So I was supposed to go sailing but because of the iffy weather, our plans got cancelled the night before. Not wanting to blow a good saturday I looked at laufkalender.ch and found a pretty good looking half-marathon mountain run, going up some trail near interlaken. I read 2200m of vertical climbing but for some reason it didn't strike me as too big of a number (had it said 7000 feet, I may have been more apprehensive)
It was brutal. The first half was a pretty typical berglauf, with some climbs and some flats, and it was easy to keep moving along. After that it basically just turned into straight up climbing. Easily black-diamond slopes for those skiing-inclined. The air also started to get noticably thinner. My lungs really started cranking/burning (we did get to 9,700ft after all). So basically it was two races, the first was a normal mountain run, and the second was a death-march to the summit.
The weather also was pretty unpleasant (certainly could have been much worse) with heavy cloud cover and a pretty persistent thick misting rain. Although I was soaked anyway with sweat, so it was hard to tell exactly how bad the rain was.
The support, however, was mindblowing. Stations what seemed like every kilometer, with plenty of food, gu, tea, isotonic drink (2 types), and near the end boullion and cola. They even had a new long energy isostar gel, that had solid objects that tasted like oatmeal from birchermuesli, it seemed to work pretty well (my delicious chocolate gu is still in my pack). Plus the freebies included a running waterbottle holder (nice), and the shirt is pretty sweet
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