Day 19: The French Hiatus
Time to heal the war wounds
We’re now entering the calm before the storm. There are 8 mountains in France. As of today, 7 mountains are skiable, and also as of today, 7 montains were skied. But before any more on that, probably a good idea to clear things up. I’ve been getting some questions about how the rankings and rules work on this whole race thing, especially after we cracked the top 20 briefly this week. Such questions range from, “did you win yet?” and “if it’s a race, why are you taking time off?” to “are you stupid or something” and lastly the most relevant, “will you please shave already, you’re face is frightening.” While I won’t deal with individual questions directly because Team Friendelstein doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, I will clear some things up.
It his “no negociating” face
Actually, I’ll deal with the beard question head on. Yea, things are getting weird, we’ve passed the “fun” phase of crazy facial hair and now on day 120 without shaving and more important roughly week 6 without trimming, we’re starting to scare children. Nathan found this gem we took right before we embarked on this journey:
Those strange men were so put together! They probably did laundry somethings and cleaned themselves with real soap. Even if they were to go do something crazy in far off lands it would take them weeks to fall apart and start looking craz—oh wait:
So things change fast on the road. I’m about two weeks away from starting to be mistaken for a Rabbi and Nathan is already there. We don’t exactly live the high life here, and our small hovel is starting to smell a little bit less like flowers. I charge my computer here sometimes:
and today I washed my hair with a shard of fragmented bathroom bar soap. So things aren’t exactly grand, but we love it, and if all goes according to plan, we’ll be cleaned up and ready to be re-presented to our families in less than ten days. Though I am taking sugguestions for what to do with the beard when I shave it. Please submit them directly via email.
Back to the race:
In short, the whole Epic Race community is about to take a several day break. A break you say? Yes, a nice relaxing break from skiing that we will fill with more skiing. There are 26 mountains that need to be skied in order to win. As of today, 25 of them are open thanks to France opening up La Tania and Saint Martin-de-Belleville. Vail, for all their money, secret underground armies, and global influence, cannot force Les 3 Vallees in France to open their last mountain, Brides-les-Bains until Brides-les-Bains is good and ready to open. Why? Because they’re French, and they haven’t listened to outsiders in several hundred years—just ungraciously accepted their help in every imaginable global conflict.
We meet a lot of people on the road, and just about everyone is awesome and everyone is in the same position. We all planned out our race strategies, hoping that Brides would open early and we’d all be ready for it, but Vail is very clear that they wont be. The Epic Pass only gives us 5 days of skiing in France, so come morning, most of the American contingent in France who, like us, have finished all the relevant mountains, will depart and go enjoy the spoils of Europe elsewhere. That is, until the night of December 19th when on the eve of the last mountain opening, we’ll all be back, camped at the base ready for the unavoidable shitshow/brawl/bar-fight to the finish line. It’s going to be chaos, and everyone acknowledges it probably wont be clean fun, or really fun at all. But there’s nothing we can do and we’re all on the same page, so we hang out, talk, and get over it. I may bring a home made shiv. It’s going to be messy.
All these names of mountains and places is probably confusing, so here’s a recap of what happened today which will clarify nothing at all, but maybe provide some entertainment. Nathan was playing around with some new camera angles. Yes, he looks like and idiot. Yes, it’s very enjoyable.
It’s been roughly 20 straight days of skiing big mountains and traveling far distances and our bodies are starting to show it. Nathan and I are lucky; almost a decade as an endurance athlete for me and more than that as a downhill racer for him have given us a stupid high tolerance for the constant injuries overuse brings. I’m down to about 80-85% feeling in my toes now, which is good enough for me, and despite one toe nail deciding it’s time to abort and jumping ship along with a few less-then-healthy tendons, I’m still trucking. Nathan’s knees and ankles could also use a nice break, but it’s not often we’re in mountains this awesome, so we’ll keep pushing it.
We’re heading back to Switzerland in the morning, which should be another 10-11 hours on the many trains we’ll need, but if all goes well, we’ll be back in time to catch some of the last few gondolas up to the gorgeous chalet tucked away in Verbier. There we’ll check Verbier off our list and put ourselves just one horrifically violent mountain scramble away from winning. We may also sleep for a little bit, use our million dollar engineering educations to try and rig up an illegal contraption to stream Sunday Night Football, and most importantly, will have at least 3 days of skiing our own lines and own destinations, free of Vail’s “check in” requirements.
Maybe skiing harder and bigger doesn’t really sound like “time off” but right now, at the bar again where the internet lives, we feel like free men for a little while. We even went and saw (acidentailly stumbled upon) some cool art while walking around a random town the other day.
I didn’t get it, but it felt nice to take our time and realize things are going to be ok for at least a few days. Now, drinking a few beers we can enjoy the placidity before we return to this strange country of France for whatever last hurdles Vail has for us. Rankings right now mean nothing. I’m sitting a #22, Nathan is posting now and will be somewhere nearby, but all that matters is the last day at Brides and as we continue to scout out the terrain and village, the only thing we know for sure is it’s going to be brutal. 100ish similarly crazed skiers and riders, after months of planning and executing only several absurd tasks away from tens of thousands of dollars and becoming the only lifetime pass holders in history….what could go wrong?
4 trains, 2 busses, and 1 gondola tomorrow until we’ll be back in relaxation land, kicking our feet up and probably taking a fair amount of advil. More from there when we arrive.
Cheers,
Eric & Nathan
