A soft incline, padded in fluffy snow, had hundreds of brown logs rising up in parallel. The bottom half of the trees were bare, creating a wide open space underneath the canopy of green pine branches laden with inches thick snow. In that space, there was a quiet of anything alive having left south or in deep hibernation. It felt like a giant huge breath was being taken in by the forest that took minutes. A tiny frozen patch fell off a tree. The crystals breaking sharply was brilliantly audible far and wide.
With long strides and puffing lungs, Cleo ran through the lone forest. Her ice running shoes had razor sharp blades at the bottom. The sound of the razors cutting the hardpack sounded like the sound of someone tearing a piece of paper. The left leg was a little dominant: KSH-ksh, KSH-ksh, KSH, ksh.
She was wearing tight black running tights that made her ass perfectly, bubbly round. She was a Miami Beach black girl. She was short, and everything about her was round. Her boobs were full cantaloupes that someone had stuffed into an underwire bra. Her kinky hair was combed into tight corn rows and lurked underneath her green hat. Her face was dark brown. It was the kind of dark where it seems completely devoid light and color - black. And then under the right light, a vibrant brown would shine like the sun piercing through the rain clouds after the rain. Her eyes were covered by oversized mirror fashion sunglasses that gave her an air of cool.
Her body heat and moisture was steaming through the capillaries of the skintight runner's clothes. Even in the depth of Siberia a human body in motion can generate enough heat to stay warm. The trick is to avoid sweating, because water has a high heat transfer factor, and to never stop. She had been training for this many times. She was confident that she would get to her destination without stopping. Everyone was betting her. She had convinced the authorities to go on her crazy stunt.
The incline steepened and forced the winter trail to meander into every tighter switchbacks. Her powerful athlete heart switched from cruising to power, big heart contractions pumped the low Alpine oxygen into her powerhouse thighs. She unzipped the front of her top to bare black skin to the cutting cold air. It felt refreshing. It took the pressure off the rest of her body that was about to break out into a sweat. It would be two hours.
She thought about the housewives back home in Miami. There were the chubby wives, essentially fat stuffed into skin bags. There were the high class Latinas with skinny bodies, perfect tans, hard bodies from spinning, and no other life aspiration. There were the shy, gray mice that worked accounting jobs and dressed in GAP, dreaming about a boyfriend. All of them had given her a twenty her and a fifty there. The total sum was $13,839. They had sponsored her run to raise money for breast cancer awareness. It all gave the run a deeper meaning, a profound sense of mission. Cleo had trained for this. Everyone would want to hear a story from her and hear how their particular support had gotten Cleo up the hill.
With 28 years, she had always been a runner. She had always aimed to leave a mark. There was that feeling of sitting around friend for cupcakes, when they all talked about mundane lives, she asked herself silently: "What would be the most awesome and most fulfilling thing to do?" And as her friend was talking about going to the movies to watch a B-list movie, her mind had been racing about the idea of conquering Europe's most dangerous mountain: The Matterhorn.
She had seen Sylvester Stallone's movie Cliffhanger, not set in the Alps yet an equally alien ice world far above civilization. All that power of his big muscles moving through sheers walls had fascinated her. She wasn't a climber. She was a runner with many marathons under her belt. So, she had decided to run to the highest hut, Solvay Hut. It's the highest hut on the Matterhorn. It's not even a staging area for climbers. It's simply this emergency shelter for when things go wrong. A skeleton search and rescue team would wait for her there to make sure that she made it safely. While they hiked up with heavy gear, emergency utilities, and warm clothing, she had traded everything for lightness. That lightness should get her to Solvay Hut before she'd need water, warmth, or shelter.
An hours into the run, the trees started giving way to meadows and rock cropping. The altitude was too much for the trees to hang on. The view of the Swiss and Italian winter land appeared. Zermatt was far below. There are higher mountains than the Matterhorn in the Alps. Those mountains are attached to other mountains. The Matterhorn stands on its own. So, it looks even more majestic. That lone position exposes it to more and quicker changing weather. Heavy clouds were streaming over the mountains in the distance. The weather report had given her a four hour safety window. The weather here was still sunny and calm.
Cleo licked her lusciously thick lips with pink lip stick. Her body was a lean hard body. Her stomach muscles were taut and showed every detail of definition. Her eyes had a steely gaze from always looking at the next goal. The music on her iPod was driving her on.
The last recent footsteps of winter tourists had faded into undefined circles that had been filed down by the wind over days. The hard packed snow had given way to frozen snow. Her ice running shoes were cutting into the snow. Regular rubber soles would be slipping all over. "Trust your gear," she repeated to herself like a mantra. With that, she made another full stride step that fully trusted her weight onto her outstretched leg with the knee shape clearly shining through the runner tights. Mentally, she was alert now. This was the dangerous high country that everyone was worried about her.
The sun was dangerously bright this high up. The air was too thin to filter out the UV radiation. Without glasses, she would have been blinded within hours. Without 40 SPF sunscreen, her skin would have been burned in less than a couple hours. Some of the ice on sunny spots dangerously glistened hinting at its most superficial layer melting in the blazing sun and getting every slippery.
The trail had turned into skinny path a foot wide with an eerie drop off on the side. Even the meadows had vanned. Only ice and bare rocks were left up here. The rocks were scrambled, cut, and burst. The harsh temperature changes and elements were hard on anything up here.
Cleo's heart started pounding. Above 10,000 feet, the air was thin. And with the steep drop off, her mind had fear setting in. She knew. Slow down and the ice cold air will get to me. Make one wrong step, one twisted ankle, and a fall hundreds of yards down would await her only to be smashed against a rock from where she would bounce for second fall of a hundred yards. "Trust your gear," she repeated to herself again, as she placed her foot with eerie precision onto an even spot on the ground between a jagged rock and the edge of the trail.
The trail stopped at a ladder, a few skinny metal ropes nailed into the wall. There was a rope for her to hold onto while she climbed up a big, bald boulder. She wasn't as fast at climbing as she was with running. While she carefully moved her feet and then her hand up, she could feel the cold air seeping through her thin running gear. She could feel her core temperature being touched. Her lips and nose were frosty cold from being exposed extremities. All she could think about was to get back on the trail and to pick up the pace to warm up.
When she reached the end of the ladder, she scrambled onto her knees onto safety. She had a mental check-in. Her mind had been numb. The running and cold had made her feel numb. Little thoughts were running through her head. Her mind was rigidly focused on the goal. It took discipline to hold the fear in check and to be focused to the utmost on making every step of the ten thousand steps be inch perfectly aimed at this narrow rocky ledge. A team of path builders must have had the utmost determination to carve the path into this sheer mountain face, using every little ledge to get a path barely wide enough for a skinny human to walk on. With long strides, she ran on. She could feel the altitude made her top out. She could feel her leg muscles simply having a weak punch, like driving a car that was switched from high octane gasoline to low octane gasoline.
Then, it happened. There was a little downward stretch. She had gotten a little too much momentum. Her right foot overshot the foot sized ice patch and landed on an exposed rock. The razor blades couldn't dig into the rock. So, her foot screeched forward with the sound of white chalk on a blackboard. Her foot shot forward wanting to go into a split. She quickly jerked her body to prevent that. As a counter balance, her body was thrown towards the direction abyss. Her heart stopped. Her mind felt the lightness of anticipating of being suspended in freefall for an extremely peaceful second before ending in an extremely violently bloody and bone crushing moment. Her arms flung to the side to hold onto anything.
