Portals.
Endurance Raving in the Alps & Berlin
As the white rabbits dissolve into rocks, days transform into nights like a trip on acid. Space and time bend like Neo’s spoon, until reality and dream are one and the same. You lose track of what day, what time, which meal it is or when exactly bonjour slipped into buongiorno. All you know is that it’s “about” twenty kilometres until you can swap your Haribo’s & Bärli Biberli (Swiss calories) for three bowls of pasta to touch more than the sides, and that you’re deep inside the Portal.
A three-hundred kilometre mountain running race that begins and ends in Chamonix, but what happens during those five days in between is a portal. Step into the void with me…
In extreme endurance, the human experience becomes condensed and ephemeral. Highs and lows blur into one equanimous frequency. Pain and pleasure cease arguing. Hunger detaches from appetite. Exhaustion coexists with an almost violent sense of aliveness. Contrast collapses and beneath juxtaposition, only the non-dual remains.
By some strange pull of curiosity, I’ve been drawn to these states.
The first time was accidental: a long, solo run through the Annapurnas in 2016 -– a boundary-pushing adventure that truly shook the habitual. I didn’t have the language for it then, only the sense that a familiar internal architecture had been rearranged. Later I would learn words like neuroplasticity and transient hypofrontality. At the time all I knew was that I was seeing differently.
There’s many ways to enter these spaces. A six day run in the Himalayas can do it, ten days of meditation and silence will take you there or even a weekend-long rave in Berlin.
Different inputs, same psychological opening.
WTF is PTL?
During UTMB week, Chamonix becomes an alphabet soup of acronyms. The Petit Trot de Lyon (PTL) sits at the far end of the gamut.
Draw a circle around Mont Blanc - the UTMB. Now zoom out twice, raise the altitude, remove all of the markings. Add a multitude of spicy ridgelines, klettersteig, glaciers, slopes of wet grass so steep you need crampons to climb them and exposure that will make the driest of palms sweaty. Add in nine alternative routes in case weather turns brutal and a teammate or two (for drama), then submit your mountain CV to solidify your place.
It’s not technically a race, but a wildly technical journey (through space and time). The route changes every year and behind their cool, split shorts and barefeet aesthetics, the route setters have a dark sense of humour.
Years ago when I still carried a real phobia of heights and great vertigo, even the UTMB felt intimidating. Through deliberate exposure and gently holding the notion that ‘the triggers are the guides’ as one of my favourite Berlin artists, Olivia Steele, reminds, PTL sparked my curiosity.
▲
Several days in, somewhere between Italy and France, when the pain in my feet was now a part of myself, we stood at twilight on top of the Grand St. Bernard Pass. Thunder rolling close enough to feel personal. Meteo Swiss, as usual, being accurate to the minute about the storm on our heels.
My comrade and I, in pure day three or four incoherence, decided to pause our running momentarily for a costume change before the electric storm caught up. We stepped into the first building we’d seen in hours – a bar on the side of the road, for double espressos (heaven). With my poncho, succumbed to the 60km/hour winds we encountered on a previous pass and my waterproofs still dripping wet, I asked the bartender:
“Vendez-vous des ponchos ici?”
“Non”, then silence for some seconds before “...but we have garbage bags.”
Parfait!!
And so it was that all through the night and into the next day, moving high up in the Alps through the rain and clouds, shiny black plastic stuck to my sweaty, relentlessly moving body as though I was in the underground fog of Berghain.
▲
How it started…
The Petit Trot wasn’t accomplished in those five days but over thousands of hours of routine: long/short/easy/fast runs.
Weight training and Blackrolling.
When the heart outgrows the human reference range for size and the watch and sock tan lines look more like permanent tattoos.
After years of podiums, iron deficiency and injuries, louder came the questioning of the relevance of external competition and the inner compass listened deeper to curiosity than ego. The affinity for the unknown guided me to explore the deep void instead of the finish line.
If you can relate at all, you might consider writing your mountain CV, finding someone alternative enough to join you on this week-long adventure into pain, infinite hunger, hallucinations, all-nighters, Haribo overdoses and apply for the honour of entering the PTL - the mystical quest that sucks in humans on some type of spectrum and spits them out after a handful of days, back to Chamonix, some kilograms lighter, sparkles in their eyes.
The question remains:
Did PTL spit me out as an alternate version of myself or did I arrive at an alternate version of Chamonix?
Portals have this effect – you leave as someone and return not to the same place that you started, despite returning to that exact same place. Fat melts away and what remains is a lightness in more than the physical sense.
◻
Berghain.
Through the doors I walk, heart racing as I step into the dark behind the brutalist facade, reminiscent of the shadow cast by Aiguille du Midi that towers above my bedroom window as the sun rises.
My heart no longer pumping on its own as the techno is doing it for me. There’s an indescribable collective human energy. Time is no longer tied to the sun but to the deepening bass and the shrinking space between bodies moving as one.
Sweat drips and endorphins accumulate.
In Berghain, a transformation occurs between your holy entry into Berlin’s mighty temple and your feet-ruined, mind-lit exit.
A high carried by meditative music, surrender, movement, energy and the freefall into the rabbit hole of the unknown. The intense sensory-overloaded environment also serves as a form of pattern interrupt and profound time dilation. Less days and less gels, but something took me back to that long run I’d done in the alps.
▲
The Petit Trot had me tripping on my own physiology - sleep deprivation, awe and endorphins. My substances of choice: creatine and microdoses of NaCl+ to stay lifted.
It’s similar energy as entering the five-bouncer-deep entrance of Berghain after tentative hours waiting in line to get a different type of wrist band.
They sound worlds apart, but both act as portals, connecting us to something larger than ourselves.
▲
The trail keeps pushing you between suffering and bliss, most often experiencing both simultaneously.
As sweat salts your eyes, it joins the mind in playing tricks on you. You’re hallucinating so hard that you start to see clearly the mind’s lies and stop believing anything it tells you.
Then somewhere over that fifth or sixth mountain pass, you dissolve.
You lose your storylines, your old skin.
You catch little peaks of euphoria on steep slopes and unexpected waves of empathy in the darkness. Exhaustion turns into something like a slow, clean high. You drop into deep flow and a vast amount of presence.
Time stops obeying. You feel the energy, the shared trip of people who are stripped to their raw humanity.
Walls come down.
All that’s left is truth.
You see yourself from outside yourself. And when you finally loop back into Chamonix: same place, same arch, it feels like the long walk out of Berlin’s church, but something’s shifted. You’ve gone through the portal.
So as I sat on the floor of my shower in Chamonix for the first time after those five days in outer space, warm water washing over my stringy body and darker “tattoos”, I noticed a techno earworm humming through me and an indescribable feeling of ecstasy – the most incredible runners high I have ever experienced. I took it to Berlin…
Written by Kirra Balmanno
Kirra Balmanno during the PTL. Photo by Ben Stoyer.
Kirra Balmanno. Shot by Ben Stoyer.