The Hobby Jogger Podcast · Hosted by: WeeViews & Branch Sauce

E53 | From South Carolina to the Alps: Running OCC with Zero Elevation Training

·39 min·2 clips

Jason entered the UTMB lottery with two stones and got an email at 5 a.m. saying he was in.

1. The Hobby Jogger Podcast episode centers on Jason Cox’s run of OCC, the 61-kilometer UTMB race in the French Alps. 2. Casey Koza and Rob Myers host Jason Cox, who is the guest runner and the person describing the race experience from start to finish. 3. The episode asks how a self-described “hobby jogger” from South Carolina handled OCC with limited vertical training. 4. Jason says he earned stones by running Black Canyons and Canyons in the United States and then entered the UTMB lottery. 5. He woke at about 5 a.m., checked his phone, and found the email saying he had gotten in. 6. He and his family built a Europe trip around the race, starting in Paris and then traveling near Les Houches and Saint-Gervais, France. 7. Jason says his wife wanted Paris as a bucket-list trip, which helped make the plan easy to sell at home. 8. He describes living in the South Carolina low country near Hilton Head, where elevation gain is limited. 9. His main training route was Hunting Island, a three-mile trail with about 500 feet of elevation gain that he repeated many times. 10. He also trained in soft sand and humid conditions, but says nothing fully prepares a runner for OCC’s vertical gain. 11. Jason recalls the OCC start line as crowded, energetic, and international, with music, stretching, coffee, and runners from many countries. 12. He says the first wave moved smoothly on a wide road, so the race did not bottleneck immediately. 13. He also describes schoolchildren lining the route early in the race and cheering runners toward the mountains. 14. The course began uphill, and Jason says he tried to hold a zone-two effort and a roughly 20-minute pace early on. 15. Weather shifted from a foggy morning around 60 degrees Fahrenheit to colder conditions higher up, then to rain, lightning, and thunder later in the race. 16. Jason says one aid station had water problems, with a slow spigot and long line, while locals later carried large pans of water to help runners refill bladders. 17. He emphasizes that spectators appeared all along the 61 kilometers, including locals moving from aid station to aid station and people cheering from balconies in bad weather. 18. Jason says that late in the race all of his devices died, so he had to ask other runners how many kilometers remained. 19. The episode has a conversational interview style, with Casey and Rob asking follow-up questions and Jason answering in a reflective, practical tone. 20. Listeners who enjoy trail-running logistics, UTMB stories, and mountain-race travel will get the most from it, while people wanting a fast-paced racing recap may skip it.

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