It's All Fun and Games, Until Someone Gets Gangrene

After the rest of the Yak Pack headed back to civilization I decided it was time to settle the unfinished business between Jungfrau and myself. So refilling my water bottle, packing some extra gels and throwing on my headphones, I headed back out for a second adventure.

About 4k into this second run, as per my usual luck, the heaven's opened up and poured down upon me.

RAIN FAIL.

Despite the inclement weather, this run felt a lot easier than the first. Instead of having to stop and catch my breath every couple hundred meters, I was stopping to take in the views and snap some photos. I was feeling fresh and genuinely enjoying what felt more like a jaunt than a mission.  I put this down to going at my own pace, rather than trying to keep up with other people. This is something I'll definitely need to work on by the 14th of September.

Once again I exited the woods and was greeted with a pretty amazing sight:

BOOM!

After 1.5 hours of running, I had reached the moraine - the rocky, slippery trail made out of glacial debris. On the previous day's run, when we reached the top of the moraine we hung a left to bypass the climb across Kleine Scheidegg because of the snow. But, being stubborn, an amateur, and a bit stupid, I decided I would do the whole course, snow or no snow - "to adequately prepare" - I told myself. It didn't look all that bad:

What snow??

I just had to run along to the right side of that little peak there, turn left around it and head down to the finish line. No big, right?

WRONG.

First I made it across the peak, which turned out to have a massive gully filled with snow on the other side, requiring me to crawl along the snow using my hands and feet more than I would have liked half way through a 24k run.  But once I made it around the peak, it should flatten out, right?

WRONG.

Turns out, just beyond that peak is a very precarious and narrow ridge:

Slip towards the left, and you're rolling down a massive hill into a snowbank. Slip towards the right, and you're falling down a bottomless crevasse (yeah, I just said "crevasse"!!), never to be seen again.

NO BIG.

But despite the mountain's best attempts, I survived the ridge, only to turn another corner for precariously narrow ridge number two:

GOOD.

The finish line is just at the other side of this peak, so I can't be too far. How hard could it be?

HARD.

As just beyond this ridge I had yet another surprise waiting for me.

SNOW:

LOTS OF SNOW:

This is where I started to kinda freak out a bit. Here's why:

1. No one knew where I was
2. I had no phone to call for help
3. It was getting dark
4. It was flippen freezing
5. No one knew where I was!

My mind started playing images from the 1993 film Alive, about the rugby team whose plane crashed into the Andes and they survived 72 days in the mountains...

But then my common sense kicked in and I realized the finish line was only a few kilometers away, I needed to man up and just get on with it. So off I went, walking as if I was wearing stilts as each step broke through waist-deep snow.

The tracks of my tears.

Eventually, I made it through the snow and on to relatively solid ground - it was more like mud - but still, not snow. Winning.

With the finish line in sight, I ran up a muddy path, across a train line and eventually made it to the finish line 3 hours after leaving the comfort of my warm, dry hotel room. RESULT!

But the mountain had one last surprise in store for me. As it was a Sunday, and around 7pm, all the trains back down had stopped. So my only option after the conquest was to turn around and run back down the mountain, in the hopes that I make it to civilization before the sun set. The run down took a lot less time as I let gravity do all the work. Luckily, I made it back to the hotel in just under 2 hours and just in time to grab some protein-rich dinner before the kitchen closed.

Unluckily for me, my hotel had a "sense of humor", and made me wear a bib for the whole meal. I told them politely that I didn't need it, but they insisted, for reasons only people fluent in Bernese Oberland Swiss German can understand. In the end I was too exhausted to fight back and exchanged a bit of dignity for a hot meal.

"BUT I DON'T WANNA WEAR THE BIB!!!"