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.

Posted in Hooning about, Sport, skiing, ski racing | Comments Off

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

Posted in Sport, skiing, speed flying, speed riding | Comments Off

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 »

Competition day in Chamonix

Friday, March 21st, 2008

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.

Posted in Sport, the mountains, skiing, weather | 1 Comment »

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

Archive for the ‘skiing’ Category

The Les Houches Town cup…

Speed Riding

Easter

Competition day in Chamonix

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