Mathieu Blanchard

Heart of Rock

A film of Mathieu Blanchard's first Hardrock 100, opening on the San Juan Mountains themselves and the miners who in the late 1800s carved footpaths between Silverton, Ouray and Telluride, paths that outlasted the villages and the mines and were later stitched into a single hundred-mile loop across some of the highest and most unforgiving terrain in the United States. Blanchard arrives ready for the cold, the heat and the climbs but openly uncertain about the altitude, having never spent more than twenty hours high, and the race sets off at sunrise with wildfire smoke sitting in the valleys. He leads early over Stony Pass at an economical rhythm, finds himself locked in with Germain Grangier and Zach Miller on the 14,048-foot Handies Peak where the thin air starts its quiet work, and moves into second on the descent. From Ouray onward the film turns inward: ice in a bandana against the heat, Kroger's Canteen, a night on Grant Swamp Pass, and an aid station where he is dizzy and barely able to see straight, telling his pacer he is not sure he can reach the finish while holding half an hour on third and facing one more climb above 13,000 feet. He gets there, second in 23:44:23, and says plainly afterwards that alone he would have quit.