Yesterday I managed to sneak off after a week of guiding, to run the Zermatt mountain marathon. I finished in 98th place in 5 hours 26 minutes, and before anyone laughs too much at the time, as you can maybe guess from the location, there’s a fair bit of uphill (around 2000m) to contend with. The weather was perfect in the morning, with building clouds towards the end, which provided some welcome shade on the final ascent to Riffelberg at over 2500m. Needless to say, I took the Gornergrat train back down to Zermatt, rather than walking. So that’s it for my mountain races this part of the season, with the Chamonix marathon two weeks ago, and the Zermatt marathon yesterday. Both were build up races for the UTMB (Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc) which I’m attempting at the end of August. The UTMB is the 160km circuit of Mont Blanc with over 9000m vertical, so these mountain marathons are each only a quarter distance and vertical height gain of the big one! Anyway for the next couple of weeks, it’s back to trekking guiding around Chamonix at a more serene pace…