u/krispeterrun

Madeira Island Ultra's 'Legend' distance is 110km (68 miles) and ~7,175m of gain (23,540ft). The most similar race I’ve done to this is the Ultra Blue Island 110km which has ~5,000m of gain.

Out of ~960 starters, I was one of the 400 people who DNFd. Here is my experience.

The shuttle bus took us to the start at 10pm for a midnight start. I waited around in the cold - trying to keep warm while not taking too many unnecessary steps. I'd had really poor sleep in the days leading up to the race, including an all night hospital stay with a family member a few days before, and I felt really sleepy while I waited for the race to start. I also felt really hungry (a logistical error), but none of the cafes near the start had much on offer except bags of chips and drinks. I decided to eat some of my gels.

The gun went off, and everyone absolutely charged down the road towards the first climb. I jogged at a sensible pace (for me) and quickly found myself so far behind everyone that volunteers were starting to open the road back up to traffic before seeing me and saying "Look there's still another runner!"

I got to the first climb, and it is probably the steepest road I've ever ascended on foot. Went up about 400 metres in about 2km. After a kilometre in, a woman was on the floor receiving treatment from the race medics. She looked awake but non-responsive - I'm not sure what happened, I hope she turned out okay. Better for something bad like that to happen while you're still on public roads than on some remote trail hours away from help.

After 5km, the course narrowed into some single-file trails and that's where the queues began - we had to keep waiting for everyone ahead to go through. All it took was one person to slow down ahead and it caused tailbacks for us slow folks at the back.

The trail continued uphill and turned quite technical with large rocks acting as steps. Then we had to come back down through the same terrain. It was so slow; I've never travelled so slowly in my life.

I reached the first checkpoint at 3 hours - the cutoff was 3h30m. It surprised me how near the cutoff I was so early on. The main food on offer was cake and sweet potatoes. I was fuelling from Precision gels and topping up with this aid station food. I sometimes suffer from feeling sick in races, and this started to happen after I left this aid station. The gels started to taste acidic and the potatoes were sickly sweet. The cake just turned into cotton wool in my mouth and sat there. It was way too early for this to start happening.

Regardless, I started the next climb - up into the darkness of the haunted-looking Fanal forest. I enjoyed the initial excitement, but that wore off somewhere around the 20th near-vertical staircase. The stairs were wet and muddy with slick wooden plank treads. Progress was glacial. This climb went on for 3h30m. It was mentally draining having to concentrate by torch-light for so long, and I somehow kept on hitting my head on low-hanging trees. Madeira means 'wood' in Portuguese, and I suddenly understood why. Once I hit my head so hard that I made a cut on my head which took a while to stop bleeding.

Going back down to sea level again was somehow even slower than when I was going up (and Strava confirms this). People were lining up to take the safest passage down the hill. Certain sides of the trail had a tree which you could grab onto, and some bits had wire rails for safety. At one point, the guy behind me fell and started sliding down on his back - I jumped out of the way, and the guy behind him did the same - and they both ended up in a pile below me. They got up and carried on. I reflected that it would be much less effort to simply throw myself down the mountain (though probably slightly more catastrophic).

The next climb went up 1,300 metres and took another 3h30m, but it seemed to last an eternity. I kept going, picking my way through the mud and rocks. During this climb, day started to break, and towards the top, it started to get really cold. The strong winds blew clouds over the top of the mountain and through the thick fog we passed a series of eerie wind turbines that were surprisingly noisy.

Around this time, I started to get hot flushes and then shivers moments later. It felt like I was exhaling gas fumes, and my body was clearly experiencing some kind of imbalance. I was extremely hungry, but food was causing me a lot of issues. I had likely dug myself into a hole by starting at a calorie deficit.

I reached a checkpoint near the top and tried to make quick work of all my admin before I started to shiver. My hands went numb (raynaud’s condition) and I warmed them up by putting on double gloves and putting my hands down the sides of my shorts while running. I looked weird, but they quickly warmed up.

It was another 1,000 metre descent after that - some of the steepest descending of the entire course. To give you an idea, one kilometre took me 25 minutes to complete. The leaders were doing this descent in 7 minutes per kilometre, so I clearly did not have the skill or confidence to descend quickly enough.

Half way down this descent, I ran out of calories. I had simply miscalculated how long it would take me to reach the next aid station, and I wasn’t carrying enough gels/chews - and the cake from the previous aid station had run out.

At this point, I was starting to do calculations in my head and I realised I was going to be at the cutoff for the entire race, which would mean I had to keep on at this pace without slowing down until 5am the following morning (and the second night of the race). This is where it all started to go wrong for me; I couldn’t stop thinking about how many hours I still had to complete, and how I didn’t really want to do any of them.

I was just too hungry and sleepy, and I felt weird and sick. My legs were actually fine; and despite a clear lack of course-specific experience, my training had gone really well. In hindsight, my training mainly involved going up and down runnable hills - it should have been on steep hours-long hikes. I have always been coached for my ultras, but had to switch to self-coached this year, and apparently I didn’t do it right.

A lot had already gone wrong, and I was a mere 12 hours into the race with 3,300 metres climbed and 45km done.

Before I reached the next aid station, I made the decision to quit when I got there. I was only 20 minutes from the cutoff, I felt like I was diabetic, and couldn’t stop thinking about how I still had an inconceivable 17 hours to go. It was completely overwhelming, and the prospect filled me with dread.

I got into the aid station, sat down, and started to sort my gear. I had some hot food, then started to pack calories for the next section - another 4 hour climb and descent up unimaginably difficult terrain. I would’ve required about 3 kilos of cake - and there were about 7 small pieces left in the tray at the aid station. I realised there weren’t enough edible calories that I could take with me. My drop bag was at the next checkpoint which had more gels in it, but that was still hours away, and the thought of gels turned my stomach. Even if I filled my bottles up with coke and took all the cake with me, it wouldn’t last 4 hours.

It was then that a checkpoint worker came up to me and told me the checkpoint was going to close in ten minutes.

I started trying to sort out my gear - getting a charger out for my phone (it was low on battery, and required by the rules to be switched on during the race), but the charger wasn’t working because my dry bag had somehow started leaking water. All my dry stuff (including some emergency clothing) had become soggy, and it made me feel less safe about going out into the mountains again with backup gear that was wet. To be honest, by this point, I wished the clock would just hurry up and time me out so I didn’t have to manually DNF.

I was really disappointed, because the section from 45km to 80km is the most spectacular part of the course - and a large section of it is currently closed to the public (due to fire damage in 2024), so the only chance you get to see it at the moment is if you’re running this race. Despite that, I was only too happy to hand in my race number and go back to my hotel.

I slept for 10 hours and woke up ravenously hungry (still). The legs felt fine afterwards, and while I did feel some regret about having dropped out, I realised I had sabotaged my own race gradually over the course of the week with a series of poor decisions and bad planning. Dropping out had become the inevitable outcome.

I’ve been racing ultras since 2012, so I shouldn’t have cocked the race up so badly - but this was a big challenge for me which resulted in a lot of lessons. If I do this race again, I’ll do the following things differently:

• Train on more similar terrain (and supplement with 3-hour sessions on the stair machine)
• Carry a lot more calories with me from the start (and a wider variety of food)
• Get to Madeira a week before the race to get used to the environment and relax during the taper - sleep well in the previous days.
• Eat a lot before the race!
• Run the first 1km fast so I don’t get stuck behind 900 runners at the bottlenecks
• Be more confident going downhill and just have faith that I won’t fall and hurt myself
• Wear a thin hat for head protection. I’m bald, and apparently I am prone to hitting my head on trees - there’s no hair to protect against cuts.

The following morning, I went down for the hotel breakfast, and who else should walk in but Aurélien Dunand-Pallaz (finished 4th) and Rod Farvard (11th). I spoke to Rod as we each made some beans on toast, and he seemed really down, explaining that he took a wrong turn at 80k and accidentally followed the flags for a different race distance the wrong way down the trail for 3km before his crew called him on the phone to tell him. Aurélien had a great race - he’s a lovely chap and said that there’s no way I can train for this race while living in London. I could only agree!

After 10 years of entering, I finally got into Western States 2025 - but I got injured two months before. So this race was supposed to be my qualifying race for WS 2027. Looks like I'll have to find a different qualifier before November.