Old Love Never Rusts
Back to Sierre-Zinal, Back to Racing
Tomorrow morning — very early — I am running Sierre-Zinal.
I am as surprised as anyone.
A Useful Kind of Not Caring
My wife Lisa recently told me that one of my most remarkable qualities is that I do not give a shit about anything.
She did not mean indifference. She was talking about a certain lightness, the ability to avoid getting irritated or thrown off course by every minor thing. I can often leave things as they are without immediately judging them, let alone turning them into evidence for whatever story I am currently telling myself.
“I don’t give a shit about races. And I love them.”
Most races fall under this positive form of not caring. The ones I miss certainly do, and, this may sound weird, so do many of the ones I run. But there is very little at stake. Apart from an occasional age-group podium, I do not win trophies, prize money, or Instagram followers. Luckily, my sense of self has long been detached from athletic performance. For as long as I can remember, there have been people who run faster than me and others who run slower. That is more or less how the sport works unless your name is Kilian Jornet. I will get back to him.
There is also no shortage of races. You could pin on a bib every goddamn weekend if you were so inclined.
Please do not get me wrong: I love racing. It gives my running life a charge I would miss terribly. Still, most events eventually become another date, another route, another time, and every now and then an embarrassing finish photo.
The Few That Call
A handful of races escape this fate.
I often say: they call you. They speak in a language you do not quite understand, but you sense that they are trying to tell you something. Registration comes before comprehension. Only once you go there and run them do you begin to understand why they matter.
Western States is one. ZUT can be one. Rodgau is one in its own strange way.
Sierre-Zinal belongs on that list.
No Business Being There
Real talk: I have no business at Sierre-Zinal.
Few races anywhere have assembled such deep fields with such consistency for more than fifty years. The very best trail runners and a considerable number of professional track and road athletes have had their teeth kicked in there.
At 32 kilometers with 2200 meters of climbing and another 1100 meters down, the race is viciously fast. Kilian Jornet’s 2:25:34 from 2024 (that’s a 4:33-per-kilometer pace despite all that climbing) and Maude Mathys’s 2:49:20 from 2019 barely sound like trail-running times.
The course removes any doubt. The climbs seem to go on forever, the descents are steep enough to make your stomach turn, and some of the most beautiful trails imaginable cross the mountains at roughly 2500 meters above sea level, watched over by the region’s five 4000-meter peaks.
Still, something keeps pulling me there.
Before I Ever Raced It
In 2022, deep in my post-Western States blues and looking for fresh inspiration, I traveled to Sierre-Zinal for the first time. I went as a spectator, which I rarely do. What I saw was so absorbing that I ended up covering almost the entire course on my own over that day and the next.
The trails were astonishing and the race format unlike anything I knew. What stayed with me just as strongly was the weight of its history and the way an entire region carries the event. The course is lined almost continuously with spectators who push every runner toward Zinal. Despite nearly 7,000 participants squeezed into a narrow Alpine valley, the organization and logistics are completely on point. The event never feels imposed on the Swiss canton of Valais. The race appears to have grown from it.
The Next Time, I Wore a Bib
I knew I would return, and in 2023 I managed to get one of the coveted spots.
As a Coureur.
Aren’t all participants coureurs aka runners? Not at Sierre-Zinal.
The race is split into two large starting fields. The Coureurs include the professionals and ambitious amateurs who want to find out exactly how fast they can cover the route. The Touristes take on the same course earlier in the day, running or hiking according to their ability. Anyone who feels capable of reaching Zinal can participate.
It is an unusually inclusive concept for a race of this stature and gives almost everyone access to what makes the event so special.
My 2023 race stayed with me so strongly that I ended up writing a whole series of articles, including one for Runner’s World.
Afterward, I was certain I would return, ideally every year until the end of my life. On paper, this worked so far. I secured entries for both 2024 and 2025. My wreck of a body had other plans, and injuries kept me from starting twice in a row.
Major b-u-m-m-e-r.
A Bib in a Drawer
Anyone who reads these weekly outpourings knows that I have now been injured for approximately 150 years. By early 2026, I had more or less abandoned every hope of a return to racing.
Something still made me enter the Sierre-Zinal lottery in April. The newly introduced draw probably appealed to me. It also gave me another chance to test my supernatural lottery luck.
Of course, I got in.
But getting a spot barely triggered an emotional response. In April, ten to fifteen minutes of run-walking were roughly the limit of my athletic universe. I had no reason to believe that a few months later I could take on a race this severe.
The registration disappeared into a drawer, which in 2026 means some email folder I would never open again.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Where’s That Bib Again?
My return to sport then progressed better than expected. After several test runs guided by my physical therapist, Sierre-Zinal slowly moved from completely impossible to mildly conceivable.
The green light came before the confidence. After such a long injury, permission to do something and trust in your ability to survive it are separate stages.
Last weekend, Lisa and I traveled to the Schnalstal with our friends, the Bruneß family, for the 19991 Alpine Trail. Lisa ran the Sky Race while the Bruneßes devoted themselves to the premium playground circuit and the Kids Race. To give myself something to do, I entered the Speed Trail on short notice.
Ten kilometers and a few hundred meters of climbing sit comfortably inside my current limits. What had neither been tested, cleared, nor discussed with anyone was the possibility that I would race the thing hard.
I still do not know whether it was the atmosphere in the valley or the old bib-number effect. But I ran as though I had never been injured.
Only on the final descent across a meadow did it occur to me that consulting my knee before serving it this kind of beating might have been sensible.
I do not know whether I caught it by surprise and shocked it into silence or whether it had been ready for this much fun for longer than I realized. Either way, it sent no alarming signals to my brain. After such a long absence from racing, several other body parts complained far more.
(I) make no mistake: my knee is not healed. That will not happen overnight. I will keep looking after it and working with it for many months. Zero pain would be wonderful, although it has become an unrealistic benchmark for an injury this chronic. What matters now is how much I can do without provoking an acute flare-up.
Apparently, “hammering a 10K trail race like an asshole” (I am quoting myself here) is already within that range.
I still cannot quite believe it.
Can We Start Again?
Crossing the Speed Trail finish line also sealed my decision to start Sierre-Zinal one week later. Somehow, with very little warning, I have stumbled back into racing.
Of course, 32 kilometers with 2200 meters of climbing are in a different category from a 10K with a few hundred meters. I am therefore very glad that in April I registered as a Touriste rather than a Coureur.
The route remains the same. The atmosphere around it changes considerably. Touristes receive no ITRA Index or UTMB score, and there are no rankings or winners. Those things matter little to me anyway. Their absence still gives the day a much more relaxed feel.
I have also wanted to experience Sierre-Zinal from the Touriste side for a long time and I suspect there is plenty to discover.
So here we are.
Tomorrow morning (very early) I will stand at the start in Sierre. I am looking forward to it more than I can say. There is even a little nervousness, a feeling I have not had in a long time. It feels good to have it back.
So…. see you in Zinal.
Epilogue
What binds me to races that call me, like Sierre-Zinal, is difficult to put into words. I recognize it in the impulse to bend down and press the flat of my hand against the ground, an unplanned, half-conscious gesture I make in very few places.
Somewhere in that touch lies the desire to belong to a landscape and an event, along with the search for an emptiness that feels complete and a wholeness without conditions. I keep reaching for perfection with the limited tools of a dilettante, setting the pendulum in motion because balance can only emerge once it starts to swing.
Ultimately, I am looking for nothing less than myself through running.
Through racing.
Update after the race: We made it. And by we, I mean my knee and me. Somewhere between Sierre and Zinal, I had the strange and wonderful feeling that I was finally allowed to play again.
I wrote a short race recap about what happened out there.
Everything Not Running
Last weekend in the Schnalstal, we met Toni. Toni is the owner of the place where we stayed. A true Schnalstal local, so to speak.
She basically lived with us for three days and, even though she was clearly enough of an outdoor battle cat to hunt, kill and eat mice (or wild boars) she happily let us feed her with cat treats we had bought only for her.
By the end, we had become very good friends and promised each other that we would meet again soon.
It was lovely meeting you, Toni!
On Repeat
The death of Lou Koller, the singer of Sick of It All, is still very much on my mind. The Instagram algo figured that out of course and now shows me new messages of condolence from well-known musicians and old friends every day. Everyone seems to have their own story connecting them to Lou Koller and Sick of It All. As sad as his death is, there can hardly be a greater form of appreciation than leaving behind a massive legacy like that.
Picking the right Sick of It All song for On Repeat was not easy. Scratch the Surface was the album that shaped me the most because it came out right around the time I was first getting into hardcore. But I immediately also soaked up the band’s back catalog like a sponge. Even though Sick of It All’s debut album, Blood, Sweat, and No Tears, is bursting with hardcore classics, I always found their second album, Just Look Around, much more accessible.
The title track, with its relentless groove and rap flow, was already breaking genre boundaries at the time and became one of the earliest signs of what would soon be known as ‘crossover’.
The song has always been a permanent fixture in Sick of It All’s live set, and I cannot remember a single show where the entire room did not sing along to every single line.
Thank you, Lou and Sick of It All, for this song and for so many others that shaped both hardcore and me so deeply.
Great post and awesome tunes another talent gone too soon