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

Wednesday was a big day in Chamonix. Starting early on Brevant was the 3rd race in the Helly Hanson Winter Ride competition organised by Evolution 2. Somehow I found myself entered as a competitor, along with Fred and Mark. We met at the bottom of the Brevant bubble lift to sign in at 8:30 am. The race format is simple. A course is set down a massive chunk of off-piste terrain. The course on Wednesday was over akilometre long, with a height difference of nearly 700m. It was huge, steep and straight down the Hotel Face. The rules are simple. No gates, no turns, just boot it down the course as fast as you can. The fastest skier wins.

They say you should do something which scares you every day. Well, I properly scared the hell out of myself that day. Helmets, avalanchetransceivers and insurance were mandatory for every racer, with good reason. The course was down a chunk of mountain it would normally take me 5 minutes or more to ski, stopping 3 or 4 times to rest, regroup and look where I’m going. This time I was just going to throw myself down it as fast as I could without stopping. Worse, the cloud was quickly coming up the valley and half of the course was in very limited visibility.

(a few pictures here… )

I couldn’t even see where the first flag was when I started - it was in cloud. As I hit the cloud layer at full speed my heart was nearly exploding from the physical effort of staying on my feet, and suddenly not being able to see what was coming was genuinely frightening. This was not a piste. There are rocks, cliffs and hidden bumps all over the place. The cloud thinned and I came storming out of the bottom of it doing massive high speed GS turns in great powder towards the finish line which I could finally see.

Then disaster. Past the last flag I hit a compression they’d warned us about. I failed to absorb it and went over the handle bars; crashing onto my head and loosing a ski. Thus ruining my time. Ah well - I still did that course in about 2 mins flat - which is pretty mad. Even though I was a bit annoyed with myself for not staying on my feet, it was fun & I’ll do it again when I get the chance!

So then it was over to Grande Montets for the Boss Des Bosses competition. As a spectator of course. It’s a real social event this one, seminaries from all over the alps come to drink beer & watch teams from Chamonix, Zermatt, Val D’Isere, Courcheval, Meribel and Verbier racing the bumps course. Zermatt beat Chamonix in the final as usual, this time on the very last run.

By the time Sarah and I had finished our dinner at l’Impossible that night, there was no question of going out for the after-party. It was all we could do to struggle back to the office to fall asleep. A great day.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Sport, the mountains, skiing, weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.