Tor des Géants or the PTL. Two ways to spend five or six days doing nothing but moving, eating, sleeping and living in the high mountains — through every sunrise and sunset, beside your best friends.
No phones that matter. No agenda but forward. Just the rhythm of moving, eating, sleeping and moving again — watching the sun come up over a col you've been climbing toward for hours, and going down chasing the next one. A year of training for it. A lifetime of remembering it.
One is a solo loop of an entire Italian valley. The other is an unmarked, roped-up tour of the Mont Blanc massif. Here's each on its own terms.
One continuous loop from Courmayeur beneath Mont Blanc, along the Alta Via 1 & 2, over 25+ passes. You run alone and sleep at life bases with real beds. A pilgrimage with a clock.
A self-navigated tour of the Mont Blanc massif across three countries — off-trail, glaciers, scrambling, no markings, no ranking. The hardest, most adventurous event of UTMB week. You move as one team.
Tap a race to focus it, or see both at once.
The reason any of this is worth doing. Tap a photo to fill the screen.
Five or six days, living up high, through every sunrise and sunset. PTL makes that a shared rope. Tor des Géants makes it a personal summit.
One wrinkle worth knowing: PTL teams are 2 or 3 people. Four of us only fits the Tor (where we'd each enter solo) — for PTL we'd split into two sub-teams. Something to settle when we ask Rogier.