With a view to having a go at a Bob Graham sometime in the
future, I have offered my services for an attempt on September 20.
With this in mind I was concious that I wanted to do some running while on holiday in Germany. I got four runs in, two of
them on the road and two off road.
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| Climb through the vine yards. |
The first run
involved a savage 270 mtr climb up through the vine yards to the
Niederwalddenkmal Monument. It's massive - the Germania statue at the top is over 3 mtrs high! The climb was followed by lots of meandering through the woods behind it. I was glad I had the compass as the direction I was sure was back to the statue was 180 degrees different to what the compass reckoned it was. The compass was right!
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| Niederwalddenkmal Monument Rüdesheim am Rhein Germany |
One of the road runs was actually quite nice
getting onto the small lanes east of Lake Constance in the south of Germany. It
involved heading generally east through the apple orchards, getting totally
lost then after a 90 minutes try to use the sun to head back west. It actually
worked very well. The other road run was a bit of a non-descript out-and-back
along the lake shore.
The best of the German runs was a 1100 metre climb up Rubihorn
- Oberstdorf (1957mtr). It involved a very early morning start with a 2 Km bike
ride to the start point I had identified the previous evening.
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| Lockup the bike then off. |
Then a 1:45
climb (including photo stops) to reach the summit at 08:45, needless to say I
met nobody on the way up. The climb passed through the spectacular Unterer Gaisalpsee - Hanging Valley at 1500 mtrs.
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| Unterer Gaisalpsee |
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| Safety foot plates and cables! |
A few sections of the climb were alongside a fast
flowing stream with some serious drops in places. The Germany had helpfully put
in place steel cables to grab onto, they were much appreciated.
There were some great photo opportunities with the clouds rolling in
behind me but unfortunately it mean that
by the time I reached the summit it was covered in clouds so I missed an
opportunity to get some shots of Alpine Peaks. Apparently The south of Germany is a very Catholic area, there were crosses everwhere including the mountain summits.
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| Summit Log at Rubihorn Summit |
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| Clouds rolling in. |
Back in the UK and it’s three weeks
to the Bob Graham so that means two weeks of intense training then a week of
cutting back. I am now 10 days into the intense period and I have done 9 runs
covering 129 Km and 5000 mtrs of climbing. I have really focused on the
climbing so I have done numerous reps of the Goyte to Cobden cross climb (about
220 mtrs). Fitting the training around parental duties has resulted in two 3
hr+ runs finishing after midnight. All going
well I am hoping to do three legs of the Bob Graham, I am currently scheduled
to do 4 and 5 but I would like to do Leg 1 as well.
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| Rubihorn Summit Cross |
