The year of 2O23 in recap

The start of the year was quite promising. I picked up on the established routine of a runner living in a big city, beating the pavements and roads in my neighbourhood, with some random chances to get out to the nearby woods from time to time. With the month of April came the left calf injury. Not a big issue, it seemed at its early stage. But the seemingly innocent calf tightness developed into a muscle inflammation and then into painful nuisance which sidelined me from a serious training for a couple of weeks.

At odds with my preliminary plans, I toed the starting line of my first scheduled race, Valassky Hrb 55 km trail run, the last weekend of May not in a hundered-pro shape. The first 30 km went well, to my surprise. But the next, a bit more hilly part of the trail, played bad with my impaired fitness. I was humbly happy to clock the 17-minute-slower finish time than the year before and to grab the fourth place in my 45+ age category. Anyway, this was just a training race, the serious running business still to come.  

For the A-races of the year, I picked the events promising the UTMB running stones, with a dream to use the rock for entering the 2024 UTMB lottery. I followed the dream on my two trips to the Austrian Alps during the summer, where I took part in Mozart 100 in the mid of June and KAT Endurance Run in the first week of August, the both events under the UTMB auspices. 

Running the mountain trails of Mozart 100 was a brand ultrarunnig experience, with all its ups and downs and a burst of inner emotions at the finish. The Alpine peaks of Schafberg and Zwölferhorn, their depleting ascents and hell-driven descents, the purifying run along the lake of St. Gilgen and even the damaging last kilos up to the Salzburg Castle before the trail finally let me back to the starting line I left at dawn some sixteen hours ago, all added to the magnificence of the day. I finished 108 km ultra trail of 5 400 m elevation gain in 16 hours and 45 minutes. I got three UTMB running stones and a bunch of running thrills to ever remember.

KAT Endurance Run was flagged off in Fieberbrunn at 6 pm and the trail took us through the night, rain and mud across the Tirol Alps to the finish in Kitzbühel. But before I reached the line and for the next three precious stones, I went through another neverending story cast by my spirit, mind and legs. KAT brought to me even more running twists than Mozart did. During the dusk descent from the peak of Wildseeloder I killed one of my poles and sprained badly my ankle. The sudden loss of the prop unsettled me mentally not for long, just as I tossed the situation in my head quickly to the understanding that I would run the rest of the race the old-school way simply without the poles.  But the loss turned detrimental to my performance once I got to the slippery terrain drenched with the rain of the night, and even more when I drudged up the steep trail od Kitzbüheler Horn at the dawn, the final morsel of the race. The positive aspect of this was that I completely discarded the ordeal of my ankle injury. The scary swelling of my lower leg came out later as one of my KAT souvenirs. On side of my KAT Endurance Run finish in 15 hours and 4 minutes, conquering 92 km with 5 100 m elevation gain. 

The last ultra event of the year I opted for was a thoroughly runable trail race of Baroko Ultra in the Pilsen region. Here I set my new PB, finishing 101 km trail of relatively modest 2 000 m elevation gain in 10 hours and 5 minutes, which was 12 minutes faster than my clocking from the previous year. The ultra was fast, without major issues and perfectly satisfying. The nice wrap-up of my past running year.