Latest News

[Archives] [View all titles]

Inaugural GB ski mountaineering championships (Skiing)

Monday 23 January 2012 03:20PM

March 31st, 2012. Chamonix

For the first time ever, 2012 will see a British Championships for ski-mountaineering.

This addictive sport combines lung-bursting climbs with heart-in-mouth off-piste descents along with airy arêtes and steep couloirs negotiated on foot (with skis on the pack). Imagine the best ski-tour you’ve ever done covered at many times the speed complete with tour de France style spectators, large cowbells and more than enough lycra to supply the royal ballet for several seasons! It is a well established sport in the Alps and interest from British participants has been growing year on year. Famous races such as the French Pierramenta and the Swiss Patrouille des glaciers are highlights in an increasingly busy calendar.

The inaugural British championships will take place as part of an established race – the cols et cimes hauts [high cols and summits], starting from the top of the Chamonix-Planpraz telepherique. British participants will compete in the main race, but will be eligible for British championship titles. The race involves 1800m of ascent over multiple climbs and descents, contested as individuals (many races are in teams of 2 or 3). In order to do well you’ll have to be not only fit, but also able to quickly transition between skins on/skins off/skis on feet/on pack/crampons on, etc.!

To enter, please go here, you need a license to enter races in France, but it is possible to buy one for the day (click on “je ne suis pas licencié FFME”). In order to be considered for the British championships please email me (es@es-on-ice.co.uk) so that I can keep a list of who is racing. Please take note of the list of required equipment.

Note: This is a completely amazing sport, certainly the most exciting form of racing I’ve ever done, but requires a good level of technical ability to take part safely. Please do not enter this race unless you are a very competent and experienced ski-mountaineer. Ski-mountaineering race organisers expect competitors to be self-sufficient and the terrain can be very technical. Add to this exhaustion from high-speed ascents and the descents can be very challenging indeed. Some of the ridge sections can be considered as serious mountaineering, often without a safety line in place.

Snatched opportunities (General news)

Thursday 19 January 2012 08:41PM

I’ve been rushed off my feet since my last post with family Christmas madness. We decided to go back to the UK for much longer than usual, three weeks, to allow the grandparents plenty of time with Aaron, and to introduce him to both his remaining great-grandparents (my gran, and Hil’s granddad). It was lovely to surround him with so many familiar faces (you could imagine him thinking “this one looks a little bit like dad…” sometimes), and to show him around where both Hil and I grew up in Derbyshire. For me it was also an opportunity to get some training on proper hills, something that is nearly impossible while living in Brussels.

As a junior fell runner I used to think Derbyshire wasn’t that great for training for proper fell running, lacking the really long and steep hills of the Lakes races I aspired to do well in. The situation is even more extreme now – I now aspire to do well in races where a single climb can exceed 1500m of ascent, and I live in one of the flattest countries in Europe, so I wasn’t complaining about the lack of hills when we got back to Derbyshire this time, I just got a lot more creative than I used to be! From the start, in addition to cycling between mine and Hil’s families (a hilly 15 miles) with Aaron in the trailer, I pursued steep hills with a vengeance – ten times up the steepest side of Thorpe Cloud in Dovedale (1400m total ascent), morning reps from the Edale valley to the moorland rim while we were staying there for a few days, plus a few longer runs with old friends. By the end of the trip I felt I’d achieved a double whammy of visiting lots of family and attending my own personal training camp.

Within a few days of getting back to Brussels an opportunity cropped up to go skiing in the Vosges for the weekend. The Vosges are the closest mountains to Brussels, five hours drive away, and have good skiing when the conditions allow. They are a bit like a forested version of the Cairngorms, with similarly capricious weather. There was one small problem; I had thrown away the liner boots for my ski boots at the end of last season as they were rapidly becoming a threadbare biohazard, and the new ones I had ordered had not yet arrived. Still, an opportunity to get some time in on proper snow before the race season starts in earnest was too good to miss, so again I had to get creative. Three pairs of woollen socks, a pair of “granny knit” slippers, some sections of old foam sleep-mat and a lot of duct tape and I had something that looked like it might work. I’m usually useless at making things, so I was surprised when my Blue-Peter creation stood up to 5000m of ascent and descent over the weekend, with only minor bruising to my feet and one sizeable blister. Yet more ascent in the training bank and hopefully a bit of endurance from which to build some race form.

The bruising and blister healed in time for this weekend, and a cross-country running race in Châtelet, to the south of Brussels. I’ve found it difficult to find details of cross-country races here, the runners I meet seem to race much less frequently than I’m used to, so despite Belgium being a country with a fine cross-country pedigree I’ve only started to do races this season. Frustrating! The one previous race I had done was an international race at the end of November where I ended up running in no-man’s land, somewhere between the elite peloton and the joggers who’d made an even bigger mistake than me in entering the race. I finished up five minutes behind the winner, Atelaw Bekele, which at first I was disappointed with, but watching him run away from the field at the European championships two weeks later I realised that perhaps five minutes wasn’t too bad after all.

This weekend’s race was a nice change, a grass-roots race on a pleasant course with a friendly atmosphere. After an over-enthusiastic start (I led for the first two laps of six), I ended up third, forty seconds behind the winner, which I was pretty pleased with – cross country has never been a great forte of mine, but it’s a good way to keep entertained, and fit, in between trips to do the races that really matter to me; in the mountains!

Six weeks in (General news)

Friday 02 December 2011 01:56PM

The six weeks since Aaron was born have been pretty amazing.

Before the birth I was assailed with stories and advice from all corners. What perplexed me was that most of the advice seemed to focus on the negatives of parenthood:

- “You’ll not get your ‘life’ back for eighteen years” - “Get some sleep now because you’ll be missing it in a few months’ time” - “You won’t be able to do any of the climbing/running/skiing things, ever again”

etc, etc. You get the picture. I started to wonder why anyone ever has a second child if their memories of the first were so difficult.

Thankfully there were others who would tell me what a wonderful experience being a parent (and specifically a dad) was. My natural reaction to impending parenthood was one of excitement, so I tried to listen more to the latter group of people and less to the first. Most encouraging were a few hardcore climbers who were completely positive about their experiences as dads: Nick Colton told me having babies was “delicious” and Bruno Sourzac, who I met on an international winter meet a few years ago, told me a few months before the birth of his first child, in response to my question about whether he had any adventures planned for the near future “my girlfriend is pregnant, I sink zis is a big adventure, non?” Nick was, in his day, one of the best British alpinists in a generation of greats (and he’s still pretty handy), and Bruno similarly predisposed to full-on adventure. If there’s one group of people that value freedom highly it’s elite mountaineers, so coming from these two this encouraged me no end.

I’m thankful to say that so far it’s been all I hoped it might be and more. For sure life has changed, but in many ways it’s changed for the better – there’s less faffing around and procrastinating, next to no TV and a bringing into sharp relief the things in life that are most important – time spent with my wife, time spent with my new baby, time spent training, racing and in the mountains and time spent working on my PhD.

I’ve managed to keep training well since the birth, with only a couple of unplanned rest-days due to exhaustion/sleep deprivation, and am feeling fit and looking forward to the coming season of ski-mountaineering races. This starts for me in late January with a couple of low-key races, if there is enough snow, in the Vosges mountains (the closest mountains to Brussels), followed by jumping straight in at the other end of the racing spectrum at the European Championships in Pelvoux (Ecrins), where I spent much of last winter.

I know I’ve got it pretty easy when it comes to keeping the training going through fatherhood – a job (my PhD) that is about as flexible as they come, a wife who the closest she gets to nagging me is kicking me out of the door at 3pm to make sure I get some training in before it gets dark and a baby who sleeps relatively well at nights and is never too difficult the rest of the time. I’ve also been lucky to get sponsored by Chariot Carriers, and I’ve been using one of their buggys a fair bit already for easy runs (need to keep it smooth for Aaron while he’s small so nothing too fast for now), and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how little it holds you back on a run. I feel proud that my little boy has currently done far more miles in the Chariot with me running than he has done in a car.

On the running front, after many false starts and bureaucracy I seem to have found a good group of runners to train with and finally managed to compete in a Belgian cross country race. I picked a tough one for a debut, one of the international Lotto Crosscup series. I wasn’t last, but I wasn’t very near the front either… Still, I seem to be improving at running on the flat so hopefully that will help out in the mountains too. Having a bit of speed in the legs is never a bad thing.

So back to parenthood: the negative things that people focus on – less time for yourself, less sleep, lots of shit, wee and general mess, are of course all true, but there’s enough joy sprinkled in there that those aren’t the things that you finish each day remembering.

To me it feels a little like alpine climbing – there are times when it is exhausting, when you wish it would stop or when you feel like you can’t cope. But overwhelmingly the experience is remarkable and filled with wonder. When you talk to people about climbing the north face of the Grandes Jorasses they don’t usually say “oh it was terrible, I hardly slept at all, I was cold and hungry and scared the whole time”. They usually say “yeah the Walker Spur is an amazing route, the climbing is so good, the view from the summit is incredible, we had one bit that was a bit tricky but we got round it like this…”. I’m trying to cultivate the same attitude to parenthood!

Postscript: By popular demand here’s a collection of some of the best baby photos so far including some new ones.

A good excuse for not blogging (Running)

Thursday 27 October 2011 09:27PM

I’ve not written anything since the Tre-Rifugi race at the end of August. Life has got very busy with preparing for the arrival of our baby. Nine months feels like a long time but Aaron finally made his arrival on Saturday morning. His mum was a star and we’ve spent the week in a hyper but blissful bubble of new-parenthood.

I’ve managed a bit of training around all the nappy changes and even did a race the day after he was born. This would ordinarily have been fairly surreal on so little sleep and after such a life-changing event, but it was doubly so as it was a race up a 30 storey hotel in the centre of Brussels. I think I was a very dizzy third (running up staircases you feel like a cat chasing its tail), but I’m not sure as I left before everyone had finished running (it was a time trial) to get back to my new family in the hospital!

Autumn is lovely here, and running in the forest with the low sun shining through the golden trees has felt a really special way to adjust to being a dad.