Travel
What was once known as a ‘dirtbag’ sport has become a tourism-driven enterprise – but as the competitors in Salzburg’s Mozart 100 know, an ultramarathon is still a long, long way to run. By Patrick Lau.
The marathon tourism boom and Salzburg’s Mozart 100
A boom in the popularity of marathons, combined with increased tourism and commercialisation of events, has caused a mild ruckus among the diehards for whom 42 kilometres isn’t enough. Ultra-running, like many back-country adventure sports, has traditionally had a “dirtbag” vibe. Considered the most difficult ultramarathon, America’s infamous Barkley Marathons in Tennessee begins not with a starting pistol but when race director Gary “Laz Lake” Cantrell lights his morning cigarette. There are no prizes for the winners; in most years, no competitor manages to finish the course.
It’s received wisdom that many of those to whom the sport appeals are trying to heal from trauma. Those who, like Camus’ Sisyphus, need to find a reason to laugh when the boulder inevitably rolls downhill again, and again; or need to place themselves in a position where each step taken is the most painful one yet, and find a reason to keep going.
The Unabomber, a classic backwoodsman, was scathing of ultra-running, declaring it a symptom of modernity. He argued it was a “surrogate activity”, a way for those living a too-comfortable lifestyle to challenge themselves, to artificially produce struggle and meaning.
It’s with these thoughts in mind that I travel to the picture-postcard Austrian university town of Salzburg for its increasingly famous ultramarathon.
When you think about Salzburg – if you think about Salzburg – you probably think of Mozart. The city celebrates him like Disneyland celebrates Mickey Mouse.
Tourists from all over the world bludgeon Salzburg’s quaint cobblestones in search of the numerous daily Mozart concerts held in villas and recital rooms throughout the town. They snap photos beneath the Mozart statue in Mozartplatz, and retreat to Cafe Mozart for a round of Mozartkugeln – ball-shaped pralines filled with nougat, marzipan and pistachio.
Of course, Salzburg has other lures. A millennia-long history as a Roman settlement, a prince-archbishopric in the Holy Roman Empire, and a centre of both salt mining and cultural production – all mean the city is littered with Insta-worthy attractions.
Around every winding corner is another castle festooned with Hohenzollern iconography, or a Habsburg-yellow mansion, or a cemetery filled with centuries of worthies and notables. The bells of a dozen churches usher each hour through the streets and alleys and across the river to the New Town.
Salzburg is also, of course, where The Sound of Music was set and filmed. I’m told most Austrians have never heard of the musical – or at least that’s what they pretend.
The reality of living in a tourist hotspot is both a blessing and a curse. During a five-week opera and theatre festival – the Festspiele – at the height of the tourist season, visitors to the city will vastly outnumber residents.
Salzburgers complain that many of the historic, and expensive, apartments in the Old Town are owned by wealthy Germans, who only occupy them during the festival and leave them vacant throughout the rest of the year. Austrians complain about Germans a fair bit, apparently, and Germans don’t think about Austrians at all.
The connection of the Mozart 100 to the great composer is unclear. Nevertheless, the event occupies the prime real estate of the Domplatz and Kapitelplatz as a mini-festival the day before the race. Loudspeakers pump Eurotrash music across the plazas, an announcer introduces elite runners to the stage in a lilting Austrian cadence, and the customary beer and sausage hawkers are temporarily joined by stalls flogging running gear.
It’s a party atmosphere, cut with a little tension. This year, thousands of tourists came for the race – I encountered Australians, Japanese and three Kazakh visitors among the more far-flung. Everyone seemed jolly but no one was getting drunk, knowing that in the morning they would face courses up to 100 kilometres.
An ultramarathon – a distance greater than the classic 42.2 kilometres – is almost always run on trails rather than city roads. Starting at 5am under the shadow of Salzburg’s baroque cathedral, the competitors headed out from the city to haul themselves up and down the Schafberg, Zwölferhorn and Nockstein mountains in the peri-urban countryside, until the hills were alive with the sound of panting, tramping and occasional moans of agony.
Taken at a moderate pace, some of the shorter courses can be a relatively relaxing summer’s day in the countryside. The trails wind through misty meadows spattered with Landhöfe, country cottages and guesthouses with maypoles sprouting from their gorgeously rustic yards. The sound of cowbells clinking in encouragement, accompanied by waves from bemused local farmers, echo up the valley walls and follow the runners as they disappear into the dark forests.
At aid stations in lakeside towns, volunteers serve chocolate cake and ladle out hot soup. One water stop is located in Fuschl am See, a hamlet best known for hosting the global corporate headquarters of Red Bull. Runners are free to fill their bottles with the stuff.
It’s unlikely, however, that anyone running the full distance is in the mood to appreciate the pastoral aesthetics – particularly not in this year’s race, with its cold, ferocious winds and rain heavy enough to turn the hillier parts of the trail into muddy streams. Even the elite athletes struggled. American Dylan Bowman, a man who’s regularly found on the podium at races up to 160 kilometres, testifies, “I’ve never raced in weather conditions like that … I hit a bad, bad low point around 50k. And for about two and a half hours I was really suffering.”
Since the Mozart 100 began as an independent event in 2012, with just 200 mostly local runners, growth has been explosive, particularly among international visitors. Fewer than a quarter of this year’s 3000 entrants were Austrian. That mirrors the trajectory of running-related tourism around the world. The Sydney Marathon sold out at 24,000 entrants this year, with international entrants up 640 per cent on the previous year.
After the event’s acquisition by the IRONMAN organisation in 2020, the Mozart 100 was folded into the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) series. That’s a collection of extreme running events held in picturesque locales around the world, from the jungles of Thailand to the Sierra Nevada mountains. There are also annual races in Mount Kosciuszko and Katoomba.
The crowning event is a 170-kilometre tour of Chamonix in the French Alps; a route that usually takes more than a week to hike. That race currently has a course record of just under 20 hours, but most entrants can expect to be running for about twice that long. During the day, temperatures can rise above 30 degrees Celsius, and plummet at night to below minus 10, with snow and fog making it difficult to navigate. The course climbs for about 10,000 metres, and descends roughly the same distance. If you put the Burj Khalifa on top of Mount Everest, you’d still be a few hundred metres short.
And it’s popular. Registration sells out faster than a Taylor Swift concert, and more quickly every year; in 2024 the number of applicants was up 34 per cent. Competitors pay about €400 ($653) to enter, but the entry lottery favours those who have competed in multiple other UTMB events. On top of travel and accommodation, the average participant is likely spending many thousands of dollars to put themselves through what, for most of them, will be the most physically difficult and painful experience of their life.
The bone of contention in the sport, if there is one, largely concerns organisations such as IRONMAN, which are seen as trying to make ultramarathons genteel holiday experiences for middle-aged, middle-class weekend warriors. That may be the case, but whichever way you slice the Mozartkugel, 100 kilometres will remain 100 kilometres, and, as the von Trapps would remind us, that’s a long, long way to run.
I stand by the finish line until dusk and beyond that, and watch the ultramarathoners coming in one by one, with their headlamps snaking across the rain-slicked plaza. Limping or sprinting, gleeful or dazed. They may be dentists battling a midlife crisis, or addicts swapping one form of painful euphoria for another, or just people who love going for a run. In the dark and covered in mud, it’s difficult to guess. They’re still coming in long after I’ve left, until the organisers shut the course a few hours before dawn.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 8, 2024 as "Ultratourism".
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