Pia Sundstedt

We are in Europe! We are home. You can’t even imagine how happy I am and how good I feel. Especially as we arrived to a completely white coloured Balck forest. It has been snowing and snowing and at the moment there is 1,5 meters of snow. For us it is like coming to paradise. We can go cross country skiing 🙂
Our flight from Doha was scheduled for Friday morning 2am. We left on time and 7 am we landed in Frankfurt. We picked up the rental car and already 10 am we were in Freiburg. After being away for 3 months I just felt so happy as I walked trough our front door.
Before getting our ski gear together we decided to go to the supermarket and one of the several bakeries and load our fridge full for the weekend. How easy just to walk across the street and go shopping. No car needed, not having to fight your way trough masses of people. Just lovely, can’t say anything more.
After a late breakfast we took our classical and skating skis + poles and drove up to our home skitrack, Notschrei. We still knew how to ski and decided to start slowly with a 10km long loop. After finishing the loop we entered the club house to wax our classical skis. We had come up with a pretty crazy idea a few days ealier. We were going to take part in a cross country skiing race the following day, Rucksacklauf.
Rucksacklauf is the hardest xco skiing race I know about. Only people who have been skiing in Black forest knows what it is to ski in this area. There is no flat parts, just climbing or downhill all the time. This makes skiing here a real physical effort and we were going to participate with no training. Insane, but the weatherforecast was looking good, with between -5–10 degrees and perfect snow conditions. Such a day you just can’t miss. Who know how many years it will take before the conditions will be so good again?

It was important to have good skis. I knew our shape would not be so good, so the skis would play a key role in making our journey a bit easier. This time We even succeeded in preparing the skis. Maybe the conditions were easy to wax, might have been so, but our wax coctail was just the right one and we had superb skis from the start til the finish.
The start for Rucksacklauf is at 7am in Schonach. A tiny little village in Black forest. It is still, dark as the start gun goes off. Every year there are about 300 participants. You can choose between 60km (finish in Hinterzarten) or 100km (finish in Belchen-Multen). Our goal was to reach Hinterzarten. We started with a slow but steady pace. A pace we wanted to keep up for the next 6-7 hours. I had played with a 7 hour finishing time in my mind, but noticed quite soon that our speed was better than expected. Still I knew that there would be a weak moment coming for both of us and naturally not at the same time. So with that in mind we continued to ski and eat + drink something regularly. My moment of weakness came after 3 hours. I forced myself to eat a dry energybar. I was chewing it like a chewing gum and tried to swollow it. After 20 minutes I noticed I was feeling more energetic again.
We arrived in Hinterzarten with big smiles on our face. It was such a great way to start our winter holiday. The track was perfect and the winter landscape was breathtaking. It was definitely worth the effort and the sore legs the next days 😉

The day after Rucksacklauf we woke up to a clear blue sky and -10 degrees. We decided to ignore our sore bodies and drove up to Notschrei and skated 20km. I wanted to ski up to Stübenwasen and see the Alps. On clear days you can see the Alps from Black forest and today we did 🙂

Black forest is one of the most beautiful places on earth, both winter and summer!