Weekend winter getaways and a visit with a fox

Spring has rolled around here in Switzerland (not that winter was anything special this year...), but the past few weekends saw me getting a last taste of snow before it all melts away. At the beginning of March, some friends (from Calgary, Alberta, who are currently living in Baden, Switzerland, about an hour away from me) and I traveled to St. Anton, Austria for a weekend of skiing/snowboarding in the Austrian Alps! It was a really great, although exhausting weekend. I definitely paid the price of not having snowboarded in... well let's not figure out how long: my body was sooooo sore and dead on Monday, with a decent goggle tan/burn to boot. Plus I was using equipment that was both backwards and way too big for me. The snow was pretty hard in places since there hadn't been new snow in a week, but we had two gorgeous days in the Alps and a good group of people so it was definitely worth it! Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's about fifteen thousand words from the weekend (most of these pictures need no caption :) ):

The crew at lunch on the second day.

The park on the afternoon of the second day

Last run of the day; Steph and Remi.

The next weekend (last weekend), I caught a ride with a colleague and her sister to St. Moritz, which is : 

Purple dot is Bern where I live, and blue dot is St. Moritz.

for the Engadiner Skimarathon. To give you an idea of the size of this race, here's some numbers:

10,758  -> # of people in the race, making it the second largest event in the Worldloppet circuit (after the  Vasaloppet in Sweden)

9,357 -> # of skiers racing the full marathon distance

2,303 -> # of women in the race, 

6 -> # of waves that the racers started in (Elite A, B, C; Main class A, B (my class); and General class)

40 -> # of minutes between when the first wave starts and when the last skiers go

16 -> # of people with the name 'Sonja' :)

0 -> # of times I fell!

The marathon is in its 43rd year, and the half marathon only its 4th. While it would have been way more epic to do the full 42km, I have not trained as much as I usually do and as of race day I had skied exactly 5 times, once of which was on a barely snow-covered field in a nearby park and the last of which was on January 6th, so I figured I should probably stick with the half marathon. 

It took us about 5.5 hours to get there including food breaks and traffic jams, which I think is the longest I have driven in one stretch since being in Switzerland. We got in at about 8pm, and after a delicious carb-loading dinner at the hotel restaurant we all crashed in our hotel rooms in prep for the early morning the next day.

Now for a little background on St. Moritz: this town of 5000 people sits at about 1800 m, or 6000 ft, and is without a doubt one of, or I think the richest resort town in Switzerland. The main streets are lined with shops filled with fur coats, diamond necklaces and jewelry, and basically every fancy, expensive clothes brand you can think of. 

Some fun facts:

-The town hosted the 1928 and 1948 Winter Olympic Games

-St. Moritz gets over 300 days of sunshine a year

-The canton where St. Moritz is located, Graubünden, is the only canton where the dialects of the ancient Romansh are still spoken, although in St. Moritz, the majority (60%) speak German, with Italian coming in second at 20% and Romansh a meer 5%.

After a shocking 5:45 wake-up and an amazing marathon buffet breakfast, we hopped on a shuttle to the start of the race, Maloja, which was 18 km up the valley from St. Moritz. We collected our bibs:

I've never had a bib with my name on it before! 

and joined the crowds...

Skis laid out in Hauptklasse (Main class) B

Me in my stylin' yellow poncho pre-race. I am so grateful for it, as it was pretty windy and cold before the start!

The pre-race preparation didn't really involve much besides dropping off our bags to be taken to the finish and laying our skis out, so it was very relaxed and chill unlike races back home where I usually end up sprinting to the start area with 30 seconds to spare.

The throngs of people moving to the start area...

The first racers started at 8:40 and my class left at 9:05. Marathon and half-marathon racers start together but men and women are separated for about the first few hundred meters or so. Then the two trails come together and form a wide and extremely long human snake weaving its way down the valley to Pontresina (half-marathon finish) or S-chanf (marathon finish). The majority of the race is flat to slightly downhill, with a few hills in the middle and at the end.

For me, the first 5 km flew by, as I was mostly concentrated on not getting tripped up by the hundreds of skis and poles around me. After that, I could definitely tell that my fitness was not at its peak and that I hadn't skied enough prior to the race, but it was still really enjoyable and an amazing experience to be around that many people. Although this is a skate race, I spent the first kilometre or two double poling as that's all you can do.

I literally had time to take my camera out of my pocket and take some pictures at the bottom of this hill while waiting to go up it. This happened quite frequently on any up- or downhill throughout the race.

One little moment that made the race really memorable for me was about 3/4 of the way through, as we were going through St. Moritz where there were spectators all along the side of the course cheering the skiers on. Since most racers have their name on their bib, it is easy to cheer people on by name. As I was passing by a crowd of spectators, a little boy called out 'Hup Sonja'. It doesn't sound that special or memorable written out like that, but it put a smile on my face and I picked up my pace.

I didn't ski as fast as I had expected I would, but I guess I have to factor in the human traffic jams on the hills and the wind. I ended up finishing 85th out of 627 women who skied the half marathon, 26th of 127 in my class, Hauptklasse B, and 7th of 22 in the age group 1991-1992. All in all I was pretty happy with how the weekend went, both with my skiing and the experience in general.

The army trucks that transported our belongings from the start to the finish.

My colleague's sister picked me up at my finish and we drove to S-chanf to pick up her sister who had skied the full marathon. This is looking from the road to the bag pick-up area and the dozens of army trucks and hundreds of people.

A little town on the way home

The next week I was in the field with Tiphanie. Here are a few pictures of the clubhouse where we stay each week in Preles:

The tennis courts and the sports centre, with the clubhouse on my right

The clubhouse from the parking lot

The main area

View out the front window

On the second day of field work, as we were driving along a smaller but paved mountain road we came upon this little guy in a field on the side of the road. He was burying a piece of bread for later eats. We stopped the car and got out to take some pictures, and he ended up coming up pretty close to us, about 5 meters away. His right eye didn't look so well and we think he had maybe been hit by a car, and thus couldn't successfully hunt for food so was eating whatever he could get, including some bread that someone had left just inside the forest on the side of the road where we parked.

Photo cred: Tiphanie

Photo cred: Tiphanie

And to end off this extremely long, but hopefully understandable post, a picture of the Alps from my favourite lunch spot in the Jura. :)

-Sonja