Welcome to the world of Suunto. In this article we will guide you through some of the key steps in getting started with your Suunto 3 Fitness watch. Get ready to meet your better self!   Once you have taken your watch out of its box, connect it to a computer with its USB cable to wake it up. The cable is also used to charge your watch. In daily use with 24/7 activity tracking the battery will last up to five days.   You will be guided through the initial settings on the watch and the app.     DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL SUUNTO APP An essential part of Suunto 3 Fitness is Suunto app. Suunto app provides a log of your activities and rest, and connected GPS for tracking speed, distance and your route, a way to communicate with your friends and a place to learn more about using your watch.     Suunto app for iOS is available at App Store and for Android at Google Play     Once you have Suunto app installed on your phone, open the app and pair your watch with the app. The app will guide you through the pairing process and help you get started.   Learn more about pairing with Suunto app for Android or Suunto app for iOS     USE SUUNTOLINK TO UPDATE YOUR WATCH The software of your Suunto 3 Fitness is updateable. You will be informed about possible software updates through Suunto app and suunto.com. If an update is available you will need to install a small piece of software called SuuntoLink on your computer. To update open SuuntoLink, connect your Suunto 3 Fitness watch to your computer with its USB cable and SuuntoLink will prompt for an update – if one is available.   Read more about software updates     MAINTAIN A BALANCE BETWEEN ACTIVITY AND REST Your watch keeps track of your overall level of activity throughout the day. This is an important factor whether you just aim to be fit and healthy or you are training for an upcoming competition. It is good to be active, but when training hard, you need to have proper rest days with low activity.         The watch automatically counts your daily steps and calories, and easy-to-follow summaries offer a view of your overall activity, helping you balance activity and rest. Wear it at night to also track your sleep. In the sleep summary you’ll see how long and how well you slept.   Additionally, the watch measures your stress and recovery throughout the day to help you ensure you have enough in the tank to make it through the day.    Read more about activity and sleep tracking     WEARING YOUR SUUNTO 3 FITNESS Suunto 3 Fitness is water resistant to 30 meters and ready for all your adventures. Go swim with it, don’t worry about a shower or a spa, it is up to the challenge. It can also operate in temperatures down to -20°C (-5 F°).   Wrist-based (optical) heart-rate measurement is a convenient way to track your heart rate and an alternative to the traditional chest-strap HR measurement. It also enables Suunto 3 Fitness’ 24/7 activity tracking and sleep tracking.   Wrist-based heart rate is at its best in activities that enable the watch to consistently read HR data from user's arm, i.e. when blood flow is steady, and when the watch itself is constantly in touch with skin. For optimal performance of its wrist heart rate sensor, you may need to wear the watch higher on your arm than where watches are normally worn. The sensor reads blood flow through tissue. The more tissue it can read, the better.   And should you engage in activities where you cannot have your skin exposed, like cross-country skiing in cold weather, you can wear your watch on top of your sleeve and use a heart rate belt and still see your HR on the watch screens. This is also useful if you ride your bike and wish to mount your watch on the handlebar with a Bike Mount.    Read more about optical heart rate measurement     TRACKING YOUR TRAINING SESSION In addition to daily activity tracking, you can use your watch to record your training sessions or other activities to get detailed feedback and follow your progress. Scroll up to the exercise icon and select your preferred sport mode.   Your watch comes with a wide range of pre-defined sport modes and each one has a unique set of displays and views. The sport modes you have used recently will be shown on top of the list.   Your Suunto 3 Fitness automatically generates a 7-day training plan to help guide you to improve your fitness. The training plan adapts to your personal needs based on your profile, recorded exercises and fitness level.   Read more about the Adaptive training guidance     CALIBRATING YOUR WATCH FOR SPEED AND DISTANCE Suunto 3 Fitness is able to record speed and distance when running and walking based on your wrist movement, but this must be calibrated to your personal stride length and movement. To calibrate, connect your phone to Suunto app (see above) and allow location services. The wrist-based speed and distance are automatically calibrated whenever you use connected GPS.   Learn more about calibration     USING YOUR PHONE’S GPS CONNECTION When your watch is paired with Suunto app and you have allowed the location services on the app you can use your mobile phone’s GPS connection for more accurate speed and distance. With connected GPS you also get a track from your exercise that you can view on a map in the Suunto app.   Please note that connected GPS will also calibrate your watch to your personal stride length and movement to show your running and walking speed also when not using the GPS connection.   Learn more about Connected GPS     For product guidance and support, please go to suunto.com/support

The sheer amount of adventure that happened on Red Bull Der Lange Weg is difficult to comprehend – seven skiers, including Suunto athletes Mark and Janelle Smiley, Philipp Reiter and Nuria Picas – set out to cross the Alps by sheer manpower and willpower, and 36 days later, five of them finished.   They battled gravity as they went uphill, and used it to their advantage to ski down – tracing their own unique track across the mountains, while loosely adhering to a route set by Austrian mountaineers way back in 1971. Followers on Facebook have been privilege to near constant updates – tons of photos, candid clips, and recaps are their for your enjoyment. But to get a better idea of the immensity of this challenge, we dug into our data and talked to uphill machine Philipp Reiter. Here’s a few of the key facts about this massive adventure.   12 “This is the most important number,” says Philipp. “It’s how many hours a day on foot we had to average to beat the record across the Alps. And that’s what we did – almost everyday." Of course, a few days were a lot longer – and that’s just the time moving. Don’t forget to factor in for packing, prepping, and eating, and other logistics.   Philipp climbing in Kals, Austria. (image by Christian Gamsjäger/Red Bull Content Pool)   4797 Height meters, in a single day. "That was on the way to Obertauern, in Austria,” says Philipp. “Definitely the longest day of the adventure.” The runner up? Another day with 4731 height meters.   74.11 Kilometers – quite the distance covered during the above-mentioned epic.   Athletes somewhere close to Zermatt, Switzerland. (Image by Philipp Reiter/Red Bull Content Pool)   100 Meters – the distance below the summit of Mt Blanc, when the team decided to turn around. White-out conditions and high avalanche danger simply made it an unwise decision to move forward.   3700 Altitude in meters of the bivouac where the team holed up to hide from a snowstorm.   Almost there! (Image by Philipp Reiter/Red Bull Content Pool)   70 Percentage of the time they spent on snow – either skinning up or skiing down. “We had plenty of days where we didn’t even take off our skis,” notes Philipp.   1,721 Total kilometers from start to finish – almost 1100 miles.   Philipp getting ready for another 12-hour day. (Image by Christian Gamsjäger/Red Bull Content Pool)   89,644 Meters in altitude climbed from start to finish – over ten times the height of Everest.   1 Day of just walking – poor weather conditions and avalanche danger forced them to move forward purely on foot.   0 Times Philipp forgot to start up his Suunto watch.   And they made it to Nice in 36 days! (Image by Philipp Reiter/Red Bull Content Pool)   36 The number of days the team finished in – they started at midnight on the last day, with the hope of reaching Nice, France by 10 AM, the same time they started their journey in Austria, for clean and even 36-day journey.          READ MORE ABOUT RED BULL DER LANGE WEG AN ADVENTURE HE’LL NEVER HAVE AGAIN: PHILIPP REITER ON THE RED BULL DER LANGE WEG   DER LANGE WEG IS ABSOLUTE INSANITY

Finding out where Philipp Reiter is these days isn’t hard – you just have to visit the Red Bull Der Lange Weg tracking page. Finding a time when he can talk to you, however? Not easy – two AM starts, 15-hour days, and thousands of kilometers combined with tens of thousands of height meters make him one very tired ski tourer. As the end of the adventure approaches, we managed to get him on the phone – and here’s what we found out.     His feet really, really hurt. “They’re really swollen,” says Philipp. “Everyday, the feet get a little bigger – but the ski boot stays the same size.” Ouch, we can imagine. And since they’re lightweight, carbon-fiber racing shells, there’s not much room for re-molding the fit – Philipp’s got to suffer through it.   They decide everything themselves. “All decisions are ours – we get a lot of information from different sources, but there’s no one telling us what we should and shouldn’t do.” And that’s as it should be – while the goal of the adventure was to closely follow the route of the original Austrian team from 1971, safety was tantamount – and bad weather meant they had to adapt the route to their own.     Philip and David owned the first ten days. The team of seven split the route into four parts - Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France. Since Austria is Philipp’s backyard (he lives just over the border in Bad Reichenhall, Germany), he and friend David Wallner provided the whole crew with beta and route guidance for that part. Italian Tamara Lunger covered Italy, Swiss skier Bernhard Hug covered Switzerland, and Americans Mark and Janelle Smiley covered France.   There’s no time really alone. If they want to hit the reset button – well, forget it. As soon as the hiking or skiing is finished for the day, it’s a meal with the crew, logistics, prepping, planning, and of course, as much sleep as you can squeeze in before those two AM starts. “There’s no mental break or time for yourself,” says Philipp. “That’s for sure the hardest part.”   They’ve seen a few slides. With such a journey, avalanche danger is of course a key concern – and plenty of weather systems made that concern even worse. “We had a huge detour due to avalanche danger in South Tirol,” says Philipp. “On a slope that wasn’t even very steep, we set off a small slide. Since the avalanche danger that day was rated four, which is ‘high’, we decided to add a lot of kilometers and go around a mountain rather than over it.”     He hasn’t really used any ‘joker’ km. In 1971, the team traveled 61 kilometers in total by car – so the athletes in 2018 were theoretically allowed the same distance, a ‘wild card’ if you will. While they occasionally had to drive to find a campsite, they always drove back to where they started from, keeping the journey pure. The longest car ride happened with conditions meant summit Mt Blanc from the Italian side was impossible – so they hopped in a car, ascended to near the top of Mt Blanc (they turned back 100m under the summit in whiteout conditions) and then drove back to Courmayeur to continue their journey west.   He can barely remember the first week… After 34 days on ‘Der Lange Weg’, Reiter says he really can’t remember that first week – “It’s simply been overwritten”, he says. “I can’t believe how fast it’s gone.”   But he knows he won’t do it again. “I’m just not sure I’ll ever have the time – it’s not only the trip, it’s the training,” says Reiter. “I’ve never been so fit in my life, but all that training took up so much time.”     With just a couple days left in the journey, the crew is eyeing to finish before 10 AM on day 36 – stay tuned to the Red Bull Der Lange Weg Facebook page to catch the final moments!   Images by Philipp Reiter / Red Bull Content Pool  

Let’s get things straight right away: there is virtually nothing pleasant about busting your legs and lungs up and down a single 1000-foot (about 300m) ski slope for 24 hours, non-stop. There might, however, be a little bit of pleasure in knowing you can do more laps on said slope than anyone in the world – a pleasure, we can assure you, that belongs wholly and solely to Mike Foote, aged 34, of nearby Missoula, Montana. Well established in both the worlds of skimo racing and ultra-running, he was perhaps the perfect person for the challenge – he had the skill and technique on skis, and physical and mental endurance that it takes to run 100-mile races. Last summer he finished second at Hardrock 100 in Colorado. Mike spent months training to dial in his optimum race speed – and masterminded the logistics of race day with a support crew, plenty of calories on hand to keep him going, and a little help from the mountain operations team who kept the ski slope in prime condition. To learn more, read the words below from the (probably still tired) man himself. Mike's Suunto Spartan Ultra says it all. So, what was your total vert for the day? What was the old record? I did 61,200 feet (18,654m). It was 60 laps of a 1,020 ft (311m) slope. There are essentially two records of someone who completed 60,000 ft in the past. Ekkehard Dörschlag did 60,000 feet on the dot in 2009 in Austria at a 24-hour event at Bad Gastein. Then the famous ski mountaineer racer Florent Perrier did 59,893 feet in 2011 in Areche, France in the Alps. These were the two efforts that felt like the benchmark for me. Skiing into the night. (©Matthew Irving) When and where did you set the record? I started at 9 am on Saturday, March 17th and went until Sunday morning at 9 am. I did it at Whitefish Mountain Resort, which is a ski area where I used to ski patrol and began uphill skiing and backcountry skiing. Conditions were variable. Quite warm and mashed-potato type snow during the day, and then frozen and slippery hard-pack at night. It made for challenging conditions for skinning, but we were able to manage it all OK. Could you walk us through the day? My plan for the day was quite simple. I really wanted to start conservative, but at the same time not slow down too much. I was able to get around 33,500 ft in the first 12 hours, which gave me a buffer for the latter half of the day. I worked really hard to limit any downtime. I didn’t sit down once in the 24 hours. For the most part, things went as planned. The snow froze hard at night, which made for really tricky skinning and teeth chattering descents. As a team, we worked through it and I had pacers working to keep the skin track in and not too iced up. I started the day off feeling pretty poor actually. Perhaps it was nerves, but it took me almost two hours to feel like I was getting into any sort of rhythm. Also in the middle of the night, I hit a wall and had to work really hard to keep from slowing down too much. Once the sun came up for the final 2 hours I got some energy back. For the final lap, about 15 friends joined me to celebrate and it gave me an insane boost of energy and I was able to complete one of my fastest laps of the day! Friends’ support gave Mike an extra boost of energy. (©Matthew Irving) When and how did you get this idea to go for the record? I began thinking about it after racing the Hardrock 100 last summer. I enjoy long endurance events like 100 Mile running races, but ski-mountaineering races are often only in the one to two hours range. I wanted to see what I could do on skis in twenty-four hours, and this idea began to form. How did you prepare for the record attempt? By skiing a lot! And also by geeking out on training and metrics. I spent a lot of time going up and down steep slopes trying to get my technique and form as efficient as possible and to try and find the best ascent rates while staying in an easy aerobic effort. I knew I would need to be very comfortable going uphill for a very long time without blowing up, so I spent a lot of time finding that fine balance. My Suunto Spartan Ultra was the perfect tool for this. After ski. (©Matthew Irving) How would you compare a 100-mile ultra-running race, like the Hardrock, and this record ski tour? Well, the mental grit it took to get to the end of the 24-hour attempt felt similar to a 100-mile race. There were highs and lows and everything in between as I have experience in ultras. However, this effort felt so different from something like Hardrock 100 as I was racing a clock and not another competitor. It wasn’t better or worse. Just a different kind of challenge. It was just me and a mountain and I had twenty-four hours to see how many times I could climb it. It was a very simple goal in many ways.

For the truly competitive athlete, every loss or DNF is a tough one. But there have likely been very few losses tougher than Canadian ultra-runner Gary Robbins’ result 2017 Barkley Marathons. After nearly 60 hours of racing, a missed turn in the last moments took him off the course as he approached the finish. He crossed the finish line from the wrong direction, a few seconds after the 60-hour time limit. It was unequivocally a DNF – and probably the most heartbreaking DNF in the history of DNFs. It’s the kind of result that has a less willful runner saying ‘never again’. Gary Robbins, of course, is not the kind of runner, and after a quick recovery – he ran the Nolan’s Fourteens just a few months later – he was back on the Barkley horse. After last year’s dramatic non-finish, Gary hit his saturation point talking about the race – no, really, he even told us so – so we figured we’d better focus on this year’s race. Read on to find out how his training and preparation is going.   Third time training for the Barkley Marathon: What’s different? Through the first two years, I was definitely on the starting line with the physical and mental capabilities to finish the race. My training has been successful. I don’t believe that there was anything in my training for the first few years that I had to alter. But I did find that by focusing on this specific race for so long, that had me moving through difficult terrain at 2 miles per hour, I got really efficient at moving 2 miles per hour – so I haven’t done much run training for the last few years. So, when I got back into my training in November my focus was on more run training. I got back into more 100-mile distance weeks, rather than vertical-based weeks for a couple of months in the winter. It helped to increase my fitness level. Last month the focus has shifted to 100% vertical training. Initially 20,000ft of climbing, then 30,000ft, and last week 40,000ft of climbing. So I did change my training a bit initially to gain some fitness that I felt I was lacking. But the actual training block leading into the last Barkley worked so well that I’m actually looking at replicating that again.   Ready to go from dawn till dusk – and much much longer. (©Ian Corless, iancorless.com)   Last year the race kicked your ass. How do you plan to deal with it on the course? The race kicked my ass both years. Last year, getting through the full 60 hours and the full five laps of the course was infinitely harder than even doing four laps. John Kelly even mentioned that there’s such a steep curve of fatigue and difficulty and pain threshold that it’s unfathomable how much more difficult doing the additional lap could be. I came out of that even more physically and mentally beat up. But – I recovered from the ass kicking very well in 2017. Well enough that only a few months later I went to Colorado and finished the Nolan 14’s, which is 14 consecutive 14,000 ft peaks in under 60 hours. That was the big difference in 2017 – that I recovered well after the race. In 2016 I really struggled for 6 to 8 months afterwards because I had done so much before the 2016 race. For the better part of 10 months, I have been healthy fit, been a runner, and feeling good about things which set me up to be able to withstand that ass-kicking this time.   Any non-traditional training? Nothing non-traditional. Definitely kept focusing on orienteering and cross-training with strength training, things that I feel that are big components for success at the race. There is a large element of core and upper body strength that comes into play with a race like this – and moving smarter allows you to move a little bit slower because every mistake that you make means you need to move faster to make up for it. So, the better you can be with navigation, the more luxury you can give yourself with time on course.   Do you feel like you’re in better physical shape? I could be in the best shape that I’ve been in going into any of the Barkley’s. I had a couple of setbacks in training – getting sick, and we lost our dog which we had for 12 years so that set me back emotionally for a little bit. But outside of those setbacks, I feel like this is one of the best training blocks that I’ve had in many, many years. My fitness is reflecting that. If things continue to go well I could show up at the Barkley in the best shape I have been in.   How about mental fitness – how do you train for a rest like this mentally? Every long-distance race gets to a point where the race is completely impossible if you’re not all in mentally. For the Barkley it’s true, but it’s true much earlier. It’s impossible to complete even a single lap without it becoming mentally draining. I’ve proven to myself in the first two attempts that I have the mental wherewithal to push through. That gives me a level of comfort, beyond year one fear of the unknown and year two fear of what I did know, I feel like this year three I have a lot less worry at how that’s going to play out. I’m almost looking forward to the mental challenge because it is so unique for this race. In training I try to replicate that challenge – I don’t train with a partner because you need to become self-sufficient and to learn how to motivate and rally yourself in the low times.   Who else has a strong chance of winning or finishing? That’s an interesting question because they don’t release a starters list. So you don’t know who is in the race unless that person publicly proclaims that they are. There is a waitlist that they pull from and you do get to see the people that they select from the waitlist. In terms of the first 40 people selected, I only know about 4-5 people who may be doing the race. I know a few people who have had to pull out of the race for one reason or another. The other thing to keep in mind is that it’s not within the rules to speak about someone else’s Barkley aspirations unless they have made it quite public. So what I can say is that the race initially had a very high level of runner, and potentially the highest level of female runners they have ever seen with many recognized and hugely accomplished runners. The hope was that we were going to see a female fun runner (3 laps), a female onto the 4th lap or even finish all 5 laps this year. But a few have had to pull out for one reason or another. There is one name that I can say because everyone knows that he is in the race because he qualified by winning one of race organizer Lance’s other races. That’s French runner Guillaume Calmettes. He is a good friend that I’ve known for many years. He’s a staunch competitor and a wonderful person who I’m looking forward to potentially spending some time with during the race. He’s never been to Frozen Head before (the location of Barkley Marathons) so he is a complete virgin.   Will this be Gary's final Barkley?   Your fans are asking and I’m sure your family as well, if you win is it the last one - or will you keep coming back?  The joke I made when during the “Where Dreams Go To Die” movie tour was that I hope you can tell that I love my wife and I want to stay married to her. So this is one and done. Truly, I have a lot of other goals that I’d like to pursue that have been taking a back seat to completing the Barkley. Not only has this taken longer than anticipated, it’s taken more out of me. I don’t have a desire to be a multi-time finisher of the Barkley. I want to be a finisher above all else and when that does happen I would be very happy to return to the park, hang out in the campground and mock those who head out on to the course for the weekend.   We know that you use Suunto watches for training but can’t use a gps watch during the race. Anything change in your 2018 gear or kit? Over the first two years, I’ve run in the Salomon Sense Pro, because that shoe was the best fit for me. I had some issues with traction, but my feet held out because it was the best fit for my foot. I really wanted a more aggressive tread on a shoe for this race. Along came the Sense Ride in Fall 2017, and I put it on my foot and it’s my dream shoe for trail running. It fits perfectly and the lug on it is so nice. So one of the few changes I’m making this year is going with the Sense Ride footwear from Salomon.  The only other change to really report is that through the first two years I only used music in the last lap when I knew I would run alone. But I love music and enjoy listening to music when I’m running, doing difficult things or lacking motivation. Over the last few months, I have been building out my music systems with different MP3 players and Bluetooth headphones. I intend to use music much more readily throughout the race to assist in keeping my mind in a positive state. I haven’t done that before and I’m curious to see the benefits.   Music assists Gary in keeping his mind in a positive state.   Sweet – so what's on your playlist for getting through Barkley 2018? Old school Beastie Boys is right up there near that top of my list. Certainly some Tragically Hip. There will be some Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave mixed in there. I like a good 90s playlist – when George Michael “Freedom” comes on, for some reason, my step kicks up a notch. Probably some Beck.   ‘Where Dreams Go To Die’ has been all over the ultra-running community. How has re-living one of your toughest life challenges been? The film itself, though, I only watched for the first time two days before the first showing. I didn’t realize how deeply seeded the scaring actually was. I believed before going on tour that I would watch it two or three times and rationalize it and be fine. But that wasn’t the case. I never got the point where I was able to watch it without becoming upset. In hindsight, looking back at that film tour, that was such an incredibly unique and special experience that I’m so thankful for. It was a huge commitment, tens of thousands of dollars, and we took a real calculated risk in the belief that it would work. And it did. The experience itself was exceptional and I would do it ten times out of ten. The further we got into the showings, we were more and more sleep deprived, which leaves you more emotionally raw. There were some really rough nights, where I was doing everything in my power not to become upset again for the seventh time. It was unexpected. It provided valuable insight into what my family went through in camp while I was on the course. That more than anything gave me more fuel to know that we are all in as a family. They are so invested in every moment of that race with me. It’s not just me out there. It’s me, my wife and my child that are trying to get this done.   Stay tuned for a follow-up report after Gary’s third (and hopefully final!) Barkley Marathons. In the meantime you can watch Where Dreams Go To Die here. Main image © Ian Corless, iancorless.com

There are a couple interesting FKTs happening in the world right now. You might have heard about Ryan Sandes' epic across the Himalayas – but you might not have heard of Red Bull Der Lange Weg. In case you don’t speak German, we’ll translate that for you: the long way. The long way across what? The Alps – from Vienna to Nice. Over 2,000 kilometers and 80,000 height meters. The time to do it? 40 days. While they hope to spend most of their time on skis, they’ll also be moving on foot, climbing technical terrain, and doing whatever is necessary to make their traverse happen via human propulsion.   Der Lange Weg starts on Saturday, 17 March. (©Sandra Birklbauer, Red Bull Content Pool)   If you think this sounds absolutely brutal, you’d be right – some of the itinerary includes days with almost 4,000 of climbing and 80+ km of horizontal travel, and takes the athletes to the top of the Alps – including Dachstein, Grossglockner, Piz Palü, Mt Blanc, and a few other famous peaks. No rests. No pauses. At least they don’t have to camp. (That’s… assuming they make it to the hut. If they don’t make it to the hut by dark? Well… we’re going to guess they keep going.) The crew of seven includes four Suunto athletes – Mark and Janelle Smiley from the US, Philip Reiter from Germany, and Nuria Picas from Spain – each one of them extremely accomplished athletes in their own right.   The original crew that skied from Vienna to Nice in 1971. (©Klaus Hoi, Red Bull Content Pool)   What’s perhaps most interesting before the challenge start is the story of those who came before them – almost 50 years ago, an Austrian team of four embarked on this adventure, with big questions about whether they could finish. While Robert Kittl, Klaus Hoi, Hansjoerg Farbmacher and Hans Mariacher were using the most modern ski gear of their time, it’s a far cry from what’s underfoot today – not to mention the advances in outerwear, layering, and of course, the gadgetry that helps us navigate. The adventure was well documented for its time, and Red Bull shared a few of the photos that you can see here. Extremely impressive stuff!   The planned route for Red Bull Der Lange Weg will have any number of difficult days – but some are a lot longer, harder and higher than others. We picked out a few highlights for you.   Grossglocker After 5 days of 2000+ height meters in the first week alone, one of the first big days will be the top of Austria – Grossglockner. They’ll need to ascend a total of 3600m over 38km, reaching an altitude of 3,454 – meaning the air will start to get thin.   Diavalozhütte On day 19, they’ll spend 12 hours in ski boots picking up 3300hm and 55 kilometers. Two days later, they’ll cover 71km in a day.   The last blast: Casteldelfino to Entraque Just two days before the finish, there’s one last big push: 3,276 height meters and 81 kilometers, and 15 hours on foot.   1,917 kilometers, 85,000 height meters The cumulative numbers here are just mental – they’ll take an estimated 420 hours to traverse almost two thousand kilometers, and pick up 85,000 estimated height meters (and we’re going to guess quite a few more here and there.) That’s like climbing Everest from sea level 9.5 times – up and down, day in, day out, 40 days in a row.   Sound awesome? It absolutely is. Will they finish? Even the athletes themselves can’t be positive – bad weather, injury, equipment issues can put a stop to the adventure at any time.         Find out what Mark Smiley packed for this epic skitour!        Learn more about Red Bull Der Lange Weg