SUUNTOブログ

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.