Team Montane Athlete Galen Reynolds: My Tor Des Geants
“In The Art of War by Sun Tzu, he roughly says, 'No plan survives contact with the enemy.' I think he was trying to say, ' No nutrition plan survives the Tor’.”
Team Montane Athlete Galen Reynolds strives for a challenge. Whether completing ultrarunning challenges like the Tor des Geants, Montanes Dragon’s Back or the Swiss Peaks 360 or scaling a snowy mountain in Scotland, he is consistently fascinated by his limits.
Since discovering the UTMB 11 years ago in a book on extreme adventures, Galen rerouted his life to explore these astonishing races after leaving school: “I was looking for a massive goal to encourage me to get back into training as I was coming out of school and was quite overweight.”
Most recently, he completed the Tor des Geants (TOR330), a 330km race beginning and ending in Valle d’Aosta, Italy. A completely unique race, the TOR330 covers an entire region, traversing through the Gran Paradiso Natural Park and the Mont Avic Regional Park.
“While every tough training run and all ultra races have things I’ve learned, the real learnings before this year’s Tor are from running previous 200 milers. I find some issues and challenges come up in 200 milers that I haven’t been able to replicate in long training runs or even in 100 milers, with sleep deprivation being one of them. The previous three finishes I had at Tor and one finish at Swiss Peaks have been instrumental in honing different strategies around the race.”
Canadian athlete Galen Reynolds completed the race in 71:22:30, in the third male position at the TOR330.
“As hard as I try to find a new passion, races like the Montane Dragon’s Back, Tor, and Swiss Peaks keep bringing me back. The magnitude and difficulty of the races put me on the edge of what I thought imaginable. I find it fascinating to explore and push when I’m at the very limits of what I previously thought impossible.”
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