Team Paparazzi
presented by GoLite

Sorry that I haven't been able to post! It's been a busy couple of days for teams (and their support crews) as with two running stages taking the place of mountaineering due to relentless rain, followed by a day of whitewater activities and another run. In betwen the days we camped near the River Isere in Bourg St. Maurice where there wasn't any internet connection.

We managed to stay dry in our tents at night, and the sun actually poked through the dark clouds for a few hours yesterday. The day when the mountaineering was planned, teams started a run from our soggy campground and finished in the town of Les Contamines Monjoie, high on the western flank of Mont Blanc amidst waterfalls and glaciated ice peering through the thick, misty fog and rain. A couple hours later, another run/hike kicked off near town and climbed south on part of the Tour du Mont Blanc trail. Snow and high winds hit teams with force as tehy climbed into the mountains and down into Les Chapieux.

The drive was epic: two hours of narrow, windy mountain roads, also enshrouded in fog and rain, then snow at higher elevations. Paint from past Tour de France races made me wish I was riding a bike instead of driving our van, but that might have lasted only a few hundred kilometers into any one of those big ascents.

The rain poured through the night, and morning greeted teams with a whitewater canoeing section. Mark, with his years of nagivating teenagers down east coast rivers as a camp counselor, kept the boys upright and pointed straight downriver. They finished 17th in the section. From there it was hydrospeeding, a kind of whitewater boogie boarding down class IV rapids. Then teams did a flatwater kayak slalom time trial. Good fun.

Yesterday afternoon sent them straight up from the valley floor to Les Arcs 1950 (meters), an epic uphill that took the winner an hour and change.

We camped last night, then drove early this morning to the start of yet another run in the town of La Feclaz in the Massif de Bauge. A light mist has been falling off and on this morning, and the boys head out on the climbing activities soon. I ran about half of the 13K trail race this morning, and the muddy, slippery conditions were fun to explore...then again, I only did part of it, and they've been running once or twice a day for four days now.