My running buddy for early mornings invited me to take advantage of hotel/dinner vouchers she got from work for a weekend in Leukerbad, and so we went there! Shortly after arriving, we went for a long(ish) run. It was a bit hard to find that little lake we were looking for, but we finally managed. It turned out to be not the sight I expected (water), but still pretty:

That’s our shadows there. After the lake, there was a trail of packed snow – just perfect to run along. More perfect than the slippery ice slopes that followed in the forest afterwards. We managed almost without falling and went for an extra loop on the other side of the village, which resulted in this overall:

After that, we enjoyed having the 36 °C (97 °F) hotel thermal bath all to ourselves. A perfect opportunity for a little swim training! Freestyle felt like swimming through some hot gel, one lap of 15 metres was already quite exhausting. But it was fun, and everybody else who was in that pool hates us now. Sorry for the splashing!

Saturday was skiing/snowboarding time. The weather was, again, pretty much awesome:

Leukerbad is not a huge skiing resort, I think we’ve seen most of its 50 kilometres of slopes. The snow was pretty good the whole day despite the high temperatures. Oh, and I brought my new phone to play with take better pictures than I used to. It has a front facing camera:

The evening brought another thermal bath session, but this time we went to a larger pool and it was definitely not possible to do any kind of workout.

On the last day, we went cross country skiing on Gemmi Pass. You take a cable car to the top of a cliff towering over the village, and from there another small cable car to the frozen lake on which the run is situated. You can see it here, towards the lower left corner:

Have I mentioned that we were quite lucky with the weather?

Now who would not want to ski around when the start looks like this:

Not me. One loop was 5 km and I could tell we were in the mountains: everything was a bit more exhausting than usual. And my cross country skiing form can still be improved very much.

This is what the loop is situated like:

I tried to record the way back down to the village with my Garmin, but somehow I didn’t manage to get the track hovering in the air. Too bad.

I also saw this:

An ad for Gemmi triathlon in September. It’s “sprint distance”, but a super tough one: 900 metres swimming, 23.2 km cycling with 750 m elevation and then 3.8 km running with 1.1 km elevation. Probably more walking than running! I might just participate :)

A great weekend all in all.