Across the Alps 2012 or maybe later...

Running 56.4km through the mountains is actually less terrible than it sounds, especially now, three days after the most exhausting 9:19 hours of my life.
Exhausting, yes, but also beautiful - running all alone high above the Cote d'Azur sunset, ocean-liners seemingly floating in the sky somewhere far down below, or coming up a hill into the wild and empty scenery of the Mercantour Nature Reserve, then marching up soft forest trails or neck-breakingly rushing down steep mountain slopes of loose gravel and boulders and speeding down swift cartways with long, efficient strides and finally getting all lost at night looking for the next trail marker but falling out of the mountain into the arms of these kind and gentle souls at the refreshment points - all of these impressions I will remember - and want to experience again.
The Neander-Trail is a small race. Like little people having been thrown across that breathtaking landscape by some fearsome ancient god - whom they now worship by running without knowing the reason why - the 120 runners quickly scatter and soon you are running all alone amidst all that beauty and self-sufficiency.
It makes me feel happy and priviledged to have experienced that. It is not the sense of "look-I-have-won-the-olympics-and-now-wear-golden-hotpants" kind of achievement, but something slightly more modest. It is something somehow new, like I'm looking out to the other side of an experience and I can see, errh - stuff:
Not simply am I now qualified for the Cro-Magnon Race next year, but also - I felt good running until the end. Suddenly my crazy plan is possible. I now know I can do it. I just need to keep up what I'm doing - gently pushing my training limits only a little bit further yet, without becoming an obsessive nutcase, compulsive sociopath or cripple!
So - a week ago I was still joking about how impossible this all is, but now I actually came in 25th of a tough mountain ultra-marathon. I started fairly slowly and got lost four times along the way, so I could have made it even a bit faster.
I wouldn't have thought it would go so well and actually I don't remember a sense of achievement like this ever since at university I talked a rowdy drunkard into giving me 20 quid for my crappy old bike he had just kicked into transportation netherworld.

So, what did I learn? Actually, this only shows that everybody else is also putting their pants on one leg at a time. And I, within the next year, shall put on the other leg of my Cro-Magnon pants - the significantly longer one. At least I now know how to do that!