Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

The Les Houches Town cup…

Monday, March 31st, 2008

…Or the coupe municipale des Houches. It a yearly Giant Slalom race in Les Houches which is free and open to all. So of course we had to have a go! It was a beautiful sunny day for it yesterday & 200+ skiers were racing. Mark took his favourite client Gracie (11), so with Matthew, her Dad, Mark and myself, we had a bit of a team going. And after the race, out came the bucks fizz from the rucksack for a quick celebration before skiing down to have lunch with my girlfriend on the terrace of the Chevanne restaurant in Houches in 15degree spring sunshine. A perfect Sunday.

Les Houches Town Cup 2008
(Gracie and Matthew - more pics)

Such good fun to have a proper giant slalom race course set out in front of you, no-one else on it, wearing a number with someone timing you and loads of people cheering you on! Amazingly I came second in my category! Brilliant! I won a medal and everything, but I was a bit late to the prize giving and all the medals had been given out to the kids already. They love medals, kids.

Every one’s a winner on town cup day, I found. To be fair there were a lot of categories. In fact there was only one other person in my category (which was probably the category for ‘older guys who should really know better’) and he beat me by 7 seconds over a 40 second course! So put like that, my second place wasn’t that impressive. But it’s all about focusing on the right details and mark and I decided it was definitely worth celebrating our 2nd places. Especially since he managed to get a trophy for his second place. Which now has pride of place behind the bar in the Delice.

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Speed Riding

Friday, March 28th, 2008

So there’s a new death sport in town this year. Speed Riding (aka Speed Flying). It’s been around for a while, but it’s starting to get more followers this year, and one of those speed riders happens to be my mate Gus. He’s pretty nails, old Gus. He’s a very experienced parapente pilot & doesn’t think it’s too mental to career down one of the steepest sections of the Grande Montets 30 feet about the snow at 50 mph. Whereas we all know that it is. Mental.

gus hurst speed flying

So anyhoo - Gus and I have been talking about making a film of this new sport & today was a little bit of research. I was on skis & had a still camera & just got a taste for how it would be to film it. In a word, difficult. It’s just so damn fast! They’d taken off, flown past us and were miles away in under a minute. I got a photo or two, but they’re not the strongest photos I’ve made his year. Can’t wait to start filming it.

gus hurst speed flying

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Try searching flickr for your name

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/

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Easter

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

I’ve never really got the whole Easter thing. I guess our family never really made a big deal of it, so since leaving full time education several years ago whenEaster simply means a bit of a holiday, I’m always vaguely surprised when a 4 day holiday comes around every year.

This year was brilliant, though. The weather gods decided to give skiers the gift of winter and it’s been dumping with snow here for ages. The day after the first big snowfall is always a little sketchy in terms of avalanche risk, so on Saturday instead of getting ourselves killed a bunch of friends went skiing in Les Houches instead - mainly to have lunch at the excellent Tannerie restaurant.

Easter Sunday, though…. I joined the second day of Mark Gear’s Advanced course on Grande Montets. It was still snowing and I’ve never seen it so deep up there. You could measure the new snow in metres. They opened the top lift at around midday, which had been closed since the snow started to fall. This is an incredible moment. When the top of the GM hasn’t been skied for a few days and you can get up there into some fresh, new snow it’s the best Chamonix has to offer. With buckets and buckets of snow up there, and Mark’s mountain knowledge and skill as an instructor, the 5 of us skiing with him knew that our runs off the top would be nothing short of epic. And we weren’t disappointed. It was some of the most amazing skiing I’ve ever done - look how deep it was!

And it’s still snowing! The season, which felt for a while that it was coming to a close has suddenly come back to life. It’s back to work for me to an extent, but I think this week will see some great skiing. I’m going to try to do something extreme I think - Maybe the Pas de Chevre or some unusual route off the Aiguille Du Midi.

Posted in Sport, holidays, skiing | No Comments »

Archive for March, 2008

The Les Houches Town cup…

Speed Riding

Try searching flickr for your name

Easter

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