In the eighth installment of his 'L'Envers du Dossard' (behind-the-bib) series, Baptiste Chassagne opens up the 2026 90km du Mont-Blanc — a race he calls the most stressful and brutal he has ever entered — and frames it as a major checkpoint on the road to his season objective, UTMB. He finished 4th in 10:02:39. The lead-in was hard. After the Grand Raid du Ventoux in late April, Baptiste and coach Simon Gosselin deliberately took three weeks off to protect his mental and physical freshness for August. The five weeks before the 90km shook him — waking every morning with 'anxiety in the belly and fog in the head' — and he considered his participation optional until the day before. He reflects that the real difficulty of high-level sport isn't suffering on a key session when you feel good, but forcing yourself back to work every day when the doubts and mediocre sensations set in. He entered this race with intent: to use a prep race as a springboard the way cyclists do, to 'get hit on the helmet' by the world's best on this format, and above all to relearn how to race inside the pack — to jostle, suffer, analyze and respond — after two solo front-running wins at Ventoux and the Diagonale des Fous. It was the final piece of his two-year tour of the calendar's 'biggest building sites' (French Champs at Val d'Isère, World Champs at Canfranc, the Diag), a deliberate campaign to dismantle his limiting belief about technical terrain before facing UTMB's rugged final third. On race day he stood on the line more stressed than ever, having even strained his diaphragm days earlier. But the gun settled him: the doubts vanished and his legs answered. His race followed the plan almost exactly — go out hard to catch 'the right group,' then ease off after three hours to save something for the final climb. He rode the Coiffet/Dhiman/Minoggio 'locomotive' longer than planned before stepping off the Franco-Italian-American train at the Émosson dam, settling into his own rhythm with Baptiste Coatantiec. He held that pace for nearly 30km to the foot of the final ascent, the fearsome Montenvers, clear-eyed that a podium would only come if one of the three leaders blew up. On the last climb he pushed back into the red when Jonathan Albon — 'the best descender in the world' — closed on him, refusing to be caught by Albon on the final plunge to Chamonix. Albon ultimately DNF'd. Baptiste crossed the line 4th: a time that would have won most previous editions, yet a solid twenty minutes behind the three 'machines' up front — proof, he writes, that ultra-trail keeps evolving and records keep falling. His takeaway: courage isn't the absence of fear but acting in spite of it, and this was only a step. Next stop, eight weeks out: the final block before UTMB.