New Trail Verbier Saint-Bernard 2010 video

This new Trail Verbier St-Bernard video is definitely worth checking out. It captures the energetic atmosphere of the early 5 AM start as well as some of the greatest scenery along the course. Viewers are able to appreciate how much snow there can be in Switzerland, in July, above 2000 meters.

This is a well-organised race and highly recommended, if you are into alpine ultra trail running. I wish they would release a longer video later on. 3.2 minutes is hardly adequate for a race with a 32-hour cut off time.

If (and this should be a big IF) you can finish the 110 km long loop (La Boucle, with almost 7 km of cumulative ascent/descent), you get four points for UTMB (Ultra Trail Mont Blanc, which was cancelled this year, and nowadays requires min 5 points from max 2 recent races to even get a chance to participate in the lottery). Actually part of the La Boucle course follows exactly the same trail as UTMB course, only in reverse direction.



By the way, my pet peeve with the French-speaking organisers appears once again: information is presented in French only, and if you translate it into English, it turns out to be fairly inaccurate nonsense anyway, LOL :)

For example, "1er Trail de Plus de 100 KM entièrement suisse" which I believe means something like "The first trail [running race with a course of] over 100 km, entirely Swiss". Typos aside, this is not a 100% true statement because:

• Most of TVSB participants choose to run only the last 61 km of the course (and about half of the long course starters, including your truly,  DNFed), so for 90% of participants it's under 100 km;
• They don't mention that part of the trail is in Italy, so it's not completely a Swiss thing only (of course they could refer to the fact that the race crew is Swiss, but that wouldn't be entirely true either, as some of the volunteers I encountered at aid stations were Finns) - and why should it, I thought the short Italian part of the course was quite fab;
• There are other notable ultra trail events in Switzerland, for example the 7-day, 370 km Trans Swiss Run, which was organised in 2008 for the first time, so they began a year before TVSB. It also offers fours points to qualify for for UTMB, and the course stays entirely in Switzerland, going through the country from North to South.   

My very long, boring and unsatisfying race report of the July 3 (2010) event can be found here:
http://paleo-runner.blogspot.com/2010/07/tvsb-2010-race-report.html

I've probably learned my lessons, and hopefully next year it will go much better, so I can finally get this monkey (or more like 900-pound gorilla :) off my back:

• Certainly my diet will be totally different and much more compatible with the food that's available along the course; 
• I'll also improve my gear, at least get a better (ie. heavier) rain jacket, which might mean a bigger backpack than the otherwise excellent Raidlight Olmo 5, but we'll see about that later on;
• Maybe I can even hire a small, but extremely effective support crew to help me (in other words, to kick my ass and stop me whining :) during the more difficult later stages of the race. 

See you in Verbier, home of extreme ultra trails and extremely friendly folks!