Running in the Alps, Summer 2019

Day 14 13 miles We decided to divide and conquer the excitement of our finale run, with Sarah taking the endearing mountain train up to Montenvers, while Max enjoyed the beautiful run route via the Roches des Mottets (where you could even spend the night in clear pods perched on the edge of the valley)….

Day 13 17 miles Marmottes: too noisy for them, only our trusty mascot came with us for fun   We collected our Europcar first thing in Chamonix and got on the road South towards Tignes, which was today’s TdF stage finish, first going through the Mont Blanc tunnel into Italy (impressive engineering!) and then working…

Day 12 Morning track: 7 miles Max VK miles We discovered before we left the UK that Chamonix has an athletics track, and we committed to do a track session. So after a warm up along the river, we hit the track for a session of 8 x 600m, each rep being 2 laps of…

Day 11 0 miles (yes, zero!) After a statistically relevant trend emerging of designing routes that were longer and harder than intended, we had a choice between another route which by our own estimation was ‘quite a tough one’ or a rest day: we concluded unanimously without need for debate that we really needed a…

Day 10 15.5 miles Marmotte sightings: 0 Another attempt at a less arduous day today, another complete fail on that front!  But another stunner of course. We decided we’d aim for St-Gervais-Les-Bains, a village along the valley, which is reputed to be like the Chamonix of 50 years ago, and we’d found a route description…

Day 9 9 miles Marmotte sightings: 2 running uphill together We spent a bit of time over coffee, planning runs we wanted to do this week.  The priority for the day was recovery running, so we honed in on a brilliant contour/ ‘grand balcon’ path running North up the valley which started at Planpraz, the…

Day 8 Max: 15.7 miles, 27km event Sarah: 14km race, 9.1 miles Marmottes: hiding from trail runners We were up at 5.15 to get ready for our race, have breakfast, meet up with our friend Becks who is also in Chamonix, and drive along the valley to Argentière. Having checked in and picked up our…

Day 7 8 miles With apologies for the first of probably several Chamonix-related puns… today we took it easy before an actual race that Sarah had managed to enter us into tomorrow just down the valley in Argentière. We decided to run easy along the river towards Les Houches, naïvely thinking it would be nice…

Day 5 14 miles Marmotte sightings: 1 Today we decided to start on a high by going up the Matterhorn Glacier cable car to the Trockener Steg at 2,939m.  It was amazing to think we’d run up this high on the other days as it seemed a long way up, and it was quite amusing…