Patrouille des glaciers: Ski mountaineering marathon

Caporegime
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18 Oct 2002
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Will jump on a train soon to Arolla for the 2010 Patrouille des glaciers ski mountaineering marathon.

I will do the big race (as oposed to the very big):
2000m climb and ski descent, 25km, 55km joggigng equivalent.

http://direct.pdg.ch/Fr/

Youtube vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoQxuyJGwA


Regiration and first equipment check until 5pm, 6-8pm security briefings, 8:30-9:30pm dinner, 10pm bus to hotel. 1:45 am wake up, 2am bus to race start, 2:45 breakfast, 3:30 final equipment check. 4:30 am start time.

Hopefullz will be in Verbier at 10-11am. Lunch in the sun in Verbier, followed by much celebration 8 months training in this race!

Spending my time carb loading now.
 
Soldato
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I was going to say that's not far! but then I realised you have to walk up the assent. Makes it a bit harder. Looks great fun though. Last time I was in France we skied a 60mile round trip just to get to a decent place for lunch, lol. I also have a few gold medals in cross country skiing from when I was younger, so I would love to do something like this at some point. Have you got much training in?
 
Capodecina
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Sounds absolutely AWESOME!

I hope you have a decent head-cam and can get some better video than the one to which you posted a link ;)

Good luck - have fun


Vote Lib-Dem - choose change!


When you get back . . .
 
Caporegime
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Back at work. What an event, glad I did it but a lot of suffering.

We got a time of 6:09, and ranked 8th out of 40 teams (4 teams did not finish).

This is a great time, made all the better because I felt really sick for the first 3 hours and was close to throwing up in the first 2. Later on a team mate took a nasty fall and lost his skis which took some time to recover. Still, even without this we couldn't ranked much higher because the top times of the Pors are really insane and in a totally different league.

The listing for our category is here: http://services.datasport.com/2010/winter/pdg/Rang042.htm (we are team polyathon 1).


Should get a few photos later to show.

Now I'm exhausted. Basically no sleep the night before the race!
My friends did the Zermatt-Verbier in a little under 17 hours starting from 10pm the day before- respect to them! I think thats a goal for the the next Patrouille des glaciers in 2012.

Before then I might consider a marathon end of summer and some other ski mountaineering races next winter.
 
Caporegime
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we decided to do the PDG in autumn last year, at that stage I was fairly fit and did a lot of hiking and climbing but wasn't an endurance machine and lacked the cardio-vascular abilities to race at speed.

I went running and swimming 3 times a week from october to end of november, once the snow was good I did 1-2 big ski tours Saturday and sunday (normally 1500-1800m, 8-12km in 8-10 hours). Twice a week I did shorter ski tours in the evening, 500-1000m 3-6km at a local ski resort. At the end of february the snow melted from the local ski resort so I went back to running and swimming twice a week in the evenings.
However, lots of training sessions were lost due bad weather, extreme avalanche conditions, illness and work getting in the way.

In total I clocked nearly 45,000m of vertical.
 
Capodecina
Soldato
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I have to ask (and feel free to pass on the question), where do you live that allowed you to ski for eight to ten hours every Saturday & Sunday and two evenings a week . . . up until the end of February?

Scotland :confused:
 
Caporegime
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Lausanne, Switzerland.

I lived in Scotland before that, which at least would allow the weekend options.
 
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