alp and fairly efficiently to the Abgschutz, taking in the excellent view.
I went fairly slowly for a while as I digested and moved into endless a-little-less-than-good trails. This section felt very difficult, again, even though I was fresh. A lot of the trails seemed to be half rocks, half cow-mangled mud.
I was trying to stay on the "official" route, which I'd defined as the green line on my SwissMobility app, and as such I wasted a lot of time and energy doing some heinous bushwhacking. After I'd been pushing through dense trees for a while I decided that the trail had obviously been re-routed, and I think it's totally fair for any attempt on this route to follow what are very clearly marked improvements to the trail.
Soon enough I reached the bail point from last time. The big difference this time was that I had 2L of water and some snacks I actually wanted to eat. It was a great feeling to continue on the trail, which was a very steep but beautifully-groomed climb through the trees, depositing me onto an incredible ridge section. I felt really terrible for denying this to Francesco last time, as it was brochure-level trail running. Somehow a perfectly smooth single track running along a very steep ridge, with clouds blowing up from the right. No cows up here!
On the first climb, I felt some hot spots developing on my toes, so stopped for a pack-off, sit-down break. I have never used electrolyte tabs before, so I didn't realize how fragile they were - I just put them in a bag with the peanut M+M's and now discovered that a) they were almost entirely pulverized b) peanut M+M's covered in fizzy electrolyte dust are delicious! This wasn't actually much of a problem, in the end, as enough moisture got into the bag to re-clump the dust into pieces which could be dropped into a water bottle.
Moving through one notch required some fixed ropes, on a section steep enough that I actually had to turn around and hand-over-hand the rope - the footholds were big and good, but a bit wet.
Somewhere around here I reached the marathon point, which was appropriate, as it was approximately when my friend Pratyush finished running his marathon in Maryland. I did mine in 7:45 or so, so he went over twice as fast! But it's not fair to compare, as he had pacers.
I began to be glad I'd bailed the previous time, as despite the absolutely epic scenery, I didn't run into any water (though I did notice an alp below at one point, which may have been an option if desperate). It was great to see the Stanserhorn come into view, but the trail down to it was one of the steep, root-choked affairs that can make things slow going. Surprisingly, I didn't find any obvious water sources on the trail going through Äscherli, but I did manage to get about 400 mL out of a cow drinking fountain, by fitting my soft flasks over the nozzle. I figured that would be enough to get me up the Stanserhorn.
The lower part of the climb was quite flat, and the actual ascent was confined to one very steep section of 300m or so. That was good because this was one of the low points of the day. It became humid in the late afternoon, and I sweat so much as to soak all of my clothes. I'm proud that I kept going upwards at my snail's pace, and thankfully it was a short enough climb that i didn't lose too much time before arriving at the flat trail around the summit. I shuffled to the cable car station and got myself a 500 mL Coke in the self-service restaurant. I sat in a bit of stupor, observed by the well-dressed rich people, as I drank (good, but too cold and fizzy, as it came out of a soda fountain). I filled my water up in the bathroom, lamented that I wasn't able to use the "real" facilities, and started the descent.
I felt much better on the way down as things cooled off, and enjoyed the fast section heading back towards the notch. It felt nice at this point to know that I was now finding my own route until the summit of Pilatus. Since I was trying to set an OKT, I couldn't deviate from the official trail, but now there wasn't one, so anything that got me where I was going was fine! I followed the red and white trail down, and then took various yellow trails, opting to avoid climbing in favor of a less direct route to Alpnach, arriving at the south end of town. It had now been a little under 12 hours. I didn't feel too bad about it, as the route to this point had not been all nice trails, but I had to admit that I was almost certainly not going to finish the route in 24 hours, as the remaining portion had taken about 12 hours on the previous attempt, and I had moved quite quickly going up and down Pilatus.
Alpnach is not a big place, but I'd expected it to have all I'd need, namely a restaurant where I could quickly get some hot food, and a convenience store at the train station where I could resupply with enough snacks to get me through the night. I'd been so sure I remembered there being a Kiosk convenience store at the station that I assumed that the picture on Google Streetview, which showed the restaurant there instead, was outdated, as sometimes happens - plugging in the restaurant's address did indeed show somewhere else, nearby. However, I arrived and there was the restaurant, just like on Streeview! Only as a write this have I deduced that I was remembering the Sarnen train station, where we got off the bus, post-bailage, three weeks before.
I could tell I wasn't popular with the server. In retrospect, fair, seeing as I'm sure I smelled like a garbage barge. From briefly looking at the website beforehand, I had expected a takeaway place, given that it was open until 1 am, served cheap (by Swiss standards) burgers and fries and was called "McOne" (lol), but it was set up more like a sit-down restaurant/bar. I asked to sit outside but she didn't want me taking up a whole 4-top, so had to sit inside, which was maybe safer since no one else was in there.
I had to pay with cash, but this was okay as I could immediately feed almost all the coins (heavy!) into the vending machine at the train station (since the Kiosk I'd been expecting didn't exist) in exchange for Snickers and Twix.
I reflected on how when I first arrived in Switzerland, I couldn't have told you there was a big difference between the big cities and the small towns, as it all seemed to foreign. But now it's much more clear that there are divides, just as everywhere.
I started the hike up Pilatus without my headlamp, relying on the light of the town below and the simple surface of the bottom part of the trail. I concentrated on efficient progress but tried to avoid pushing too hard, not wanting to sweat too much. This was perhaps the morale lowpoint of the route. I was only halfway done, I was miserably sweating on the humid lower part of the mountain, and all I could think about was all the hardships coming up. 3 hours of walking up this trail, then a whole series of sections that I remembered all to well, all punctuated by surprise detours to get around cows. So many cows.
I tried as hard as I could to focus on the short term goals, the first of which was simply thinking that with every step, I gained altitude, and thus cooler temperatures, less humidity, and more wind as I would escape the trees. I had also surprisingly not passed any water fountains in Alpnach and had had to resort to buying a bottle from the vending machine at the Alpnachstad train station. I was now out again and was greatly looking forward to two sources I knew on the climb. The first, not really for humans but which I've used before, was blocked by cows so I kept on, knowing there was another option soon. My heart dropped a little when I reached the second one, in Ämsigen, and saw it wasn't running, the trough empty. This was the last one I knew about for at least 2-3 hours. As is almost never the case, though, there was handle on the spigot, and turning it worked! Phew.
As it would turn out, though there were quite a few cows here, low on Pilatus, but on the rest of the route there were far fewer, and none that blocked the whole trail as had happened so many times on the previous attempt. I think the 3 weeks made a big difference, at the end of the summer. I heard more cows inside barns, and I suspect some had been moved lower down. There were also markings for an upcoming e-mountain bike race, so it's possible that some fields had been cleared in preparation.
As I continued up, I passed a group of people camping right along the trail. They said something to me and I replied "Schöner Campingplatz!", which they laughed at. Even though I try with German, in Switzerland the first thing anyone says to you is usually in one of the many dialects of Swiss German, so most interactions begin with a misunderstanding.
I crept up the last switchbacks to Pilatus Kulm. It was about 23:30 when I arrived there, and someone came out of the hotel, probably having seen my headlamp and wondering if I was in trouble. In typical polite Swiss fashion, though, he just said good evening in some sort of German, I responded the same, and then he went back inside. I checked to make sure I went to the official start of route 57 (the cable car station), and then began the descent. I wasn't feeling wonderful, but I knew things were looking up, as in some sense it was now about running out the clock. Bailing and quitting were not so different, now (which is a good thing if you're not in any danger), and all I really had to do was keep moving, eating, and drinking, and the remaining kilometers and hours of darkness would continue to disappear.
The night is more of a blur, but thankfully I had already made all the wrong turns on the previous attempt, so the task of staying on course while tired was far less stressful. I played it very safe with water, filling up to 2L whenever possible. A low point last time had been the Schlierengrat, a long, slow ridge section in a root-filled, sometimes muddy, never-a-constant-grade single track. There is no water on the ridge, as you would expect, but then surprisingly little to be found for a long period afterwards (though there is a stream at Schwendi Kaltbad which, in retrospect, I should have used on the first attempt). This time, I had made very sure to have enough water, but my headlamp dimmed significantly - I'm sure it did on the first attempt, as well, but I had gotten further along to where it wasn't so obvious. The low light in combination with tired legs and uneven trail made this section interminable. My phone was my backup lamp, which I should have switched to earlier, but I was anxious about wasting the battery too much. I actually shouldn't have been, since after switching to it for the descent from the ridge and looking at the drain rate, it (a couple of years old iPhone 8) had a least 2-3 hours in it, and I also carried a backup battery which could have mostly recharged it. I didn't want to dip too much into that reserve since I needed at least a little bit of it to recharge my GPS watch (Suunto Ambit 3 Peak) on the go - a single charge there only lasts about 17 hours unless you want to sacrifice GPS polling rate. I really didn't want my watch to die, as the GPS track is an essential part of verifying an FKT. There is a nice viewpoint on the ridge, where I stopped for a few minutes, lying down and looking at the stars, which is something I haven't done for a while. I felt very cold when I got up, but I am glad I stopped for at least a bit to appreciate being in a beautiful place, even though my main objective was to move quickly through it.
On the way down, nature finally called. In getting my pack on and off, I managed to accidentally pause my watch, so didn't track for a couple of kilometers before noticing after Glaubenberg (my proposed ad campaign: "Glaubenberg: Believe it! [picture of person in helmet having great time on some sort of ropes course]"). This also meant that I didn't track the little extra jaunt I did because I forgot my poles and had to go back for them.
The rest of the route wasn't too bad, and the sun coming up at about 6 was beautiful. This time, the weather was clear, so I got the spirits-lifting sunrise I'd been hoping for. I also busted out the secret weapon (headphones) at around this point. I always have tiny loops of songs going around and around in my head during these endeavors, and some of them were pretty irritating this time, as they leaned a lot in the novelty direction. There was a lot of the Pistol Annies which, as pop country, is somewhere between fun and obnoxious. Some They Might Be Giants, some Weird Al (paying homage to TMBG), and, out of nowhere, even some MC Pee Pants. Being able to replace those with real music was a joy.
I was happy that I continued to do much better eating and drinking. I found that with my ample water supply, I could put some Snickers or gel in my mouth, and then take a sip of water, which made everything much more pleasant to get down.
Getting to Glaubenbielen was a big boost, as it meant one more big climb, and then the descent. I pushed hard on the first part of the climb (probably too hard) and I ate plenty of candy. I lost some time to getting tangled up trying to recharge my phone on the go, as the music-playing was draining it faster now, and I didn't want to lose the map or camera. I slowed quite a lot near the top, losing more time to another natural call. Crossing the notch put me in the full sun, suddenly, and I made the mistake of waiting until I finished the climb to put on sunscreen and my hat. It was great to see this section in the daytime, as the trail goes on a spectacular knife edge - if you continued on it, you would get to the Hardergrat, which is a well-known hike for a good reason. I finally arrived at a creepy wooden statue which marks the start of the descent. I took a few minutes to swap into daytime gear, get the rocks out of my shoes for the descent, and take pictures of the great vista over Lake Brienz, with 4000m peaks visible to the south.
The 1000m descent was slow and painful. My legs were feeling quite shot, so I just did what I could to get down. I have zero idea of how, but at some point on the descent my watch completely stopped. This requires three button presses with two different buttons, so it seems unlikely to happen by accident, even in an exhausted state. I saw an elevation profile displayed which gave me some hope that it had saved the track so far, but I was not very happy now that I was unsure about this - part of the objective had been to establish an OKT, for which a GPS track is required. I started a new recording for the remaining 4km or so and tried not to think about it too much, which wasn't difficult as getting to stop was going to be a sweet reward.
At least I didn't lose the trail, as I had more than once on the previous attempt in the dark. Finally, I arrived back at the road and slowly jogged the sidewalks back to my starting point at the train station. I finished at 10:42, for a total of 26:35 (1d 2h 35m).
I estimate the distance at 125.6 km with 7575 m of climbing. I hit the 24 hour mark somewhere on the last, \~500m climb, so this is a PR for me for climbing in day.
Sitting down was incredible. Not running anymore is truly one of the most rewarding parts of running.
Luckily for me, a train arrived almost immediately, and I was back in Zurich before 1pm, ready to start eating everything in sight.
I don't really have many concrete future objectives, yet (though I'm sure ideas will come, as usual, once I forget the pain). I'm a tiny bit worried about my knees (more than usual steep downhill in the last month or two, some of it on very tired legs), so I will probably try and baby them for a while. Speaking of which, we're expecting a real baby soon, so I should be realistic in how much time I'll have to traipse around the hills all weekend. My original plan for this summer, pre-pandemic, had been to enter some races, in the hopes of running a hard 100-mile race next year, comparable to the UTMB. This loop was, by the numbers, similar to 3/4 of a UTMB (120 km, 7500m of climbing, roughly 500m-2000m elevations, as opposed to 1000-2500m). This makes me feel that it would be possible to train for a race like that, but also puts into perspective how long it is - to me the most daunting of the many daunting statistics is the 40 hour average time to complete it.
As of now I'm thinking I will return to some general training as I can fit it in, perhaps taking the chance to focus more specifically on speed, muscular endurance, and core strength, and look for a race to enter next year.
Lessons learned, which I find useful to write down, to be able to look back on later: