Why I Keep Going Back
I first heard about the Tour du Mont Blanc because of Elaine.
She is one of my closest friends — a runner who does things that make ordinary athletic ambition look timid. For the better part of a decade she has paced roughly a dozen marathons every year, not to race them herself but to carry other people across finish lines they weren't sure they could reach. Hundreds of marathons. Hundreds of strangers' best days. Then she takes all that accumulated mileage, all that quiet generosity, and points it at something like UTMB — 106 miles through the Alps, over 30,000 feet of vertical gain, mostly in the dark. She does it with the same calm and joy she brings to everything. At mile 23 of a marathon, when most runners are somewhere between suffering and despair, her smile somehow takes the weight off.
When she ran UTMB in 2015, I found myself staring at a map. The Tour du Mont Blanc. A 110-mile circuit through France, Italy, and Switzerland, threading beneath the highest peak in the Alps. A hut-to-hut hiking route. Not a race. Something a regular person could attempt.
I wondered if I could be that person.
I booked the huts in December 2019 for the summer of 2020. Then the world shut down, and the Alps waited.
I rebooked in December 2021. And in the summer of 2022, after six months of training, I finally landed in Chamonix.
That two-year wait taught me something I didn't know I was learning: that the wanting is part of it. By the time I set foot on that first trail, I had already been living with the mountains for years. They felt like somewhere I was returning to rather than arriving for the first time.
The first three days were long, hard, and rainy. The landscape hadn't opened up yet — just relentless climbs through forest and pasture, the peaks hiding behind clouds and effort. This is the part that doesn't make the highlight reels. The part where you put your head down and move.
Then on the fourth day, crossing from France into Italy, the mountains appeared. And the wildflowers.
I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that — the entire mountainside covered in pink blooms, extravagant against the granite and snow. I stopped every few yards to find a composition. The light kept changing. The flowers kept being there. I covered that stretch at half the pace I should have, and I didn't care at all.
Later, after a rest day in Courmayeur — pizza, pastries, a breakfast buffet I still think about — I got completely lost trying to find the trail out of town. Twenty minutes of scrambling through streets that all looked the same. A grown man, with a map, lost in a small Italian village. I eventually found my way, laughed at myself, and started climbing toward Rifugio Bonati.
Bonati stopped me cold.
The hut sits directly across from the Mont Blanc massif — close enough that the mountain fills your entire field of view. The evening was cloudy. Sunset was a disappointment. I went to bed thinking I'd missed my chance.
The next morning, hiking away from the hut in the early golden light, I turned back.
The entire massif was glowing. The rifugio in the foreground, the mountain behind it, everything lit from within. I stood there longer than I should have. I still didn't want to leave when I finally did.
That moment — the reward showing up not when you were ready for it but when you were already walking away — might be the truest thing I know about mountains. The sunset I thought I'd missed turned out to be the one I'll never forget.
It has been four years since TMB.
I take time off work to reduce stress. Then I go walk 100 miles through mountains, carrying a pack, sleeping in huts, pushing my body until it reminds me it has limits. I come home exhausted and somehow restored.
I've thought about this contradiction. I haven't resolved it.
What I know is that the stress of a normal working life is diffuse and unresolvable. The stress of a long climb has a summit. You reach it, or you don't, and either way the mountain is honest with you. That honesty does something to the noise in my head that nothing else quite manages.
At 51, every successful adventure feels like a gift. The training runs longer. The recovery takes more. Right now I'm nursing a mild pain in my left foot — backing off the hill repeats, trusting the taper, reminding myself that showing up healthy matters more than showing up sharp. I've been here before, in marathon training, when every small ache felt like the beginning of something catastrophic. It usually wasn't. The body is more resilient than fear suggests. But it does ask to be listened to now. I'm learning.
In a few weeks I leave for the Dolomites. Alta Via 1 — a top-to-bottom traverse of a mountain range that looks, in photographs, like it was designed by someone who found the Alps insufficiently dramatic. I have deliberately avoided watching any footage of the trail. I want to arrive without expectations, without someone else's highlights loaded into my head. I want the Dolomites to be new.
The huts are booked. The pack is being dialed in. The foot is getting better.
Elaine's UTMB run planted a seed that grew into TMB, and TMB planted something that is now pulling me toward AV1. I don't fully understand the chain of causation. I'm not sure I need to.
What I know is that the Alps keep offering something I apparently need. And I keep saying yes.
I'll tell you what I find.