“The Skinny Line” is a brand new movie from Scott Sports activities, produced by Timothée Ranger, which follows 4 of the model’s skilled athletes as they put together for and compete on the 2024 UTMB. We meet Cody Lind (U.S.), Anne-Lise Rousset Séguret (France), Rémi Berchet (France), and Andy Symonds (U.Ok., lives in France) as all of them search to carry out at their greatest on the 109.3-mile race round Mont Blanc.
The UTMB course begins in Chamonix, France, and dips into Italy and Switzerland earlier than looping again to Chamonix, masking 32,480 ft of elevation acquire alongside the way in which. The race at all times attracts a very aggressive discipline, and the movie delicately highlights the psychological challenges of making ready for a feat of this magnitude. The athletes are strolling a skinny line between efficiency and harm, success and failure. The place does self-belief finish and exterior strain start?
There’s a shifting perception — one which isn’t typically explored in movies of this nature — into the expertise of the athlete inside the crowds at a race as massive as this. There are literally thousands of fellow runners, but in addition hordes of spectators lining the course. The environment is buzzing, it’s electrical, however as Symonds notes, it’s in stark distinction to the quiet of the mountains. Berchet says, “Once you’re within the viewers it’s nice and unimaginable, once you’re on the opposite aspect, it’s very scary and annoying.” We see that Rousset Séguret is all smiles as soon as the race is underway, however she recollects emotions of hysteria within the strain of the beginning line.
Anne-Lise Rousset Séguret on the 2024 Madeira Island Extremely-Path. Photograph: Scott Operating
That is very a lot a movie in regards to the highs and lows, not simply of this iconic race, however of the game typically. Berchet thoughtfully articulates the significance of operating since you truly need to, and discovering the appropriate causes to coach. Rousset Séguret gives measured views about balancing the game alongside her life as a mother and as a vet. Symonds eats some ice cream. And Lind merely states, “Generally operating is simply so rattling onerous.”
Andy Symonds with the promised end line ice cream that received him by the 2024 UTMB. Photograph: Alanis Duc
The movie comes on the race from a extremely beautiful assortment of private angles in what serves to be an altogether shifting and galvanizing piece of storytelling. It’s a celebration of the mountains and trails that received these athletes into the game, whatever the consequence of the race.
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Cody Lind on his option to putting seventh on the 2024 UTMB. Photograph: Alanis Duc