One week ago I had never heard of this sport, tonight I saw Killian Jornet talk at the Chamonix Adventure Film Festival. He is a professional Ultra Runner sponsored by Salomon. This morning he took an “easy” run from Les Houches to Mont Blanc in 4 hours 15 minutes together with his sister. That's over 3800 meters of vertical, topping out at 4808 meters above sea level. On the way down they stopped for some breakfast at one of the refuges, making their leisurely return a full 2 hours long. 

And he didn't mention this himself, it came out during a questionnaire with the audience after showing the film Kilian’s Quest by Sébastien Montaz. Makes me wonder how many other humble super-humans I have walked past in the street in the last week.

We also saw Panik in Baffin (ski & snowboard), Feel the Hill (longboarding), Wild Water (whitewater rafting and kayaking), and The Climate of Change (environmentalist). 

I feel very inspired now.

We spent our last day in Morzine before moving to Chamonix driving over to Chamonix to walk to Lac Blanc, a lake I've seen pictures of heaps of times, but didn't even know where was. Turns out it's a reasonably easy walk, 2.5 hours in and out. If you take the telepherique up the first 1000 vertical meters that is.

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I was very excited to see the mindblowing mountains around Chamonix again, but not quite as excited paying 23 euros for a single return ticket on the lift. It was great going for a little hike though, and my legs and back even coped fairly well.

Afterwards we went into Chamonix town which was quite the circus. I wasn't expecting it to be that super busy. I guess it's a popular tourist destination. After the obligatory browse in one of the climbing shops we rewarded ourselves with a pizza and pint before heading back to Morzine.

Action day! We joined the masses of motor-cross look-a-likes and tried out downhill mountain biking for the first time. In other words getting up the mountain the lazy way, on a lift, then rolling, shaking, jumping and skidding down again while dressed like a storm trooper in full body armour. 

We stuck to the green 'very easy' runs, which was hard enough. Except at one point where we accidentally ended up in a blue steep curvy afair directly under the chair lift. Ops. I had to make up for that by buying a nice lunch at the top of the mountain.

Although it's out in the nature it doesn't quite feel that way. I was way to busy holding on to the brakes and paying attention to whatever was directly in front of me. No time to stop and take in the views when you're charging down the side of the mountain bouncing over rocks at 50 km/h. It was good fun though. But they seriously need to do something about the fashion. I understand that the amount of hard plastic shells you're wrapping yourself in for protection sort of limits the clothing design options, but does it all have to look like Tommy Lee's tattoos? I think there's a marked here.

It was easy getting out of bed today, I was going to see some mountains today. Yay! Woke up to beautiful sunshine, picked up some pastries from the nearest bakery and headed for the hills. The directions were easy - past the lake that we picnicked by the other day, though a million goats, get on the lift. It was an amazing number of mountain bikers up there, even more than down in town, which made me very keen on jumping on a bike myself. But the best bit was standing on top of a mountain again. I could feel the endorphins. Happy happy me.  Back in town I had my physio appointment. A good massage, but nothing new. I'm stiff as hell and need to do stretches etc. Didn't stop me to go for a bit of an afternoon climb though. It was really nice to feel some rock under my fingers again. They've got some really interesting rock here to. I don't know what it is, it's like a mixture of limestone and granite. I'll have to look more into that. We rounded off the evening with a bring-your-own-food BBQ at a bar here, which was jammed with people. Ate, drank, met some good new people, and made many plans. A very successful day I feel.

Grumble grumble. My back is still horribly painful. Stupid middle age DNA. Have been ordered to take it easy today. At least I've got a physio appointment tomorrow. Though I know the solution is going to be exercise every day. That's alright. Doing some streches now.

Had a good 12-13 hour sleep to catch up with yesterday's lack of sleep, skipped breakfast and met our new friends for a lunch picnic by a wonderful lake surrounded by mountains and waterfalls. Tam showed us a good-looking climbing crag, pulled off another practical joke, before we finally bought her a shandy.

We've not even here for one day, yet we've already met a girl who biked through the middle east, and our friend who has only been rock climbing 3 times now wants to go ice climbing with head torches in a cave. The town is overrun by muddy people on downhill bikes, so I reckon I'll have to assemble my bike soon. But first we are going rock climbing and picnicking tomorrow. This is part of the reason I moved to the alps - people inspiring me to do stuff.

We did it! After planning for 7-8 months we are now snoozing in a car park in Morzine. Everything has gone surprisingly smooth traveling today. Even getting up at 3:20am with less than 3 hours sleep. 

We filled up my mum's Honda Jazz with all our belongings. That little thing is a regular Tardis. We had 4 bags, 2 snowboard-bags, and 1 bike inside it. Cruised to the airport in record time, not much traffic at 4am, and left the car at dad’s specified parking where they will pick up the car when they return from their holiday in 2 days. The airport was way to busy for a sunday morning, yet we somehow eased our way through that as well, special luggage and all. The only downside was that I messed up my lower back with all the lifting, so Shannon had to take over a lot of that. Once on the airplane we fell asleep pretty damn quickly.    

At the Geneva airport there's a Swiss section and a French section. We found our car rental on the second attempt. After the usual “this isn't what the price was when we booked” we had our car. Our upgrade car even, because we booked with a ski rack, which apparently is impossible to get in summer. So upgrade ahoy, our Citroen Berlingo became a brand new VW Touran. It fits all our stuff, and is nice to drive.

Speaking of driving, I remember leaving the airport and simply jumping on the freeway and being on my way to the mountains. Not so much from the French side. We got a 1 hour drive through the city of Geneva amd cross the border twice before we got to hit the freeway.

Seeing the mountains it finally dawned on me. I'm not on holiday. This is my new home! 

We drove through a dozen picturesque French mountain villages, got lost in one of them, got directions and bought some great bake goods from the local boulangerie, squeezed the car up tiny winding roads past a classic car event in one village, a 4x4 event in another, trying not to hit any of the road bikers, before reaching Morzine. 

Morzine is bigger and more busy than I anticipated, but I believe it’s the summer high season at the moment. Funnily enough it started raining at the exact moment we arrived, but it wasn't to last.

I originally posted this on my other blog, but thought it belonged here as well.

 

I'm going to try to write something sensible, probably mostly just a diary for my own future reference or something. So much great has been blogged and tweeted in the last two days in response to the horror that happened on Friday afternoon, it's overwhelming, and it makes me proud to be Norwegian.

I was with my girlfriend at a friend's cabin, on our last day of three weeks of summer-holiday. It was my first extended holiday at the "Sørland" (Norway's south coast) since I was an adolescent, and I'd seen more of it than I'd ever done before, first staying with my parents, later visiting various friends along the coast, enjoying being a tourist in my own country. We were just packing up when I got a phone-call from my mum, telling me there'd been an explosion in Oslo. I instinctively looked up on Twitter for more updates, the regular news sites would hardly load, but the headings were clear. Something bad had happened. And for every bit of information that came through the bad became worse. Sadly this has been one of the constants this weekend.

We sat glued to the TV for about 1 hour before the footage and reporting became to repetitive, and got in the car. We still had to get home after all. At this point nobody knew who or what exactly had happened. It was clearly a terrorist attack, but we didn't yet know who or why. Foreign media were already blaming Muslim extremists, but local media kept their cool and stuck to what little facts we had, which pointed nowhere, and weren't afraid to report that. Fear-mongers: 0. Common sense: 1. I admit I hoped that it wouldn't be muslim terrorists behind it, because I didn't want Norway and Norwegians to turn into scared anti-Muslims. As it turned out I'm supposed to fear tall blond men, if I was to follow that rhetoric.

Then came the first tweets about shots at Utøya. The radio caught up within minutes. We were stuck in a que at the freeway.

For the first time in my life I made a decision based on fear of terror. Having now idea of the scale of the attacks, and the seemingly randomness of a bomb in Oslo and shooting at Utøya, I suddenly felt like a sitting duck being stuck in the que at the freeway. I took the first exit.

My suburb is pretty far from downtown where the bomb went off, so coming home everything seemed very normal. But it didn't feel normal, to much listening to the radio I guess. I went to my neighbour to pick up the mail she'd collected while we were gone. She'd been in town, but hadn't understood the seriousness of it until a shop clerk told her about it, which naturally scared her. And having her son about to board a plane didn't do much good for her nerves either.

We watched the news getting increasingly worse as it got later.
I wanted to do something to help. I heard they needed blood donors, and was considering getting back in the car and driving into town. Luckily I found out that only already registered donors could give blood before I headed down. I signed up as a donor online instead. Hopefully they get me in the system soon enough. I also naively thought that I could head into the city on Saturday and help with the clean-up. I didn't think about the military guarding the entire perimeter. Eventually I got to sleep at 3am. At this point there were hardly any confirmed dead at Utøya.

I was woken up the next day by my girlfriend getting a call from a friend, and the first thing I heard was the number 91. I was immediately awake. The number was tenfold of what I'd fallen asleep to, which was more then bad enough. I got so engulfed in the news that I didn't even eat breakfast until somebody on Twitter had the sense to remind us all to eat. Or maybe it was a retweet. I've never seen so much beautiful supporting words been offered in 140 characters as I have these last two days. I've never had so many people write to me on Facebook, nor send me support on Twitter. I wish they wouldn't have had to.

I eventually had to turn off the fire-hose of news and do something normal. I mowed the lawn and went for a long nice walk with my girl. It felt really good.

Back home the unreal world was continuing, but it still felt like it didn't quite affect me. Yes, I had a small lump in my throat, and my brain was getting fried, but it wasn't until I read the first eyewitness blogpost that I burst. What a nightmare those poor people went through. And what troopers they are.

We spent Saturday night at home watching a movie. It annoyed me that it had a terrorist plot, but it turned out to have a happy love ending. Typical Hollywood stuff, but I'm way more emotional than usual, and the happy ending did me good.

Today I eased of all the media a lot more, and I noticed both my Facebook and Twitter stream has calmed down quite a bit. The longer essays about how could this happen etc. are out. Some very good articles, some horrendous ones. It's become to much to cover. We chose to go and do something normal instead, and spent the afternoon at the rock-climbing gym. The gym was full of people, everybody seemed quite upbeat. I think everybody was there for the same reason as us, and were happy to just get out and be with friends.

I was also happy, even though I felt tired and climbed like shit, which normally would've annoyed me. There's no way I could bring myself to feel like I have any reason to complain about anything whatsoever.

And I went into town. To look. I just had to. Not to see the damaged buildings, but I needed to feel the atmosphere. And I'm glad I did. The flowers are beautiful. People are friendly. It's this sense of a communal being. Nobody knows exactly what to do, but we're in this together, and we will do the right thing.

So now what?
I'm afraid it is just a matter of time before I find out that I know somebody that's been lost. Norway is to small a country for something this big not to affect everyone.

But the response makes me immensely proud to be Norwegian. The official response is that we will fight terror with democracy and humanity, and we the people have taken this to heart. I've seen the prime-minister cry. The King patiently stand in line to light a candle. Armed soldiers in my town. A sea of flowers, candles and kids' drawings. And a cold calculated mass-murdering terrorist getting appointed a lawyer and a civilised trial. Because that's how we do things.