I mentioned a week ago that I’d be counting every chairlift I went on over the following 7 days, because, what goes up must come down. I wanted to see my total ski descent to satisfy a little of my curiosity, and also to see if I could descend the same height as Mount Everest, which stands proudly 8,850m above sea level. It took me a year to virtually ‘climb’ Mount Everest – would I be able to descend it in a week on skis, whilst working full time? I had no idea! I’ll just let the statistics do the talking:
Number of days skiing – 7
Number of hours skiing – 46
Number of hours working – 56
Number of chairlifts – 165
Number of different chairlifts – 23
Most commonly used chairlift – Grattalu (the park run) – 72 times
Total altitude descent – 63,526m
Number of Everest descents – 7.18 times
Number of wipeouts learning to 360 – Too many to count!
As you can see… I made it down the height of Everest. And not once or twice, but over 7 times! No wonder my legs feel so sore! I didn’t ski any more than I would do on an average week for this challenge, except that we had particularly good weather.
I’ve done a few challenges like this; from counting how many times I climb a hill over a year, seeing if I can reach the height of Everest, to swimming in the sea in every month of the year. I always find them hard to write a blog post about because, ultimately, these challenges are futile. I’ve got no grand underlying message to share with you. No major observations or lessons learnt from the challenge. But what I will briefly comment on is the way such a small challenge can add a little excitement, a little spice to your daily life.
It has been fun tracking my progress and seeing how I’ve been getting on, finding out how many times I’ve been up the same chairlift, and wondering how much skiing I had actually done. And yes, I did even feel a sense of achievement at the end; 63,526m is a lot of skiing!
Perhaps what is even more impressive, and sobering however, is the thought of going up 63,526m on chairlifts! They aren’t exactly known for being the most rapid form of transportation!