Patrouille des Glaciers 2022 - Arolla to Verbier with bronchitis

Patrouille des Glaciers 2022 - race report. (As always, it's long so skip at will or grab a cuppa a settle in.)

I’ve had a little bit of a hard time figuring out how I feel about this PdG.

The race itself was 29km and 2200m of vertical in really challenging snow conditions but of course the race is actually the very last part of the journey.

This winter I ended up being away very much more than I thought I would. My work as the commentator for the new live streaming of the ISMF (International Ski Mountaineering Federation) has been absolutely brilliant. I have learned so much, seen so much more of the skimo season than I normally do and got to know better than before the federation, the elite athletes and all the other people that make the World Cup work.

However, this meant my training was sporadic. Partly due to being away so much, partly due to being tired and not always prioritising it when I was at home. We also started as a team who had, as it turned out, different visions of what was involved in training and how to go about that. This led to quite a few stressful conversations and tests on friendships (which, thankfully, withstood the test).

Fast forward to about a month ago and our reserve was called in to play (the race is entered with 3 racers and a reserve) and we had only one opportunity to skin together as a team before the race. Mini slotted in perfectly, was a similar level of fitness and seemed like fun (I had only met her once before and Ellen hadn’t ever met her!)

Two weeks out and the self doubt started: I haven’t done enough training, I’m never entering this stupid race again, I’m going to let my team down etc etc. and with a week to go, both Ellen and I came down with bronchitis. Cough meds and rest seemed to be the only options the doctor could give so we kept our fingers crossed and got to the meeting point at the barracks in Sion at 1am on Sunday morning.

We had devised a strategy that seemed to suit our health situation (as it turned out Mini also was coming down with the same chest infection!). We were all determined to get to Verbier, but we needed to be sensible. We would start and decide at the first check point whether we felt we could continue.

The new start arrangements for the Arolla to Verbier race are in some ways better but being bussed up the mountain for over an hour at 2am in full gear was a bit nausea inducing and then it was so late that we skidded into the startline with only 20 minutes to go. And I desperately needed a pee. In a onepiece skimo suit. In a revolting portaloo which was a 3 minute walk from the start.

We put our couteaux (crampons for skis) on to help us grip on the steep, icy “wall of death” that is the starting climb of nearly 1000m of vertical. Then it was a quick as 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go! And the 4am wave from Arolla had started.

The first ten minutes were as lung and heart rate busting as these things always are but I had a very clear view of exactly the average speed we needed to stick to ensure we made our fist cut off after 750m so I obsessively looked at my watch all the way up. We were sensible in our pace and soon fell into a rhythm with me at the front, Ellen in the middle and then Mini.

I felt so strong on that climb, I had music quietly playing on my earphones, a buff over my mouth and nose to keep the cold air out of my lungs (thanks Tracie for the top tip!) and I was so surprised at how good I felt. So much so that I deliberately had to talk myself out of going faster as I knew the lack of training and the bronchitis would soon trump any euphoria-driven blast out the gates!

We made it to the first checkpoint 16 minutes ahead of the cut off and as I turned round with a big smile, I said “Are we going to Verbier?” YES! was the unanimous answer. So we pushed on, smiling as the blue hour approached and hundreds of headtorches dance ahead of us up, up, up towards Pas de Chevre.

After a short skinning section along the side of a steep face (never my favourite), we hit our first transition and bootpack. It was busy so the going was slow but we were happy to be there and not unhappy about getting a small breather. It was steep and the footsteps in the snow were not always full boot depth so I was on the very edge of my vertigo tolerance. I couldn’t really look up or down too much so I just concentrated on the boots in front of me, which unfortunately belonged to someone who was not very comfortable on the climb, not giving me much reassurance but at least something to think about. About half way up the 300 or so steps (I think, but really didn’t count) we had a fixed rope to hold on to which was helpful and very friendly soldiers from the German army encouraging us and giving us a friendly “Morgen!”

At the top of Tsena Refien (2951m), we once again ate and drank as we had been doing all up the first climb, every 30 or so minutes. Anyone who has raced in a team with me will tell you that I take my responsibilities as chef de patrouille very seriously. This does not mean I think I am the best but it does mean that I think about the wellbeing of my team a great deal of the time. I like to know how fast we’re going, how much vertical we’ve gained, how the team is feeling physically and mentally and it also means reminding us all to eat and drink at regular intervals.

My motives are in some ways actually quite selfish. First, thinking about the wellbeing of the team and the stats mostly distracts me from any pain or dark thoughts I may be experiencing. It also has the benefit of making sure I have well-fuelled people around me who are not going to falter and slow us down. I am aware that it can become irritating as a grown person to be told constantly by another to eat, especially as the race goes on and tiredness kicks in, but I never make any apology for it (well, I occasionally make a “sorry not sorry” type apology).

The ski down from Pas de Chevre started in powder but soon became horrific. I took the lead, as agreed, and battered down the first section. I stopped, turned around and to my surprise the girls were nowhere to be seen. Another racer came passed and told me Ellen had fallen and lost a ski so I waited until they came in behind me and seeing a visibly flustered Ellen, slowed down for the next section. To be fair, there wasn’t anything to be done fast as we side slipped and scraped over ice and bumps all the way to just above Pas du Chat.

At this point, the conditions were so bad that we were forced to take off our skis and down climb the last section over very slippery rocks and snow. As we transitioned, my race skis with no brakes started to slide down the slope. They both caught in Ellen’s skis but as she bent down to rescue one, the other took off again and as we all cried in alarm, it thankfully caught on some netting. Phew!

I took a step towards it and promptly sank my right leg into the snow, right up to my crotch! Hoots of laughter until I realised that the snow had immediately set like concrete around my boot and leg and I was completely stuck. For the first time ever, I properly understood what people who have been in avalanches talk about. It was solid. So I dug with my hand. Then I hacked away with my ski until I remembered we all carry avalanche shovels as part of the mandatory kit so I had to break out the by now infamous gifted pink shovel (that’s another story) and dig my own leg out the snow.

Meanwhile Mini, being much lighter and nimbler, had made it safely to my ski and retrieved it, so we put skis on our backpacks and down climbed. On one of the rocks, my left leg shot out from under me and I fell on to my left side. Nothing serious, just a sit down, but jarring nonetheless.

At the bottom of the down climb, the first of the elite teams passed us. It was the Swiss and there were great cheers as they shot past us on foot. Next, as we transitioning to skinning again, the Italians came by. This time I was the first person in the transition zone to notice them and I started hollering “dai, dai” (Italian for COME ON!!) and then more roaring from the amateur racers ensued.

As the day wore on, more and more would pass us and I found it very exciting and motivating to see the people I normally watch on a small screen while commentating, actually up close and roaring past me. I know them all and so sometimes when I called their names in encouragement they looked up and smiled or said hello. This was a great source of entertainment and distraction for me as we took the long, flat, pretty boring skin round Lac des Dix. After a while I stopped telling the girls who they were, because I think my skimo geekery was getting a bit dull.

In between distractions, I noticed I now had an unexplained sore left wrist. I have broken it three times and I wondered if I had done something to it when I slipped on the down climb but the adrenaline had covered it up. Occasionally, it was so painful to push on my left pole I would just pole with my right hand and drag the other one behind me like a bird with a broken wing. It continued in waves like this for the rest of the race.

Around this point, I started to notice I was pulling ahead of Ellen and Mini and was having to force myself to slow down slightly. In the classic way, I would stop and then as soon as they got to me would start again, meaning I was getting more rests, which is not ideal team strategy. The conditions were average to say the least and Mini had a small fall off the skin track, doing the splits and recovering quickly, but making Ellen and I feel less maladroit now we’d all had a slip!

Lac des Dix was over much quicker than any of expected. Ellen and I had been round this course before, both in 2018; me as part of the full PdG from Zermatt and Ellen from Arolla. We both had moments that we remembered with horror and were dreading. The “wall of death” had been one of mine and Lac des Dix was one of Ellen’s. By the time we reached the next check point at La Barma, we had both successfully defeated a couple of large demons and were feeling positive.

It is fair to say that for hot, tired ski mountaineers (by now the sun had hit us and it was getting warm) that the checkpoint at La Barma is a little oasis. There are loos (hallelujah for the female racers) and there are several aid stations. We hit it at 8:15am and dived into the chocolate, sweet tea, bananas, bouillon and the loo.

The last time I made it to La Barma, I remember sitting in the stinking portaloo with my head in my hands just wishing it was all over and not knowing how I was ever going to make it back to Verbier. This time, however, I wrangled myself in and out of my onepiece and perkily popped back to the girls and said with great gusto, “right, shall we go home then?” The look the normally sanguine Ellen gave me will stay with me a long time…

So, after a rather luxurious half an hour at the aid station, we traipsed through the timing checkpoint and started to tackle the last 1,200 metres and 15km to home. That’s a long day out in itself so we were in fact nowhere near home!

The first bit out of La Barma is steep and a shock to the system after the boring but relatively easy skin round the lake. I had made the decision to have a caffeinated jelly sweet alongside my other refreshments because I thought it would give me a boost. I am really very very bad at coping with caffeine but I have never really suffered with it in race conditions. It has always been a good thing. Not so this time. Within minutes my heart rate was through the roof and I had to deploy breathing techniques and mind over matter to stop myself from blowing up. It was also very very hot by now.

After 45 minutes, I felt better and I thought we should eat again. As I turned to suggest this to the girls, I saw that Ellen’s face was scarlet and she looked completely done in. So once we had eaten and had a “mental and physical health check” I offered to put her on the tow. I had never towed anyone before and there is not a huge difference in our fitness levels but I knew it was the right and only thing to do. I also know from being towed myself that the psychological benefits of being attached to a team mate almost outweigh the physical ones and thankfully Ellen agreed straight away.

As I clipped her to me and started off, I wondered what the hell I had done. I had already been starting to really feel the strain of the length and demands of the race and we had a really long way to go and I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to sustain it. My wrist was sore, my feet were beginning to feel blistered, my shoulders were twanging, my right knee had almost seized up and I was so hot.

Quite quickly, though, the most extraordinary thing happened. I found that being needed, being able to help, being someone who could tow a teammate when she needed me, was like I found a gear I had never ever had to use before. I had been checking our times and speed and my heart rate obsessively from the start on my watch, but now I almost doubled up.

I found the pace at which I could go while towing Ellen where she felt the benefit and I could sustain, and I quickly gauged the range of my heart rate at that pace and I stuck to it. Checking with Ellen now and again to see if she was ok, we plodded up the mountain, passing some teams, being passed by others. Mini by this time had a really sore throat and was happy to tuck in behind us both. She was also increasingly being hailed by friends she hadn’t even known were racing and that seemed to keep her perky and motivated.

As we slowly made our way up the hill, over the quiet but pumping music in my headphones, I began to hear the crowd at the top of Rosablanche. It is impossible to not feel moved by the noise made by people who have got up at the crack of dawn and skinned up to well over 3,000m, carrying supplies for racers, fondue kits, bottles of wine, cowbells, trumpets, flags etc etc.

It is the equivalent I imagine for the Tour de France racers when they come up the Col du Tourmalet or Mont Ventoux (although on a much smaller scale). It is also the signal for most people that they will make it, that their race (all being well) will now finish in Verbier and not by being helicoptered off the mountain.

But long before you see the whites of their eyes, there is a long way to skin and then, after we had stopped for another breather and to let Ellen swallow some painkillers for a by now thumping headache, there are nearly 1,200 steps of a very steep bootpack to tackle. It had taken us much less time get to the bootpack than I thought it would, though, so that was encouraging.

The queue going up the bootpack was enormous, the heat was intense and the fast people trying to squeeze past were irritating and scaring me. This particular bootpack is iconic and doing any bootpack changes the muscle groups you’re using so it’s often “fun” but this turned out to be the most anxiety-inducing part of my race. The steps had been hard packed by the Thursday racers, then we had had fresh snow after very cold temperatures so the steps were very slippy in places. And when you fear you’re going to slip on a steep bootpack with hundreds of people behind you, it’s not much fun at all.

Finally, we could hear the full force of the crowd, the trumpeter, the bells (and the racing yodeller, who made us all roar with appreciation half way up). The emotions were real and we all hugged on the summit as strangers congratulated us with heartfelt sincerity. Shortly afterwards, an angel in the form of a lovely girl I have only chatted to on Instagram, called Sofiya, was calling my name and handing us a bottle of coke and the best tasting clementine segments I have ever tasted! She had contacted me the day before and asked if we needed anything and we were so grateful to her for carrying all that stuff up the hill for people she had never met before.

Then a surprise shout from Alessandra Schmid, Swiss skimo racer who was not racing this PdG, who joined us as we were in transition to ski back down the other side. I was so flustered that an elite ski mountaineer would be chatting to me in transition, that I took my bag off with skis still on, I put on the wrong jacket for the downhill and I had to ask her to check me over to see if I was actually ready to ski! It felt funny to be the one racing while she cheered us on – a bit of role reversal!

When I tried to write about the ski down from Rosablanche the last time, all I could remember was burping up the fondue I had been given by some total stranger at the top! This time, I would be grateful not to have remembered. It is really long and although the snow at the top was ok, it quickly became a rock and ice hopping race through narrow channels for descending at speed with increasingly burning thighs, aching knee and sore toes. There is also a lot of skating and poling, which is exhausting at the best of times, more so when you have a down jacket on and you’ve been on the go for over 7 hours! I was chanting to myself “turn, turn, turn” so I wouldn’t stop every few seconds.

Finally, we reached Ellen’s and my mutual demon zone: the final skin and bootpack up to Col de la Chaux. We got back into towing mode and trudged our way round and almost before we knew it, the col was in sight and I shouted, “Is that all you’ve got PdG?” as Ellen and I marvelled at how relatively little distance the last section was compared to the monster we had both been dreading.

One last push up the “small” bootpack, a big team hug, a horrid, slippery down climb and we were rewarded with the most gorgeous skiing we’d had all race! Then on to the pistes and hooning down to LA Chaux, I screamed (look away now if you’re sensitive) “F*ck you, PdG. F*ck you, bronchitis. F*ck you, negative thoughts.”, tucked and shot down to La Chaux, the girls hot on my heels.

And then, mud. No snow only rocks, ice, walking and slow pain spreading all over my body as what should have been a 15 minute skate/ski became over an hour of plodding down the mountain, mostly on foot with some truly shitty skiing in parts. It was an ignominious and painful end to a famous, well raced race.

Family and friends were there to meet us at the bottom of the piste and along the route as we marched/ran the final kilometres through Verbier to the finishline and a glass of champagne.

We had laughed, we had suffered, we had chatted, we had sunk into our own thoughts, we had supported each other and we finished a race that lots of other teams didn’t, all three with chest infections, only having skinned once together as a team.

My heartfelt thanks to my amazing teammates. To Mini for stepping up at the last minute, fit and experienced but never having skimo raced before. She brought good humour, great chat, common sense, consistency and a solid performance throughout. Her position as the backstop both on the way up and in the skiing gave me, and I’m sure Ellen, a really reassuring feeling throughout the race.

And to Ellen, who at one point said "Despite all the complaining, I am really enjoying myself!" But she barely complained at all. She powered through what must have been a very painful second half of the race with stoicism. We could tell she was suffering, but she was the epitome of grit and determination. An incredible example to us and to her 10 year old daughter.

One last thing to mention. When I said at the beginning that I wasn’t sure how I felt about it all, it’s because in all honesty as well as the stressful lead up to the race, I was really shocked to have taken 10 hours to complete the “small” PdG. I was almost a bit embarrassed. This is in no way a reflection on my incredible teammates and it is with full understanding that we were not at full lung capacity in a team that had not trained together, in a year that had the crappest conditions the race has seen for a while and that I had not trained very much but something made the morning after feel rubbish.

My head knew all the facts but my heart felt out of whack. I allowed “other people were so much faster than us” and other nonsense thoughts to take over. However, a long chat with Graham and then writing this all down has reminded me that the time we took to complete this race (10 hours 5 minutes) is only a number.

And that number is not the journey throughout the winter, it is not the experience of years of training and racing that allowed me to make good decisions for me and the team and recognise when I needed a shift in mindset. It’s not the camaraderie, nor the feelings of pride in myself when I felt strong despite the odds. It is not the glorious sight of head torches bobbing up the mountain in the early dawn or the sun coming up after we’d been on the mountain for over two hours already.

It’s not turning round on Rosablanche and having your little remaining breath taken away by the stunning beauty of the views, nor starting to recognise the mountains of the place you have made your home as you get closer to the finishline nor the hundreds of people, strangers, friends and family alike, cheering and clapping and really meaning it when they say congratulations.

And it is definitely not the genuine affection and gratitude I feel for the two women I am proud to call my teammates who, despite our joint coughing and spluttering, finished this bloody hard as nails race with me.

It really is just a number and I’m more than ok with that.

PS I am stiff and sore and tired as I write this and I have once again properly trashed my feet with blisters but anyone who has got this far and is concerned for my very sore wrist may find this amusing: about 10 minutes from the end of the final skin up to Col de la Chaux, I realised exactly why it was so painful. My obsessive watch checking had given me a repetitive strain injury. I kid you not.

Over and out.

Home to Rome: Walking the Via Francigena 2020

In 2017 I was training for an ultra marathon and during my long runs I discovered a walk called the Via Francigena passes very close to our home. Upon further investigation I found it was an old pilgrims’ trail that goes from Canterbury in England to Rome.

Much like the Camino de Santiago in Spain, it is for walking off your sins and being absolved in the great holy city. I’m not Catholic so the sins part didn’t interest me so much but the idea of walking such a long and varied route captured my imagination. I decided to forge a long term goal to walk the whole of the Italian part, from Grand St Bernard (about 45 minutes from home) to Rome over the next 10 years or so. And gave it the loose title of “Home to Rome”.

In 2018, I set off with the dog and did 3 days through the Aosta valley, staying in dog friendly hotels, all pre-booked. There is an app for the walk, which is superb. Breaks it down into 45 sections of around 20km each. I keep it open on my phone and the GPS picks up where I am. It is so detailed that I can instantly tell if I have gone wrong and find the path again. Not that that happens too often; the signage en route is mostly great.

2019 was a tricky year for me and I didn’t make the time to do my bit of the trail. I’m slightly annoyed about that but decided that I would charge on this year and booked four days in the diary for the beginning of September.

Again, just me and the dog. Originally, I had thought it would be fun to ask people to join me for bits of it, but right now, I love the thought of just pottering along on my own. My only minor concerns being where we might next find water or food. I can start when I want, stop when I want and eat and sleep where I want. As a mum, these small things are actually huge luxuries.

Here is a small run down of my four days on the trail.

Best 4-legged Sherpa ever.

Day 1 and 2 (Nus to Chatillon and Chatillon to Verrès)

I dropped my daughter at school and took off for Italy at 8:15am. Just over an hour and half later I was in Nus, the finishing point from my 2018 trail and just south of Aosta.

I parked at the station - an important logistical point for the return. I dug out my pack and the dog’s (I sometimes can’t move for people cooing over how cute she is with her doggy backpack on), opened the app and found the trail very quickly.

And soon I was walking. The reason I have lumped the first two days together is for two reasons. 1. The landscape was similar and 2. I found them both incredibly hard work.

I am always anxious for the first two days when I leave home. No matter what I am doing, how fun or exciting it is, the stretch of the umbilcal cord for a mostly stay at home mum is hard. Intellectually, I know have nothing to worry about. The kids are safe and loved and looked after. My husband has learned over the years to manage fantastically well without me. They create their own rhythm between the three of them that is so important for their relationship.

I don’t even particularly miss them for such short periods of time. In fact, I am always glad of the break but for some reason the going away, the loosening of timeframes (any full time parent will understand the managing of their own life around the timeframes of their kids) is disconcerting. I wonder how to fill my day. I take a while to relax into “just walking”, surely there is something else that urgently needs doing??

So those first two days were a little anxy despite the freedom and the excitement of being on an adventure. The good thing is that I eventually recognised it as a recurring theme of all my travels and I hope that next time I will anticipate it and head it off at the pass!

This time round I decided to not book any hotels. I did a week on the Camino de Santiago in around 2015 with my friend, Tash, and we just booked as we went every day. I loved it, it added so much to the excitement and novelty of it all but had thought that because I had the dog I would have to be a bit more organised. Meh, I thought, let’s challenge that!

Being a lover of books written by adventurers, I was inspired and came up with the idea of wild camping on this trip. Just deciding when and where to stop every day. Carrying all my kit and finding my own rhythm. My husband was looking for an excuse to buy some super lightweight camping kit so produced a tent and sleeping mat. The planning of the kit was fun - I love that.

The only downside was that the dog could not be allowed in the super lightweight tent for fear of ripping it instantly. So she had to have her own tiny tent. And bed. And all her food obviously. And so my pack grew heavy. In an untried rucksack. Do you see where I’m going here?

By the end of day one, traipsing up and down mountainous paths and not really timing our eating very well because I was a little worried about where we would sleep and because due to the virus, the restaurants were not open until around 7pm ( by which time I wanted camp to be set up and sorted), I was tired, my weight-bearing joints hurt and I was cursing the damn kit.

Add to that my research which had told me that wild camping in Italy is actually not legal but if you were careful and respectful it would probably be ok. In theory this sounded fine. In practice I was nervous about someone shouting “gerrof my land!” at me.

I set up camp just after Chatillon, above the trail, behind a rock, under some trees on the edge of a vineyard. It was windy so a bit tricky getting it all up properly but eventually we were settled in. I was tired but excited to be doing what I had set out to do. I listened to a podcast, made a cup of tea (on my list of exciting things to do on the trip - drink tea while wild camping - seriously…) and settled down for the night.

And here’s where it all came a bit unstuck. I was not in the slightest bit nervous about being out there on my own although I was still worried about being shouted at, but what was really bad was how freaking uncomfortable the super light mattress and pillow were. I hadn’t stretched (an absolute must for me after exercise, but forgotten in the excitement) and I had a lousy, achy, painkiller-filled night. I was also hungry and could hear the dog whining in her tent on and off. My indoor dog presumably not impressed at her outside living!

Hers n hers tents. I loved the camping, just not the super thin mattress…

I was up early and packed down and on the road by 8:15am. The packing down was not such fun. I thought about my day and how we could manage it better in terms of food and finding somewhere to sleep that wasn’t going to be as stressful.

Regardless, I felt excited again as we headed off into the next morning. I stopped for breakfast about 10. It was already really really hot but my plan was to do about half way and stop in the shade for a snooze. That would allow us to rest during the hottest part of the day and to extend the day to catch the restaurants that evening before camping again the other side of Verrès.

Big mistake. The app had said the section was “challenging”. It had said that on day one but despite the heavy pack and the sore joints, I was ok. Day two, part one was also not too challenging. But after a sleep in a clearing in the woods, I was sluggish, hot, hungry and despite thinking I would just potter through the next half of the day, it became a hard slog uphill with a pack that felt heavier by the minute.

The signs in the Aosta valley give you times to the next destination and it seemed like the walk to Verrès never seemed to be getting any shorter. It was up and up and up and then, almost worse, down and down and down.

As I was finally walking into Verrès at around 6pm, the sun going down, both of us hungry and tired, I looked at the app to see what was on the other side of town and saw, to my horror, that it was flat farmland with a motorway, a trainline and a river. No chance of a secret camping spot for at least another hour’s walk and I was absolutely done in.

I found a restaurant, ate and drank, fed the dog and looked for a hostel. Guilt and annoyance at carrying all the heavy bloody camping kit ate away at me until I put on my big girls pants and decided it was my ruddy adventure and I would do as I pleased. And in this instance it was finding somewhere nearby to sleep. Immediately. And to add to that, I booked myself a campsite en route for the following night. Away went the stress of where to sleep and assuaged the guilt of all the camping stuff going unused.

A hot shower, a really good full-body stretching session and a six-bed dorm to ourselves and I was right as rain.

Day 3 (Verrès to Pont St Martin)

The pont in Pont St Martin

I pinged awake at 6:15am with the most genius of ideas. I packed, grabbed breakfast to take away, jumped on a train back to the car. I drove to the campsite for that night, dumped my huge bag, putting only the absolute essentials in Pixie’s pack, drove back to Verrès, left the car and started walking. Genius.

And what a glorious day that was. I felt light, physically and mentally. I took turns with the dog to carry the pack (it slung over my shoulder pretty comfortably and weighed no more than 1kg) and we fairly skipped on.

I was beginning to learn that despite finishing every night feeling done in that getting up every morning was a fresh start. The weather was glorious again and we made good progress, stopping for a proper lunch in Hône and then trotting on towards our campsite.

The going was much easier and gentler. To be honest, much as the Aosta valley is beautiful, it’s not much different to where we live - they even speak French fluently. And if I wanted to torture myself walking up and down hills with a huge pack on, I could just walk out my front door and do that any day.

This was starting to feel like Italy. Rolling trails, tiny mediaeval villages, vineyards, open fields, secret pathways under vines and alongside streams. Utterly glorious.

We sauntered into camp around 5:30pm and after feeding the dog I ordered a panaché (a shandy), tired but bloody chuffed with myself after a great day.

And as the time came to pitch my tent, I went to pick up my bag and discovered it had been kept safe all day in the most delightful little cabin with a double bed and electricity and so without a moment’s pause I said, “How much?” For €30 it was mine for the night.

Cheating? Bailing? Not living the adventure? Bugger that. It was my adventure and the best thing about it was that I could decide at any time how it worked out. I slept like a log, not even noticing the mosquitos that fairly ate me alive until I woke up at 8:30 looking like I had chicken pox… Oh well.

Day 4 (Pont St Martin to Ivrea)

Oh what a joy to start late after breakfast. I had a loose plan to walk to Borgofranco d’Ivrea to get the 2:30pm train and then get back to the car and home.

Only that wasn’t the end of the “section” and that didn’t sit right with me, so I shouldered the heavy bag once more (although lighter as no more food for the dog meant I shifted some of my stuff to her pack) and we headed out again feeling refreshed and relaxed.

What a glorious place Piemonte is. I took photos all day. We worked hard, walking almost without stopping for over 5 hours, but it felt joyous and calm and like I was doing what I came here to do - just put one foot in front of the other and soak it all in.

We finally arrived in Ivrea as the 3:34 train pulled out the station but an hour sitting in the station cafe was actually very pleasant. We ate and drank, she slept and I pondered the return to normal life.

I arrived home at 7pm to discover an immaculate house, happy family and, best of all, cake waiting for me!

I loved Piemonte. So beautiful.

What did I learn?

It is vitally important for me to do something that makes me excited and takes me away from normal life and people I know. To allow time to stretch outside the boundaries of school and activity hours and be mine alone to do with what I want.

I LOVE that this is a plan that will take me around 10 years to fulfil (it’s c. 1000km to Rome from Gd St Bernard) and that with minimal planning I can just up and go once or maybe even twice a year.

I also love that I adapted to the challenges and found ways to enjoy even the hard days. I worked really hard to keep walking, especially the first two days but decided that the payoff has to be somewhere comfortable to sleep. As Glennon Doyle puts it, and I quote loosely, “at the end of your life there will be no prize for she who suffers the most”. Allowing the actual hard part to challenge me is fine, torturing myself with lack of sleep and carrying insane amounts of kit is not.

I accepted those first few days of anxiety as something I do and can expect and work on for my next trip away.

Italy has a LOT of really really barky dogs, thankfully mostly behind fences. And Italians love dogs, especially ones with tiny doggy backpacks on. They also do not pick up poo very much.

My Italian lessons during lockdown were bloody well worth it. I can safely manage my way through basic day to day speaking and asking for help.

Next time, I am going super lightweight but still going to wing it and find somewhere to sleep on the hoof. It’s fun.

The Italy we regularly whizz by on the motorway is way more interesting and intriguing than we see from a car window. It’s worth visiting, especially as I was only a maximum of two hours from home (by car).

The anxiety draining away felt so lovely. Heavy, like the icy hand holding up my insides had melted and dropped them down to where they are supposed to be. But also light, because I found myself smiling and laughing at old memories I hadn’t thought about for a long time.

And lots more, but four days of my inner chat would bore even the selfless Via Francigena pilgrims of old…

Facts

Pixie, my super, hardcore mountain dog, and I walked approx 85km in four days. I am very proud of us both.

You can download the app “Via Francigena”.

You can also do the route by bike (but it is not considered as “worthy”).

There are quite a few bits on main roads which suck the life out of you, are hard on joints and were hot and uncomfortable for the dog, but they just serve to make the rest of it seem even more glorious.

Blister count: 1 proper one, managed with compeed and a day without the pack and two “hotspots” - not too bad for my princess feet!

The red dot pulses with where you are and you can zoom right into see the route

The Climb

With apologies to Miley Cyrus for pinching her song title, here is a long-ish blog about 36 hrs in the mountains with my husband.

I live in the mountains. In the Swiss Alps, no less. I see them every single day. Even as I lie here in bed, I can see them out my window.

I have climbed them on skins and skied on them in the winter. I have hiked and run on the sunnier, well-trodden paths in summer and autumn. I have cycled over their tarmacked cols and sweated buckets in the process. And I have oohed and aahed over how beautiful they look at all times of the year.

I considered myself to be someone who knows mountains fairly well. Pfft, well that turned out to be nonsense!

My husband, Graham, is a driven, high achieving, goal oriented person. I could write a whole bog post on that alone, but maybe another time. His current goal is to climb all the 4000m peaks in Switzerland (i.e. all the mountains over 4000m).

He spends a lot of time pursuing this goal and I spend a lot of that time wondering what sort of far-too-young widow I would be. Often, though, I think ignorance is bliss, because despite the tales of derring-do he reports and the beautiful pictures he takes combined with the large number of mountaineering adventure books I have read, I have never actually been “up there”.

Mountain man

It’s no secret to anyone that knows us or who followed my “Mummy School” posts through lockdown that we often have a tempestuous marriage. A great team when we pull together, we are a downright shambles when we annoy the hell out of each other and start pulling in opposite directions.

We have been trying to do more stuff just the two of us but lockdown plus school holidays has made that more difficult than usual. Not unusual in these crazy days, but difficult nonetheless.

And so it was that Graham decided that we should climb a mountain together. Metaphorical or what?

He wanted me to share in the hard slog, the daybreak Alpenglow, the camaraderie of the mountain huts and the pleasure of a day’s hard work “in the hills” (as my dad would call it).

And for the sake of our marriage and the fact that for once I didn’t have to organise a damn thing, I agreed.

We left the kids and the dog, scattered amongst good friends, and left home at 5am on Tuesday morning. After a 2.5hr drive to Italy and a 30 minute cable car, we arrived at Passo dei Salati-Punta Indren at 3275m.

Kinky boots

By this point I was harnassed up, with jangly things I don’t know how to use clanking from my waist, wearing big mountaineering boots and crampons. Anyone who has followed any of my adventures before will know that I have the most easily blistered feet on the planet. The wrong kind of flip flops can leave me hobbling, so this was a concern as I prayed to the pre-emptive compeeds and anti-chafing powder to keep me pain-free!

The idea was to take a day to acclimatise to the altitude and then head to the Gnifetti hut, stay overnight and attempt Parrotspitze the next day. So far, so nervous but good.

We roped up (we were on a glacier with stunningly beautiful but potentially lethal crevasses) and off we went. Pace was good, I was nervous but chattering and listening to Graham’s advice as we walked up.

The plan apparently was to summit Punta Giordani at 4046m. The word apparently is important here because I was not aware of their being a summit in day one’s plan, the significance of which will become clear.

This was supposed to be an “easy” climb, a simple plod up the glacier and pop up on the top. I wasn’t sure what easy was supposed to mean and having pushed myself to do some pretty hard things in the past, I didn’t think too much of the clambering over rocks in inch long crampon spikes. (Side note: the unnatural sound and sensation of pointed metal on rock is deeply unnerving.)

A large icy patch without much snow had my heart rate elevated as I struggled initially to understand that I had to roll my feet with the mountain so that I had as many points of the crampons in contact with the surface as possible. It’s not for anyone with weak ankles, this game!

We passed that and it got snowier again but steeper and nearing the 4000m mark my breathing was laboured. A couple sped past us, a woman leading a very puffed out man, and we exchanged the customary “buongiorno”. The views behind us were stunning.

Some time later, I had to resort to 40 steps, stop, deep breaths, repeat. I was feeling a little teary, but remembered from previous ski mountaineering adventures that altitude can do funny things to your brain and emotions and I was now higher up than I had ever been. Mostly, I was feeling ok though.

We could see the couple stopped for quite a while before we reached them, only about 100m from the summit. They were waving and shouting now about how they were stuck on a band of rock surrounded by ice and didn’t know how to proceed up or down. She was scared and as it was apparent that Graham was the most experienced in the group, we all looked to him for guidance. And this is where my day took a turn for the worse.

At Graham’s suggestion, they all took their crampons off to tried to climb the bit of rock. Too slippy. I was happy to have stood dumbly and not removed mine. My anxiety levels were rising dramatically as my actual physical lifeline was slipping down a rock on the side of a mountain.

Crampons back on and Graham clambered with reasonable ease over the icy part and shouted “it’s fine, just come up”. By this point, the fear from the woman next to me had leached well and truly into me and I froze. She had asked for help getting down, Graham was trying to go up and it all got a bit confused. Both her partner and me stood and waited for instructions from our lead climbers.

At this point, I called “red light, I’m tired and scared, I want to go down now”. Now, I KNOW that this means no matter what the other person wants to do, they must 100% honour the feelings of their climbing partner.

So what did he do? He untied himself, said “I’ll just go to the summit and come back for you.” And left his very novice wife at 4000m with two panicking people and disappeared round the back of a rock.

Yes, you read that correctly. That is exactly what he did. And at that point, for the first time in our tempestuous marriage, I really, truly thought “this is it. I am getting off this mountain, I am packing up the kids and I’m out. Everything I thought was wrong has just manifested itself here on an exposed mountainside as summit fever has addled his already selfish brain.” But with a lot more swear words.

Beautiful but terrifying

The other couple sorted themselves out and made their way gingerly down the ice and soon I was on my own, not knowing what to do. Soon, Graham appeared beside me and said “it’s totally fine, let’s just go up.” And then all hell broke out of me. Sobbing, shaking, shouting and more pure white angry than I have ever felt, I demanded he get me off this fucking mountain and home - IMMEDIATELY.

I knew then, even as I was wailing and shaking, that I was not actually in any immediate danger. I was perched on a band of rock and perfectly safe (relatively speaking), but the fear, betrayal and loss of confidence I felt at that moment was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

After trying unsuccessfully to get me to move up the mountain to the oh-so-close summit, he lowered me down the icy patch below the rock as I freaked out, having to find grip on the points of my crampons, and then a few minutes later we were on the softish snow again where we carried on down the way we had come up.

Feeling calmer and more composed, we stopped and I looked him in the eye and told him I would go on to the hut that night for the experience of it, but not climb the mountain the next day. Most importantly, he was never ever to ignore my feelings and fear again or I would go straight home. Non-negotiable.

He explained that he had thought he had made it clear he was scouting the summit for him to bring me and the other couple up behind him but fully realised that he had cocked up and not communicated with either me or the other team that had asked for his help.

It is rare that Graham makes a full and unreserved apology but when he does it is so obvious that he knows he was wrong and that he is genuinely sorry that I always forgive him. It will take a while to forget, but we were ok and my packing plans were shelved.

When he asked if I regretted not getting to the summit, my reply was that as I hadn’t known there was a summit to be had, I was satisfied with how much I had pushed myself and was ready to go down.

We set off and soon I was fairly skipping down the mountain on my new-found confidence in my crampons. I was in the front, the snow was softer and grippier with the midday sun and I was on crevasse-spotting duty which kept me occupied and I was even chattering and telling stories as we descended.

Crevasses - beuatiful but lethal. As close as I could get for a photo!

It reminded me of the prologue to a book I am reading by an incredible adventurer, aptly named Jenny Tough. She finds herself in an actual life and death situation, swears that if she gets out alive she will simply can her expedition and go straight home. Inevitably, as soon as she is safe, has cried hard, fast, snotty, sobbing tears at the relief of it all, she simply picks up her pack and carries on.

We descended almost back to the lift and as I had acquiesced and decided to stay in the hut - it’s no romantic night sharing a mountain hut with a lot of smelly, snoring mountaineers, but it was still a night away from home together - we started round the mountain to the path that led up to it. I had been promised exceptional food in this particular hut. And wine. So I was in!

Now began the second adrenaline-filled part of my day.

There were two paths to the Gnifetti Hut. I said to Graham, when offered the choice, that I would prefer longer and less steep as I was already tired and a bit wrung out. When we got to the divergence, it said Rifugio Mantova to the left and Rifugio Gnifetti to the right. I was easily persuaded by my now forgiven lead climber that actually we really had to go right as he wasn’t sure it would all lead to the same place.

I looked up and I thought, well, it said an hour in the guidebook, how hard can it be?

Famous last words. Bear in mind we were still wearing big stiff mountaineering boots, carrying a pack with ice axes on the back and I was tired and a little bit wobbly already. And so we start following what can only be described as a rocky outcrop up a sheer cliff.

Can you see the route up this “wall of death”?

Despite living in the mountains, loving skiing and ski mountaineering and having jumped off some fairly high edifices in my life, attached to bungees/harnesses etc, I actually have a reasonable amount of vertigo. I know, WHAT??? I HATE rock climbing, even in the tiny proper shoes and harnessed up and attached to the rock.

And suddenly it just wasn’t fun AT ALL anymore. For half an hour we walked, scrambled, teetered and hauled ourselves up a rockface I couldn’t even look down. Panic struck at least three times as I howled with fear and misery. Sobbing loudly as Graham quietly coaxed me up via ferrata style ladders, metal rungs in the rock and sections so slick there were ropes on the side for support. All with a seriously vertiginous drop to the right.

I consider myself to be quite adventurous, pretty brave and all in all a fairly tough cookie, but this was next level actual, visceral fear. Again, I recognise that probably other than throwing myself off the mountain, I was probably pretty safe. But as anyone with vertigo will attest to, that’s exactly what you think you’re going to do - throw yourself off the mountain.

When we finally popped out at the top, Graham said “I can see the hut” but more sobs wracked my poor adrenaline-filled body as I looked up. And up. And up. It seemed miles away and I was already so fried, I couldn’t think straight.

We had to put our crampons back on, traverse a hideously steep glacier on which the snow was melting and melt water was gushing down in small rivers. Bad enough, but I was ok on my crampons so just put one foot in front of the other and watched Graham’s boots the whole way.

And then, as I looked up to the hut from the snow and ice, my last nerve gave way and I saw that to get to the eagle’s nest, high on a cliff, I had to climb up a via ferrata, including ladders, rungs and overhangs.

Now you know when you read about people saying their minds have to be stronger than their bodies in difficult situations and you think “gosh, you’re so strong, I would never manage that”? Turns out sometimes you have no choice but to go forward.

I was hooked to the first ladder, tears streaming but quiet now, as Graham climbed up like a monkey and belayed me from the top (he had me hooked into the mountain from the top, so even if I slipped, I wouldn’t go anywhere).

Yup, it really was that horrific…

I am always aware in situations where I feel like this that no matter what panic is gripping me, how utterly out of my comfort zone I might be, that no-one else can get me out of there. I can be helped and coached and supported but I cannot be physically lifted or carried so out of the corner of my mind comes the hideous truth that if I don’t move, we are all in serious trouble.

So I muttered to myself “just keep going, just keep going” over and over and over as I put one foot up and then the other, one hand up and then the other. And once at the top I stumbled onto the terrace of the hut, where people were enjoying beers and a laugh and lay down on the floor and once more sobbed my heart out.

Winston Churchill once said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.” Well, for most people there that day it may have been a lovely day in the mountains, but for me I felt I had pushed through the fiery pits of hell and was now stuck in Satan’s own mountain hut, furiously trying to think of ways I could legitimately call for a helicopter to get me back down.

As the evening wore on and I ate and had a drink, I started to feel calmer. I was still insisting that I would not be climbing our intended peak in the morning, but even I wasn’t convinced by my protestations. I was more tired, mentally fried and sore than I had been for a while so the legendary good food, camaraderie and excitement of the most glorious sunset from 3647m mostly passed me by.

Eventually, I drifted off into a fitful sleep and all too soon it was 4am and time for breakfast and more mountains…

Rifugio Gnifetti - access bottom left, that’s the stroll up after the ladders…

Now, you may be wondering - how did I cope with the downclimb of the cursed via ferrata? Well, one of the reasons I agreed to do the following day’s climb is because out of the other side of the hut, it’s four steps down to the glacier and away you go….

So, headtorches on, off we set in the pitch black at 5:05am. Weirdly, I am way more relaxed about heights, mountains etc in the dark. I think it must be to do with not being able to see the potential death traps??

On day two, I was on more familiar ground. I’ve started many a ski mountaineering race at that time of the morning and I actually really like the quiet plodding up the hill in the cold and dark. Only the sound of your breathing and the crunch of the snow for company.

By this point I was familiar with the use of my crampons, I was acclimatised and I know how to dig in and trudge with purpose. We took it really steadily, and we stopped several times for removing layers, changing gloves, eating, looking behind us at the sunrise, but only two other groups passed us, which meant we were moving at a fairly tidy pace.

I started to feel pleased with myself, despite the fact that the two songs going round in my head were “The Sweet Escape” (that made me giggle when I realised what I was singing) and “Waaaaaaah, Bodyform” (yup, perfect timing. If you know, you know. Screw white jeans on a bicycle, this was next level extreme activity!)

My body hurt everywhere and the steep bits were tough going, but as soon as it flattened out and my body sighed with relief, my brain replied “oh, this is a bit boring”. What is wrong with me???

The wind picked up and as we came on to the plateau below the Margherita Hut (Europe’s highest hut at 4554m!) we stopped to put on hard shells (windproof jackets) and big gloves. We could see so many well-known mountains from there but we could also see the top of our intended summit, the Parrotspitze, and it had snow billowing off it.

The familiar rise of heart rate and adrenaline started to kick in as Graham pointed out the route, which appeared to stop at a rocky outcrop (similar to the previous day’s first drama site). I decided to trust him and to push my personal fears aside as I knew he really wanted this for me and for his tally.

We climbed higher, now well over 4000m with the wind whipping us quite wildly now. At one point I had to stop as the tips of my fingers were dangerously and painfully cold, but several arm swings later we pushed on.

As we neared the rocky outcrop, the panicky vertigo started to kick in and I worked really hard to keep it together. Graham popped up effortlessly, found a solid rock to belay me and hauled me up over the icy steps as my crampons fought for purchase and I used my ice axe properly for the first time ever.

Small sobs of “I can’t do this” rose up but eventually I was on the rocks, which we climbed, our crampons screeching as we went. And then onto a ridge of snow with about 100m to get to the summit.

By this time the wind was howling, the snow was blowing and suddenly there was another team coming down towards us. Graham said casually, “just step to the side”. If I could have I’d have swung for him. He was completely fine, albeit cold, but I was frozen into a half-shut knife position, unable to look anywhere but my boots and he wanted me to MOVE TO THE SIDE!

He dug me a little ledge and stood slightly behind me and they squeezed past. I was nearly sick with the fear as the ridge got narrower and I was struggling to stand up so I called it. 10m from the summit, I very clearly had a vison of our two kids. With us standing on a snowy ridge in a howling gale, despite Graham being very comfortable and not worried, my fear of not seeing them again was so real that I said “enough”.

This time he heard me and he listened. We turned round and we came off that bloody mountain. He awarded us the summit as there was no defined point (no cross, no cairn) just one bit slightly higher than the rest.

We got over the rocks, down the icy part and onto the snow, where I got my slightly belated summit photo taken and despite Graham trying to persuade me to do two more easily reached summits, I put on my determined face of steel and declared, not for the first time on this trip but definitively for the last time, “I want to go home.”

Just after the summit at 4432m. You can see it along the ridge on the right. Looks pathetic from this angle! (photo: Graham Friend)

We fairly trotted down the hill, marvelling at the crevasses now glistening in full sunshine. I was so sad they were so dangerous because they are so incredibly beautiful and fascinating that I wanted to stare right into every one! Keep moving, came the chat from the front end of the rope.

We were in the Mantova hut drinking tea and eating apfelstrudel by 10am, having summitted Parrotspitze at around 7:30am and all we had to do was take the “easy” route back round to where we had started the day before.

Adding to a cairn on the way home (photo: Graham Friend)

By midday we were in Gressoney-St-Jean having lunch in shorts and t-shirts and after a large dose of caffeine, we drove home and collapsed in a small heap.

The flippant but good news from all of this? Not one single blister. This must be some kind of record but also I think it was a little reward for all the other suffering!

The actual good news? Well, we managed our mountain. We spent 36hrs together, doing something hard. There were many points where I had to repeat to myself Glennon Doyle’s words from her incredible book “Untamed” where she says: “I can do hard things”. This wasn’t a hard trip for Graham but it was so far our of my comfort zone, I didn’t even recognise the zone anymore.

Do I feel proud of myself, Graham keeps asking me? It’s a hard one, because I cried A LOT. My levels of fear were so great sometimes and I let that get the better of me more than once. I let that fear tell me I was weak and pathetic and stupid for even agreeing to do it. I am, probably unnecessarily, a bit embarrassed at the level of hardcore snottering and crying I did, but I still did it so maybe that’s something to be proud of.

Lessons learned? I still love the mountains, but I only really love the trudging up the snow pack; hard work but stable, physically demanding but all that is needed mentally is a bit of grit in the face of body fatigue. However, the exposed rockfaces and ridges, the skittering crampons over ice and stone? You can keep that.

Contemplating a tough couple of days before the descent to the valley floor.

I would like to finish by saying that despite the very real anger I felt at Graham for that stupid error of judgement on day one, I am very grateful for his calm, kind, (otherwise) always thoughtful and selfless protection of me on the mountain.

He really knows what he’s doing, he loves sharing it and he is a good and patient teacher. It’s a side of him I don’t always see or I perhaps I choose to ignore because of all the noise of real life, but it is one of the reasons I fell in love with him 17 years ago and it was good to be reminded of it, even though I'd rather have been reminded in a less extreme, hostile environment!

For example, in a spa hotel beside the sea, cocktail in hand. Ah, well, a girl can dream…

Still married. It was a close run thing though… ;-)

My Body is Amazing - or How I Learned to Love the Only Body I’ll Ever Have.

“Seriously? You think you’re a supermodel?”, I hear you cry. “The media tells us that no normal women thinks their body is amazing.”

I wrote a post on Instagram the other day, using a picture of me in a bikini in our garden in the Alps. I hesitated to post it but not for the reasons you might think… I hesitated because I am not used to publicly showing that much skin. I’m British and we’re a bit reserved about that sort of thing. Well, I am, anyway. I also don’t really care for gratuitous flesh shots to get likes.

I did not hesitate, however, because I was worried about how my body looks. And when I wrote that in the post I realised that it was 100% true. The kind of true you know is true, because it doesn’t even occur to you until you write it down and think “wow, I really believe that. Well done me.” I am not critical of my body. Let me say that again. I am not critical of my body.

It has not always been this way.

I am very tall (179cm/ 5’10.5”) and was taller than all the boys until I was about 15. The death knell of any teenage romance (well, that’s what I tell myself the reason was…).

I have been called thunder thighs, told I have fat ankles, been told by a drunken football player whose advances I was trying to rebuff, “F*ck off, you flat-chested lesbian!”. How I wish my 19 yr old self had been less shocked, mortified and teary and more able to ask why on God’s green earth that was even an insult, but I wasn’t too woke in those days. I’ve been sidled up to on a dance floor, where I tend to follow the advice of “dance like nobody’s watching” and told “you’re not as hot as you think you are”.

I was so self-conscious of having no boobs that I had this dress made with a super high neckline and only wanted it photographed from behind. Age 15.

Like most girls and women, I have taken these comments to heart way more than I should have. I have thought at various times that I was fat, chunky, unattractive and unsexy. I look at photos of me when I was that awkward 19 year old and try to tell her with hindsight how f*cking beautiful and perfectly in proportion she was.

The “thunder thighs, flat-chested lesbian, wild curls” era. Age 19.

Here are the objective facts about my body:

When I am very fit, and feel better and stronger than ever, my chest shrinks to make me appear more like an adolescent boy with hips than a full-blooded woman.

Thanks to some fairly impressive weight gains and losses over years (e.g. I put on nearly 20kg in my first pregnancy), I have stretch marks on the back of my thighs and on my bum. A masseuse, mid massage, once asked me if I had got them from gaining or losing weight! Needless to say, I didn’t relax much for the rest of the session.

I have the most impressive set of 1970s scars on my thighs from corrective hip surgery when I was a toddler. And when I was a child I was very very self conscious about them, because people always ask about them. Luckily I am Scottish so shorts and bikinis were not exactly every day occurences during my childhood!

They come from double hip dysplasia at birth which was not detected early and the broken femurs, pins and enforced leg rotations in plaster for a year have led to wonky knees and a leg length difference.

This weirdly shows most in my shoulders, the right one sitting quite obviously higher than the left. (Try asking me to carry a bag on my left shoulder and watch me sweat…)

I have teeth that were not quite sorted despite the years of braces, a chipped front tooth and thin hair that was too curly until I had my babies and now too straight.

My feet blister just looking at an uncomfortable pair of shoes or thinking about going for a run, hike, ski tour. My toenails will NEVER recover from training for an ultra marathon.

First holiday with my now husband. I thought I was fat. FFS. (Good scar shot!) Age 30.

Doing downward dog in yoga makes my stomach do that thing that mainly women who have had babies will experience; the weird soft skin lengthways pouch.

And I have hyper keratosis, which means a lot of the skin on my arms and legs is slightly bumpy as if I have an allergy or goosebumps. I avoided short shorts like the plague until my 40s. Also, because of my “fat knees” (this is not objective, quite obviously ragingly subjective).

And I have hated all of this. All of it. At various times. Not always and not all the time, but enough to be a thing.

But not anymore. And I didn’t even realise it until the other day when I wrote that IG post and I felt this rush of gratitude for not hating my body anymore.

I will tell you why:

This body was born with two dislocated hips and the resulting surgery left me with mis-aligned knees which can occasionally be painful. But to date this has never stopped me doing anything I wanted to. And those scars make me distinctive, unique and I actually think they’re pretty cool (when I even remember they are there).

I am so grateful for the obvious wonkiness because it has given me, through physio, osteo and scans over the years, a really good awareness of my body and how to look after it.

This body was knocked down by a moped (aged 9) and a car (aged 17) and thankfully came off almost unscathed.

This body has fallen off inummerable horses and pistes (and a few tables…) and still gets back up and keeps going. It has endured its left wrist being broken THREE times (being pushed over by a boy at school, an ice skating incident in Austria and learning to snowboard in New Zealand, in case you’re wondering).

This body tolerated, with remarkable strength, much of my early adult life doing as little sport as I could possibly get away with, seriously crappy food and a pickling amount of alcohol. As well as over 10 years as a sometime smoker.

This body has endured two rounds of IVF, two pregnancies and given birth twice - once naturally with no pain relief and once by emergency c-section, following induced labour (the most amount of pain I have ever experienced).

The beginning of the “dance like no-one’s watching” era, mortifying my friend Geoff somewhere in Europe (I think Amsterdam). Age 21.

This body has breastfed two babies, showing that a flat chest can do exactly the same job as its more curvaceous counterpart.

This body has been more sleep deprived than I care to remember, been fed some utter sh*te over the years and been pushed beyond any limits I could ever have dreamed of.

This body has gained and lost a LOT of weight and I now know that those stretch marks don’t matter a hoot. They are battle scars and I wear them with pride.

This body allowed me, at age 38, to start doing sport and from there to a multi-stage ultra marathon and the world’s toughtest ski mountaineering race, wtih several other adventures in the mix. And despite the evident shock, has adapted so that I am fitter and healthier at age 47 than I was when I got married aged 33 even though nearly all the things mentioned above are still part of how I look.

This very tall body married a man two inches shorter than it, who doesn’t care if I wear heels and who, in part, married me for my very long legs.

This body knows how to ski, ride a horse, kitesurf, run, cycle, ski tour, do yoga, dance (like no-one’s watching, obvs) and myriad other activities.

This body is strong and most of the time, pretty fit. It just seems to get better and fiercer as the years go on.

So when I look at my body, I no longer mind all the things I used to hate. I sometimes notice them but now I see a body that has endured a great deal but that still carries me and my crazy ideas into the next adventure. I see a body that is so much better for how I look after it and how I feel about it.

I had to be forced into wearing these shorts bought for me for for my hen night. And man, look at that booty! Age 33.

How did I get to this point?

How did I go from a well-proportioned, healthy-looking girl and young woman who was often convinced she was unattractive, chunky and never quite the “right shape” to someone who looks in the mirror, sees the unevenness, the scarring and lumps and bumps and says, “hello, amazing body”?

I think I got here by being able to see what my body was capable of, by realising that it was there to be used for more than attracting boys, for more than “fitting a mould” of how a woman should look.

I think an inkling of it started giving birth to my son, aged 35. I had such an unshakable faith that my body was able to do what it was designed to do that despite labouring for 16 hours and being rushed to hospital for unexplained bleeding, I still managed to deliver an almost 9lb (3.95kg) baby with no pain relief or intervention. I later likened it to running a marathon, which my husband had recently done, so that he understood the journey and the pride I felt in myself for carrying and delivering this baby.

12hrs post birth - probably the start of the appreciation of my body’s amazing capabilities. Age 35.

It was helped by taking up sport and learning how to eat more healthily and how to look after myself properly instead of just worrying about whether I looked like Pamela Anderson or Cindy Crawford (insert “perfect” body of your choice) and just sort of magically hoping that I would wake up one day and be petite, toned and curvy (for example). Becasue that’s what it was, unattainable wishing and hoping. And it’s bullshit.

I learned that hurting while training, suffering with stiff muscles the day after and fueling myself with good, nourishing food not only made me feel better but made my body more useful! I could do stuff I couldn’t do before, like ride a bike with friends, go for a run, go skinning before breakfast. Yoga made me more flexible and training made me stronger. The right food kept me feeling alert and full of energy.

My first cycling sportif. Geneva to Lausanne. The face says it all - I did it! Age 38.

Competing for up to 14 hours in a race became an attainable goal and all because my bloody wonky, bumpy, scarred body was firing on all cylinders.

So, even now, when I stop training for a while, eat more pizza than normal and my jeans don’t fit quite as well as they normally do and I get a bit soft around the middle, I don’t hate my body. I still celebrate it, because it has and will hopefully continue to charge forward and conquer all the dreams and plans I have.

I give myself a break and I take small steps back to where I feel strong and healthy again. I start to do a bit more exercise, I make our family meals more nutritious. Because I want this body to keep going and to keep me in adventures for as long as possible.

I refuse to beat myself up anymore about not being uber fit all the time and about sometimes eating enough chocolate to make Willy Wonka wince.

I don’t look like anyone else and I never will. It is liberating and fairly emotional to realise that all those things I hated or felt self-conscious about are now things I either don’t notice anymore or I think, “who gives a f*ck?”

And also, I have a daughter. Despite all the fears and misgivings I have about being a good mum, the one thing I am sure I am giving her is positive body image. I truly believe that because I love and respect my body that she will see this, absorb it and hopefully feel the same way about hers now and as she grows into the incredible woman I know she will be. (That, though, is a subject for another time…)

So, there you go. My body is amazing.

And truly, so is yours.

Ask yourself how has your body served you and taken you on a journey? How would your life be different if you stopped wishing you looked like someone else and embraced the only body you’ll ever have?

And PS, dancefloor stalker, I am as hot as I think I am. Hotter, even… Stick that in your pipe!

Suited and booted for the 1st Half Marathon des Sables. 3 day, multi-stage, self sufficient 120km ultra marathon. Age 44.

Finishing the Patrouille des Glaciers. 14hrs 27mins overnight from Zermatt to Verbier. Age 45

Patrouille des Glaciers - a race report

A few facts:

The race – ski mountaineering: walking up mountains on skis with synthetic skins, followed by skiing down. Also some sections on foot, with skis on your backpack, when it is too steep to skin or ski, known as bootpacking. This particular skimo race only takes place every two years and is organised by the Swiss Army. It is known as the toughest team race in the world. It has two race days, Wednesday and Friday, for security reasons.

The team – (From Wikipedia)

Each patrol consists of 3 members who, in order to compete, must

• have alpine experience which ensures their capability to independently master unexpected situations under extreme conditions in an inhospitable high-alpine environment
• train to meet the physical, mental and technical requirements of the competition
• be willing to live the ‘PDG spirit‘ towards their own team, all participants and organising staff by acting fair, with caution and solidarity recognizing their limits as well as respecting nature and the unique alpine world
• have excellent skiing skills, experience in skiing while being roped up to others, experience in alpine touring and mountaineering competitions

Date - 17th April 2018

Route – Zermatt to Verbier, Canton of Valais, Switzerland

Distance – 53km (Published distance. Actually 61km, with new start)

Vertical metres climbed - 3994m (actually over 4000m)

Km of effort - 110km. Used in mountain races to show the equivalent of a race without altitude difference – there is an equation for working it out, ask me if you want it!!

Time allowed – 17hrs

Race record (set 21st April 2018) – 5hrs 35 mins (mind blowing)

Pippa Middleton’s finishing time in 2016 – 14hrs 54mins (the relevance of this will come…)

Our finishing time – 14hrs 27mins 14seconds

Number of teams taking part – 1600

Number of all women’s teams finishing the full distance – 24

I have sat down several times to write this and have failed to get past the facts section. That’s the easy part. Describing my journey to race day and the race itself is massive. Graham seems to reel race reports off so matter of fact but it is crazily hard for me put these thing into words! I’m pretty sure Annabelle and Leysa will remember it differently, but here is my version!

Background

Two years ago, after a brilliant winter’s training, Leysa and I had our attempt at the small PdG cancelled due to bad weather. Three nights before Annabelle and her team had started the big race but for various reasons had not been able to finish. A pretty disappointing end to an otherwise great season for all of us.

Leysa and I had spent that whole winter saying “I can’t imagine anything worse than training for the big PdG and then skinning all through the night” but about a couple of weeks after our aborted short course attempt, we both had the same crazy idea: “Let’s do it!”

Annabelle pretty immediately said she would be interested if we were looking for a third. She and Leysa didn’t know each other but I thought they would get on, so a year later I rounded them up and we started to make a plan. I entered the Half Marathon des Sables (I only do big races with French names it would appear) so that I would be fit enough to start the winter of massive training with a good level of fitness.

Our first hurdle was that Leysa, who had planned to spend the winter here, had decided with her husband to stay in the UK. She offered to pull out and let our replacement take her place, but we said no. I was confident that she would do her utmost to stay fit and be here as often as she could to train and Annabelle trusted my judgement.

The second hurdle came when I landed a job that took me away for two weeks over New Year, plus Tristan being in hospital for a week with appendicitis, plus all my skimo commentating commitments, which meant I basically did no training at all for almost a month. I came back at the end of January and I also was pretty much requesting to be replaced because I was so terrified of not being fit enough. Leysa immediately dragged me up a 2000m climb to prove to me that I was perfectly capable and after that the real work started.

Goals

When we first got together we had made a rough plan of how long we thought we would take and what our goals were. This was honed over the months but this is what it ended up as:

1. Work together as a great team and finish as friends with incredible memories to share
2. Best case: Under 14 Hours
3. Next best scenario: Faster than Pippa Middleton in 2016 (14hrs 54mins)
4. Final case: just finish in the 17hrs allowed

You might wonder about the finishing as friends thing, but I have seen innumerable team cross that line not even looking at each other, never mind talking and it was absolutely vital to all three of us that this would not happen to us.

The Pippa Middleton goal was, hilariously, one we all thought of individually so it became our mantra!

My own personal goal and motivation throughout the winter was to cross the line in Verbier with the kids running beside me. It was something I had seen so many other people do since I began watching the finish of this race in about 2008. It was what kept me going when I didn’t want to go training or wanted to come off the mountain early. “You will never be able to run through Verbier if you don’t do this last interval session!” was muttered to myself more than once!

Training and Challenges

If you read my race report from Half Marathon des Sables or you have known me for more than 6 years, you will know that I have not been sporty for very long. Taking on these massive challenges without a lifetime of fitness is a whole different ball game to someone who has built up physical and mental strength over the years.

Thanks to Graham and his love of sport and coaching others in things he is passionate about, I had a pretty comprehensive training plan to follow, which I duly did as much as I could with kids and life to juggle. So physically I trotted along quite nicely, getting fitter and fitter.

My biggest challenge was in my head. Whenever someone would ask me who my team mates were they would take a sharp intake of breath and say “wow, they are really fit/strong/machine like/incredible”. This really really started to get to me, especially as there actually was a bit of a gap between their fitness and mine.

Annabelle is nearly 10 years younger and Leysa is about 13kg lighter than me, (which, when hauling yourself up a hill, makes a big difference). I was pretty sure I didn’t need to make those excuses for myself and so I worked harder physically, but I could not shake the “you are not strong enough, you are going to let them down”. My rational head knew that a. it was nonsense and that b. they didn’t think like that, but demons will pop up whenever you let them in.

I decided that if I had put this much effort into my body, I wasn’t about to let my mind ruin it for me and went to see Domenique Forsberg for some hypnotherapy. Even I was a bit unsure it would make a difference so I didn’t tell anyone but it was one of the best decisions I made. She was amazing and her calm and kind manner and subsequent recording for me to listen to made the most enormous difference. I finally truly believed I was an equal member of the team.

The last thing to set a cat amongst the pigeons was Graham’s exceptionally kind offer of full on race kit. Lightweight, ridiculous looking skis and boots, which while pretty much closing the remaining gap in our team’s physical abilities (I went faster once I was carrying less weight up the hill), meant that I had 5 weeks to break in new boots before the biggest race of my life.

I knew it was potentially a mistake but I ploughed on regardless and surprise, surprise my pathetic princess feet freaked out and I ended up with a badly bruised inner left ankle bone. So bad that I had to pull out of our final training race before the big race. Annoying doesn’t cover it. I am truly lucky that the girls didn’t throw a massive hissy fit at me and that they were able to race as a two.

So I took two weeks as a taper, had my boots blown out again, and got on my bike to stay in shape for the big day. My ankle recovered enough to think it would be pretty much ok on the big day.

Race Day

Finally we arrived at race day. We all felt a bit nauseous with nerves, then excited, then wobbly - in turns. We all had physical niggles, but overall I think we were all pretty confident, although fairly daunted by the task ahead. Well-meaning people kept saying “oof, the big race? Wow! That’s enormous!” D’ya think???

All along, as chef de patrouille, I had been the one to enter the races, organise the accommodation, do the kit lists, ask the questions that needed answered, remind the girls to bring their passports, remember the mandatory kit list etc. I loved it and I think the girls were happy to let me get on with it, gently taking the micky out of my sometimes OTT organisation. So it was with great squeals of joy that they realised that I was the one person who had forgotten something on the way to the station that morning. One quick stop in H&M to pick up a sports bra and we were on our merry way to Zermatt!!

We had had all our mandatory kit checked and stickered two days before so we skipped right through ID check and went to our hotel, which was two minutes from where the briefing would be later on. During lunch we went though our race plan one more time and then we went back to the hotel to lie down and get some rest. We all slept, remarkably, despite the growing nerves, and got up again at 4 to go to the briefing.

The PdG briefing in Zermatt is unlike any briefing I have ever been to before. It is as mythical as the race itself. It is in a church, there are speeches by the President of the Canton, the President of the Commune of Zermatt and following the actual race briefing we are led in a mountain prayer by the local priest.

It was very, very emotional. The speeches were in several languages (a multi lingual country demands a lot of its politicians!) and they were funny, touching and very genuinely passionate about what a huge undertaking we had ahead of us. Tears and knee squeezing were the order of the day between the three of us.

After the briefing we chatted to lots of friends who were also going that night. We were all anxious about how warm it was likely to be the following day as temperatures were unseasonably high and we have had insane amounts of snow this year. So avalanche danger was on everyone’s mind. We knew that the army would not let us out on to the course if they were in any way worried about our safety, but that was almost worse. The thought of not starting, or starting and being pulled off the course was horrendous after all the prep!

We had to wait until 7:30pm to know for sure whether it would all be going ahead as planned. Back to the hotel, kit laid out and off to dinner with our amazing support crew of Kate, Rachael, Jane and Leysa’s mum, Maggie. We ate but were soon twitching to be back “in the team bubble” – our mantra for keeping our heads when all around us was chatter and other people’s opinions/thoughts/experiences.

Once back in the room, it seemed to take no time at all until we needed to leave. Big deep breaths, final check of each other’s kit, tying Annabelle into the rope (as the youngest, we had made her the rope carrier!) and leaving the safety of our hotel for the start line.

It is hard to put into words how I felt just then. Other than slicing my finger open on my expertly sharpened edges (thanks Tracie) and bleeding all over the place, I wavered between absolute confidence that we could do this and abject fear about the challenge ahead. Graham, who has had his fair share of sporting challenges had said that this was by far the hardest thing he had ever done, so I was understandably daunted. However, an interesting sensation was the overwhelming knowledge that, all being well, we could absolutely do this.  I had never felt this before and I tried to let it wash over me and drown out the “stop being so cocky” voice that was vying for attention.

The girls were all waiting for us at the start line, where we left our civvy bags to be loaded on to the lorry to be delivered the easy way to Verbier! We were then funnelled down into an underground room where our avalanche transceivers and head torches were checked before they let us into “the pen”. Lots of chatter from the girls, the 5 minute call and a last minute hug for me from Rachael when I sobbed my heart out with the fear and tension and anticipation. I had been nervous about them being there at the start, not wanting to deviate or distract from our “bubble” but I was so so glad they were. I needed that hug like a lifeline and she just repeated over and over “I’m so proud of you, this is so huge, you’re going to be fine.” Crying again, just thinking about it.

10:45pm is a bloody weird time to be starting a race. It feels surreal, standing about in your kit, adrenaline pumping when I would normally have been in bed for about an hour already! The familiar voice of Silvano Gadin (a commentator colleague of mine and The Voice of Skimo) counted us down and we were off! We started at the bottom of the main street in Zermatt, skis on our backpacks and we ran/route marched up the street to the most incredible and unforgettable cheering and cow bells. People came out of bars and restaurants and lined the streets and it felt so magical.

We were doing it. All this time thinking and prepping and training and here we were, heading out of Zermatt for a night on a mountain range! The biggest cheers were reserved for Zermatt locals and right then I knew that although they would leave with the most support that every single step was taking us home to where our applause would deafen us.

The traditional start of the PdG was altered this year (due to too much snow) to mean that we put our skins on probably about 45 minutes earlier than usual. Aficionados of the “real start” were disappointed to not be running up the mountain in their trainers and then changing into ski boots in the dark. We, on the other hand, were delighted! We had never planned to run anyway and given my ankle worries, it was a better start for us.

We put our skins on and off we went. The first section is pretty flat and fortunately I had asked Graham what average speed we should be maintaining (in order to meet the first cut off) rather than judge by how many metres of vertical we had clocked off, because it took a very long time to gain any altitude at all.

One of my roles in the team was to set the pace and to keep an eye on time in order to keep us fed regularly. I am a stats geek so it suits me to be aware of all of that – it also distracts me, gives me something to think about and helps that teeny tiny demon voice because I feel important doing that job. (You gotta get your motivation any which way you can!)

We kept the pace deliberately easy for the first while. Not slow or lazy, but it was to be a long night ahead and we needed to not let the adrenaline get the better of us. At the first hour when I said we needed to eat and drink, we all groaned a bit but managed to chuck some food in. When I say food, I mean sugar laden bars, gels and jellies. It’s a crap and disgusting diet but it works if you manage it properly. We knew if we wanted to make it, we would have to be absolutely religious about this. The girls had many more “natural” options than me, but from the first bite of a healthy bar, I knew I would be in trouble all night. I couldn’t eat it and had to go straight to something easier to chew and swallow. It was too “big”.  This was the start of a nutrition and hydration slippery slope for me…

It was a beautiful night with stars all around us. Head torches dancing in front and behind us. Strangely, I hadn’t actually thought about being surrounded by other people. So much had I repeated “stay in the bubble” that I had forgotten that there would be other people trudging along beside us, breathing hard and facing their own demons. It wasn’t cold to start with, but I soon regretted my decision not to bring my medium weight gloves as my thumbs got colder and colder.

The other thing that people always go on about is how cold it is on Tete Blanche. At 3600m high, it’s a pretty daunting place to be in the middle of the night, but we were blessed with reasonably clement weather. It was cold but not the mythical cold that everyone talks about. Part of me was a bit disappointed not to be able to pass on the “bloody hell, it’s cold at the top” stories. But only a tiny part!

One of the things we had trained to do was how to skin roped up, how to put the rope onto our harnesses and carry on with minimum fuss. After 2hrs and 40minutes it was such an exciting milestone when for real I had to shout “I see the lights” (of the next checkpoint) and we stopped and went through our routine, like we were seasoned pros! We had also reached our first cut off point with 40 minutes to spare, which was a great boost.

We also had to put on a layer then because I was chilly. The pace to this point was good, I think we all felt good – I certainly did, despite being a bit cold and already hating my gels. The wind was getting up and we knew that what lay ahead was going to be our first big challenge. A steep climb with one of the only technical sections of the course. And ice. And altitude.

Once you start climbing above 3000m, little voices start telling you it’s too hard. They start to tell you that you can’t do it and if you are not ready for that, you can easily believe them. I felt ready for those voices and started to treat it a bit like when I am tired and think to myself “just get some sleep and it’ll be better in the morning”. Only here I kept saying to myself “it’s the altitude talking, just keep going and soon you’ll be over the top and be able to breath easier and the voices will go away.”

What I had not anticipated at all was how much route finding I would have to do as the person at the front. I think that had I known that I would have worried about it, but just being presented with it as a challenge was a godsend for me. It is easy to get bored trudging along with nothing but your breathing and your pounding heart for company. By this stage no one is really talking so having to find the least icy tracks for the team and having to weave all three of us in and out of other roped up teams all around us without getting stuck or cross was actually quite fun.

I felt really strong on that climb. We were overtaking all men teams left, right and centre and it felt so good! The night was beautiful and if I lifted my head my torch picked out the mountains around us. It was hard going but glorious.

Then we hit the first section when I realised we had potentially made a team error. None of us had couteaux with us. These are ski crampons that help when it is really icy. Annabelle doesn’t like them and I had never used them so we had agreed not to take them. BIG mistake.

The next section of kick turns built into the mountain was spectacularly icy. I was ok because I had super grippy, brand new skins on but the girls were starting to struggle behind me. They went down a few times, Annabelle’s ski came off and Leysa was not happy at all. It was really hard going, even with the help of a mountain guide who grabbed hold of the rope and pulled Leysa and Annabelle up one of the worst parts.

Once we had come out of the worst part, Leysa called for a breather and I think that was the lowest point of her whole race. It is rare for her to show how hard she is finding it, so when she asks for a stop it really means stop.

Slowly but surely we made it to the top. My memory of the order of the sections of that climb are blurred to say the least, but suffice to say that the summit of Tete Blanche was one of the best sights ever. Other than feeling a bit sick, I hadn’t really found it too challenging. I smiled and shouted to the soldiers and guides as we ploughed through and at that point in the race I truly thought to myself “well, this isn’t as hard as everyone said would be! Is that all you’ve got Tete Blanche?” 2000m out of 3994m were done and I mistakenly, as it turned out, began to think the second half wouldn’t be so bad either…

Skins off, heels clicked into bindings and we took on one of the other unique aspects of this race – skiing roped up together, in the dark, from 3600m on a glacier. Luckily the snow was amazing, powdery and grippy and at the front I quickly got into my “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 turn” rhythm.

I am the slowest skier of the three, something that had been worrying me in the lead up so it was with total joy that I heard from behind me “slow down, Catie!” A real moment of pride for me – I wasn’t slowing us down! Half way down the roped up section, a cry from behind “Allez les filles!” as the leading (and eventually winning) women’s team shot past us. Emily Vaudan is a local girl who is not just a phenomenal athlete but really lovely. She had wished us luck beforehand and was quick to congratulate us afterwards, knowing that it was us she had passed at high speed!!

At the bottom of the 10 minute roped up ski we put our skins on and skinned round and up to Col de Bertol. I had taken a gel at the top so that combined with my overall feeling of wellbeing and pride at skiing so well put me in a great mood. I shouted back “I’m having a really great time!!!” and Annabelle replied “Have you just had a gel??” Peals of laughter from us all as we battered up the last roped up climb.

At the top a very nice guide/soldier/volunteer (who knows) stowed the rope in Annabelle’s bag while we took our skins off. What a sense of achievement we felt, knowing that the rope wouldn’t be in use again for the rest of the race!

Now the craziest ski of the race began. Downhill, mostly on ice, in the dark, lit only by head torches, side slipping at great speed (the noise all around us was something else), over bumps, skirting rocks, trying to keep Annabelle in sight, while Leysa stayed behind me (never put your weakest skier at the back). On and on we went, just aching to see Arolla and our support crew. The mental high was intense, but physically I was beginning to feel really sick.

I hadn’t been able to eat any of my “natural” options (bars made with dates etc) because they felt too big and I couldn’t chew them. So I was relying on gels and jellies to give me instant sugar boosts. I was having to remind us to eat every hour but by this point, I think (tiredness makes you really stupid), my camelback wasn’t letting out any water. I thought it was frozen, so kept drinking sports drink from a soft bottle stashed in my race top but it was making me feel sicker.

When we finally saw the lights of Arolla and found the girls, I was really struggling to think what I could eat. We were so lucky that we each had individual help and Rachael was amazing. “What do you need?” is the best question you can be asked in this situation. I drank 2 cups of homemade sweet potato soup, one cup of homemade bone broth, but I could not put in anything solid. I switched out my sports drink but failed to tell anyone my camelback wasn’t working. At this point I thought it was frozen from the descent so I just shrugged it off. In hindsight, though it had been a good while since I had drunk any water.

We left Arolla in good spirits and into the darkest part of my race. We had made a team decision (against all advice) to not necessarily stay together on “the wall of death”. It is an insanely steep climb and it was so so slippy and cold. People were sliding all over the place and we had agreed that if we lost each other we would just regroup at the top (some nearly 1000m later). This, as is turns out, is a long, long way to go on your own.

I got cold, having left a vital windproof jacket with Rachael, thinking I wouldn’t need it again as we were heading into the day (it was 5:30am when we left Arolla). So I stopped to put my big jacket on. We had all set off at quite a speed and as soon as I was not the pace setter any more, it got too much for me to maintain, added to the fact that I was slipping all over the place and I fell behind.

I could see them ahead, chatting and going together. They turned round and I held up my hands and shouted “Wait!” I could see that they understood my hand signal to mean “go on” as they turned back and carried on.  This happened twice and eventually a sad, little voice rose up out of me and I actually wailed “please wait!” To no avail. They ploughed on as my demons roared out, laughing and shouting “we knew it, you’re too slow, you’re not fit enough, look at them having a nice chat together while you are puffing up here, you’re so embarrassing, you can’t keep up with your own team.”

All around us, fresh legged starters from the Arolla race were racing past me, adding to the downturn in my humour. I was never once angry with them. I knew they misunderstood me and I knew what the plan was, but I was so so low and so cold. When they finally did understand and wait for me, there was a nano second of huffing from me and mortification from them and then we carried on. Annabelle kept going, because she was cold and Leysa stopped to put on a jacket.  We force fed ourselves more sugary crap and ploughed on.

Eventually we reached the bottom of Col de Riedmatten and Annabelle said, kindly “do you want to go on the tow?” This was a big moment for her, reaching this point as it was where her team had had to abandon two years previously, so I think she was feeling strong and buoyed by beating her own demons. The tow is an elastic bungee that allows stronger team mates to pull their struggling buddy, making the effort more even between the two. We were not long from our first bootpack of the race, so I said no.

We got to the bottom of the bootpack, put our skis on our backs and started walking up the very large steps. Normally they are small, allowing you to move quite quickly without having to haul your entire body weight up on each leg every step, but these were huge and deep and tiring. However, the good thing about a bootpack is that you use a different set of muscles and the change in rhythm is as good as a rest.

At the top, the Italian guides who had been allocated to looking after the climb, helped us put our poles down the back of our packs and showed us how to hold the rope, lean backwards and walk with our feet higher than our hips, holding on to the rope and downclimb. Adrenaline spikes all over the place as the skis on our packs started to catch on the snow and rocks in the narrow couloir. Cramp in my forearms from holding the rope so tight – my life and those below me really did depend on it! 

It served to wake me up and it was fun despite the nervy descent, slipping on rocks and hoping no one above let go. We arrived at the bottom and other guides took our skins off (they had been left on when we started climbing) and then we skied down some sheet ice and over to start the trek round Lac de Dix.

By the stage it was about 8am, the sun was up and it was starting to get warm. I had still not managed to sort out my camelbak and was probably starting to be seriously dehydrated. But I also was not thinking straight, so I hadn’t told anyone yet. I felt so sick as I bullied us all into eating again. More sugary crap and on we went.

We put our skins on and started the trudge round the lake. Lots of people “skate” this but we had decided as a team to skin it. Thankfully it was left foot up and right foot down as we skated round the side of the lake as by this stage, unbeknownst to the girls, my feet were in a dreadful state. This direction of travel was at least to my advantage. My left leg is shorter than my right, so I was perfectly suited to this slightly tilted angle.

On our last big training session, I had been suffering from a poisoned toe, which was bandaged up. Without me realising for a very long time, the bandage had slipped off my toe and gone under my foot, causing the most enormous blister under a large section of my right foot. I thought it had healed enough in the intervening two weeks, but apparently not.

It had come back with a vengeance, from about two hours into the race and by this point it felt like I had on a second, slippy, painful sock. My ankle had hurt from the minute I put my boot on in Zermatt, so a reasonable amount of painkillers had been consumed by this point. In the only short section of the race when we skinned round a bowl that had the mountain on our right, the pain in my ankle nearly made me pass out.

The slog round the lake is long and hot. Again I had to say “I’m really sorry, but it’s an hour since we last ate”. Groans and begrudging compliance made me feel terrible for being the food bully, especially as I was beginning to take on less and less myself. As I say, tiredness makes you stupid.

Eventually we got to the next checkpoint at La Barma. It was a marvellous sight, not least because we were all desperate for a pee, and there were portaloos there. A longer transition with pee stop and a big glass of coke was needed. I was really, really struggling by this point. Leysa felt sick but better after fruit, a coke and a gel. I still couldn’t face eating but when Annabelle said she had had a banana I thought I could handle that, only to be told there were none left in the whole food station. Talk about crushed…

The girls ate quite a lot there but I still only managed the coke, but a big coke burp made me feel much better so once again we trundled out of transition into the last big climb of the race. I finally had the brilliant idea to jiggle my pack and lo and behold my camelback came back to life so I tried to drink as much water as I could, but it was effectively too late and I slowed to a crawl. The heat was insane.

When people have done this before I have asked, “when did you know you had made it?” and the reply is very often, when I got to the top of Rosablanche. This was the climb we started now, but I think in my head I had known from the start that we would make it (barring a disaster). However, the significance of climbing this last big mountain before heading home was not lost on me.

The girls were soon ahead of me, but despite turning round to check on me regularly and occasionally waiting, I was happy to let them go at their own pace. I was deliberately keeping myself at a pace that I knew I could manage for the next few hours and despite being physically near the end of my tether, I knew every single step was taking me home. All I wanted to do at this point was see Graham and the kids.

I started counting. I knew it was quite early for this tactic, but it was the only thing I could do to distract me from the sheer fatigue. I count to 60, then I allow myself a big deep breath a two slow paces. Then I count to 70 and do the same. Then 80 and so on until 110. Then I start again at 60. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, but it works for me. Sometimes I set up a jukebox in my head and sing songs in a made up playlist, but I couldn’t summon anything apart from Kylie “Love at first sight” so when I was fed up with her I counted again. I was mentally in good shape, despite the tiredness.

All around me, people were trudging. It was quiet in the blazing sunshine, nothing but the sound of skins in the snow and breathing. And then we could start to hear the sound of people at the top of Rosablanche and see the infamous 250m bootpack, with over 1300 steps. It is a mythical part of a mythical race and I was so excited to get there. I was imagining it would be like a Tour de France summit.

As we got to the base of the bootpack, we met Millie, Maev and Ellen, who had started in Arolla earlier. Millie saved Annabelle and I with what felt like gallons of water. I have never been so grateful – we swigged and swigged, with her permission – gave them a wave and off we set.

The girls pushed me hard up that bootpack, but I could hear the cowbells and the Alpenhorn and I knew that my best mate’s husband, Duncan, (also Graham’s team mate) was at the top with a bottle of coke.  You can hear people hollering and cheering and encouraging long before you can see them. The sun was brutal and the climb was hard. I was feeling very emotional at this point, knowing that seeing friendly faces would be so good but so hard at the same time.

It was incredible coming up there and I burst into tears when I saw Duncan. Still the girls kept pushing and wouldn’t allow us to stop, apart from a quick bite of fondue that someone offered us!

Skis on and we set off down Rosablanche. My legs were absolutely done from the climb so I jelly legged it down the hill and to this day cannot remember a single thing about that descent.

Skins on and round a bit more. Ski down to the bottom of Col de la Chaux and skin up the last climb of the day. It seemed like an insurmountable climb and my feet were, by this time, in exquisite agony. We made it to the top of the skin and boot pack and then, after a quick stash of our kit into our packs, so we looked good as we arrived in Verbier (a lot of kit gets stuffed down your top in these races, making you look like a pot bellied pig!), we headed off to join our home pistes.

We shot down past Cabane Mont Fort, I was whooping despite the utter exhaustion and over to La Chaux. Now, traditionally, the race has always made you skate round from La Chaux to Ruinettes (2km on the flat and utterly brutal) but two years ago they changed it to skip that part. We stupidly assumed it would be the same but when I got to La Chaux and caught up with Leysa, the look on her face told me my worst fear had come true.

That skate round was the lowest and most miserable part of the race. I was so slow, I had absolutely nothing in the tank. I was cursing the organisers, I hated them, I wanted to take my ice axe to them but somehow I got to Ruinettes and we blasted down our familiar pistes. It was so surreal skiing into Medran, thinking “I just came here from Zermatt”. I was desperate not to fall as my legs were so weak I had to use the front of my ski boots to just hold me up and hope for the best.

Arriving in Medran and being met by Tristan as well as Leysa’s two youngest boys and her husband Andrew (Graham’s other team mate) was amazing but I was on fumes, I could barely even take my skis off. Poor Andrew offered twice to carry them and I snapped at him “No!” I couldn’t imagine anything worse than getting this far and having someone else take my skis for the final kilometre run through Verbier.

This was it. This was the moment I had been dreaming about for nearly 10 years. It was here and the girls made me run the whole thing! I was exhausted, I had not an ounce of energy left, my feet were agony and I just wanted to lie down and stop.

But we ran and we ran and every single person I knew seemed to be lining the streets, cheering and roaring and smiling and waving. I alternated between smiling like a crazy woman and bawling and crying, howling my head off. It was everything and nothing like I imagined. It was 1000 times better and more overwhelming than I could have dreamed of. Amelie joined us and we crossed the line, exactly as I had planned all those years ago, feeling like a rock star, like the Queen, like someone who had taken on and thrashed the pants off the biggest challenge of my life. 

As long as I live, I will never forget that run. It was so overwhelming and so emotional. We had made it home and our homecoming was incredible.

When I finally did see Graham I collapsed into his arms and sobbed my heart out. Standard practice for me, but so needed. It had been so hard and so so long. My team mates are the most incredible women. We finished that race stronger and firmer friends than before. They pushed me when I needed it and they inspired me with their rock solid attitude to everything the race threw at us. I could not have asked for a better team and we are rightly proud of ourselves.

And we beat Pippa Middleton’s time! Job done.

Half Marathon des Sables - a race report

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Be warned, this is quite long and it's quite personal, so either discard without further thought or grab a cuppa and hunker down.

A few facts:

Dates; (26th – 29th Sept 2017)

Total race distance: 110km

Extra distance walked due to relocation to starts: approx. 21km

Number of stages: 3

Stage 1: 25.5km. Total time allowed: 8hrs Time taken by me: 5hrs24mins (165th)

Stage 2: 66km. Total time allowed: 25hrs. Time taken by me: 15hrs36mins (169th)

Stage 3: 21km. Total time allowed: 6hrs. Time taken by me: 4hrs6mins (175th)

My total time on the course: 25hrs8mins

My average speed: 4.5km/hr

Highest temperature: 42degrees C

Competitors on startline, day one: 271 (unconfirmed)

Competitors finished: 229

My overall ranking: 165th

My ranking in my age group: 19th (out of 29 finishers)

For someone who likes to talk and share a lot, the thought of putting to paper the entirety of this race seems very daunting. Perhaps I am too close to it still, but actually I feel quite strongly that there are parts of it that I want to keep just to myself, or share with people over a glass of wine, rather than thrash them out here. So this will be based on some learnings, rather than a blow by blow account of the event.

A quick bit of background, however. I first heard about the Marathon des Sables when I was a hard working, hard drinking, non sporty girl in my late 20s. I was utterly fascinated by a talk given by Chris Moon but pushed it aside as something that only uber sporty people would do. I have remained peripherally aware of it ever since, occasionally meeting people who have done and grilling them endlessly about the adventure and the effort. But I still never thought it was something for me.

When it was announced that there would be a Half Marathon des Sables, the first person I suggested it to, surprise surprise, was Graham. He swiftly signed up and started organising himself. It was only when our friends, David and Lizzie, did the “real” MdS this April and she assured me that all sorts of people do this, that I checked out the very generous cut off times and thought to myself “with a bit of training, I could walk that”.  And the surge of excitement at the thought of the adventure just would not go away, so I signed up and started training. Graham set me a plan and insisted I do run training as well as walking. As added motivation I decided to raise money for The British Red Cross and do the race in memory of my best friend’s mum, Liz, who died of cancer last November.

Fast forward through five months of training (some more consistent than others) a couple of trail running races, a lot of money spent on kit and a thoroughly mentally exhausting lead up to the race (husband away a lot, solo parenting taking its toll etc etc) and suddenly here I was, on the island of Fuerteventura, facing the adventure and feeling less sure of myself that I ever have done. And by that I mean that I was pretty sure I could do it, but that I had no real idea of what to expect. For someone who had never run more than 12km when I signed up for this and who had still not done more than a 34km session in training, this was the mother of all challenges. To add to it I was mentally worn out, my left piriformis muscle (lower back/top of my bottom) was making it hard to sit, stand, lie down or get comfortable in any position. I had a trapped nerve in my shoulder from climbing and the thought of carrying a 7kg bag was making me feel a bit nauseous.

We arrived, had our kit checked and walked out to the bivouac and thus started the biggest and most difficult challenge of my life.

Here, in no particular order, are some things I learned over the course of following four days. Hopefully this will give you an insight into the race. For more specific info on the terrain, the map etc, you can go the Half Marathon des Sables Facebook page and look at pics and routes.

1.    My body is amazing.

This is not something we hear people say very much but we should. It is not a vanity statement, I have wobbly bits and stretch marks like everyone else, it is a statement of fact. This body was born with two dislocated hips. To remedy this both my femurs were broken and pinned (one of them twice) and I spent a year of my toddlerhood in plaster. As a result, I have badly tracking joints which lead to sore and swollen knees. I have one leg shorter than the other, hence the recurring left piriformis pain, as it takes a massive amount of strain at the top of the shorter leg.

As a child and teenager I did as little sport and exercise as I could get away with and as an adult I did almost none. I drank too much, I smoked sometimes, I worked long, long hours and ate crap food. I basically abused this poor body.

And miraculously at the age of 39, it allowed me to take up sport and continue to improve it through exercise and better eating. This week I ran/walked for over 25hours and despite, at times, pain from my toenails to the roots of my hair, it kept going. And today, apart from my totally shredded feet (every body has a weakness – mine has feet that are prone to blisters!), I know that if I had to, I could keep going and going and going.

This week I blasted along a 10km beach, I climbed mountains, I trotted over lava fields, I powered up the sand dune to end all sand dunes. I passed younger, stronger, fitter people lying on the ground, vomiting from the heat and (after stopping to give them water and alert the medics) I powered on again. I was not fast but I felt so full of power.

And when, on the long stage, I had been on the go for 15hrs and I could see the finish but it was not getting any closer and I wanted more than anything else in the world to stop and vomit, this body kept driving me up a 25% sand dune for a further kilometre.  At which point I did vomit – I had finally pushed it further than it was ever expecting.

I love my body for allowing me to do everything I do, but this week it was a flipping rock star!

2.    Food, music and people – the power to lift and lower

Food. I think it’s fair to say that most people who know me well think that I think too much about food. That I perhaps am a bit faddy, that I try too many things. What I have been searching for years is a way of eating that doesn’t leave me tired, irritable and gives me the energy I so badly want and need. At the end of last year, with the help of an amazing nutritionist I changed how we eat and it has changed my life. I won’t go into it here but I was so determined to keep the principles of this way of eating even in the most extreme environments and while pushing my body to the limit.

I did it. I did this event without gels, without pasta/rice/potatoes and only eating “real food”. It worked and it kept me fuelled and going. I am very proud of that and that I managed my nutrition so well that I was not wobbly or dehydrated at any point.

However, what I had miscalculated was the power of food to lift and lower your spirits. After a poorly rehydrated meal in the middle of the night on the long stage, I left the check point feeling like I would be sick. This continued long into the night and I had to keep force feeding myself so I wouldn’t run out of energy, despite the fact that my electrolyte drink now tasted vile and my beef jerky was choking me.

When I stumbled into Graham’s arms at the finish of that stage at 3:30am, sobbing my heart out and he put me to bed in my damp, sandy tent, the beef jerky made a violent reappearance.

This is when I admit that the highlight of the rest day, when I spent most of it lying down, feeling sick and thoroughly exhausted was a bottle of ice cold Coke (from the organisation) and a handful of M&Ms from a fellow competitor. Even before the sugar and caffeine had a chance to kick in, the change in taste and texture had perked me up no end.

Lesson: always take something different from my “fuel” to keep my palate and my tummy happy!

Music. Inspired once again by our friend, Lizzie, I asked people to sponsor my playlist. They responded in droves and not only did I raise loads of cash for The British Red Cross, but I ended up with an epic playlist. I will publish it for anyone interested.

I wanted to do the first stage without music to really feel the sensations of the race without “back up”. I managed that and was happy to have done so.  By 20km into the second stage, however, I was ready for a lift. I plugged in and I flew into the second check point (CP), dancing and singing “Happy”! I quickly moved out of that CP and into the first of my sanity-questioning sections.

7km uphill in deep shale, without a breath of wind on a hot afternoon and the tears were triggered by Take That! I am a long time fan and having seen them in concert 4 or 5 times made me think of all the people I had been to see them with. A face scrumpling sniffle of self pity came over me as I trudged along,

Minutes later I was actually dancing as I walked. I had moments through the long stage where I couldn’t talk to anyone because the music made me so emotional. On the final day, I flew down the last hill like a woman possessed partly because of the tune blasting in my ears.

I started the final stage plugged in and the first line that came through my headphones was “Today this could be the greatest day of our lives” – Goosbumps much??

I thought of people every time their song came into my head. How long it was since I had seen them (too long in many cases), how we met, adventures we had been on together.

Personal favourites:

Maniac (from Flashdance – my hill flying tune!)

Go Hard or Go Home – Wiz Khalifa

Stronger – Kelly Clarkson

These Days – Take That

Proud – Heather Small

She Sells Sanctuary – The Cult

Insomnia – Faithless

Titanium – Sia/David Guetta

Greatest Day – Take That

Chandelier – Sia

The Climb – Miley Cyrus

The Only Way is Up – Martin Garrix

Sandstorm – Darude

Pray – Take That

Hold up a Light – Take That

Happy – Pharrell Williams

Strauss – Radetzky March

Funky Cold Medina – Tone Loc

People. People made this event so special. People we met, people I ran with, people who bolstered me when I was lower than I could ever imagine, people in our “pod” of tents.

Dave from Dorset who route marched the 10km beach with me. Dirk from Belgium who lost his dad at the beginning of the month and joined us as we battled over a technical ridge in the pitch black. Sylvie from France who was a grandmother and a MdS Morocco veteran. Big Brian, former professional rugby player from Canada. Michael, my saviour in the darkest hours of my life – who stopped me from crying, made me laugh, kept me talking, and metaphorically dragged my exhausted self up that last dark sand dune at 3:30 in the morning. The boys in our pod, one of whom was, purely coincidentally, an old friend from university, with whom we laughed more than I have laughed in a very long time.

And Graham, my husband.

I have supported Graham through some pretty challenging events. I have been with him as he suffered from sickness and diarrhea from dehydration and too many gels. I have seen him cry in pain and exhaustion and carry on anyway. I have redressed and held him as he has shaken with near hypothermia. Watched him be hooked up to a drip and put in an ambulance. I have seen his legs cramp so badly that they looked like an anatomical model of every sinew.

I have wondered, perhaps unfairly, and only in moments of fear, worry and anger at him allowing himself to get into these states, whether he would do the same for me in similar circumstances.

After 15.5hrs, physically and mentally exhausted, arriving to find him on the finish line at 3:30am – standing there all by himself just because he had an inkling I might be in soon – was one of the best sights ever. My mental strength finally gave way and I sobbed like a baby. He took my poles, carried my allotted water, led me to the tent, took off my stinking shoes and socks, made me get undressed and get into my sleeping bag. I was crying the whole time and shaking with exhaustion and bewilderment. He even checked my sick when I was freaking out it was full of blood (it was jerky). I need never have asked myself whether he would be there for me. He looked after me like I was a helpless child, that night and all of the next day. And he never stopped telling me how proud he was of me. He still hasn’t stopped.

They all lifted me. I hope I managed to do the same for some of those people and others. We were like a little band of mentallists who needed each other at a particular time in our lives.

3.   Mental strength and inspiration

I didn’t ever think I would be this person. I never thought I was as strong as I have proved to myself. I felt a confidence this week I have never felt. I fought very hard to allow myself to feel it – to not let the little voice that says “shut up, you’re just being cocky, you’ll fall soon” take over. At risk of overstating it, apart from the very very hard times in stage 2 and the horrific blisters I have suffered as a result of it all, I loved this event. Graham keeps asking me when I will realise what I have done. It has taken a while for it to sink in. It will probably take more time for it all to make sense, but I am so unbelievably proud of this unsporty girl.

I am an athlete. I am an ultra runner. It turns out that I love climbing mountains more than I like running on a flat boring beach.  My heart sings on a technical mountain ridge in the dark and when dancing through an uneven lava field. I found strength from music, people, food and a great husband but mostly I found a strength in myself I wish I had had all my life and I hope everyone finds in themselves at least once in their lives.

Many people have said I have inspired them. This feels like a heavy mantle, weirdly, but if it’s true then I reply – go out and find what makes you feel strong and proud. Do it once, then do it again and again until it stops the inner voice from dragging you down. Do it to make your kids and your friends proud but do it mainly for yourself. It feels liberating.

I did this for myself and for Liz. She knew inner strength like no one should ever have to. I hope I have done her proud. She was with me the whole way. In the massive fun, dancing, singing-out-loud highs and the horrible, painful, blistered, weak, vomity, sandy, hot and humid lows. You all were.  It turns out I could have done this alone, but I am bloody glad I didn’t have to.

Over and out.

PS. I dedicate this post to the middle toe on my left foot which is the only one to survive training and racing without a single blister or loss of toe nail.

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Blogging for the first time

I have never written a blog before. I tend to think they can be a bit self indulgent so I mostly stick to sports and cooking blogs when I read them. This will definitely not be a cooking blog, so I'm going to go with sports - my sports, the ones I love to do and the the ones I love to commentate on and present - ski moutaineering, skiing, road biking and trail running mainly. My blog posts won't be long but they will be full of photos, they will be honest, and if I'm very lucky, a little bit entertaining!  Feel free to commment and give a newbie some top tips.

Since it's summer, here's one of me pootling round Lac Léman in May

Ski mountaineering makes it to the Lausanne 2020 Youth Olympics

Utterly thrilling news! On 9th July the IOC and the ISMF (International Ski Mountaineering Federation) announced that ski mountaineering will be one of the eight sports in the Lausanne 2020 Youth Olympics.

The event will take place in Villars sur Ollons and 48 athletes aged 17 and 18 will compete, with all 31 ISMF member states being invited to put forward their top youth athletes.

The disciplines being represented are individual race, sprint and relay. This should really showcase the athletic ability of these incredible athletes in both an endurance and sprint envrionment. All three disciplines are well suited for the public to view up close and personal, albeit some sections only by skis!

The news comes almonst a year after the sport was awarded full IOC recognition and is a great step towards inclusion in the full Winter Olympics. Many congratulations to all those who have worked so hard to make this long held dream a reality.

The senior men line up in Spain earlier this year. Too old for the youth Olympics, but an inspiration for those coming up through the ranks.