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What the athletes achieve in the Red Bull X-Alps adventure race seems almost superhuman. The route leads from Kitzbühel in Austria around Mont Blanc in France and back to Zell am See, south of Salzburg. The highlight: every meter must be covered on foot or flown by paraglider. Not all participants reach the target in the planned twelve days.
As legendary as the X-Alps race itself is the man who has made his mark on the Hike & Fly sport in recent years. Since his first participation in 2009, Christian “Chrigel” Maurer (40) from the Bernese Oberland has won all seven editions, sometimes by two days ahead of his closest pursuers. In the scene, he is considered a living legend. The eagle of Adelboden is his nickname. Blick meets the exceptional athlete preparing for the race on his local mountain, the Niesen. The mountain is one of a total of 15 checkpoints that the athletes must pass.
Up the mountain six times in a row
He no longer remembers how many times the trained mason climbed the 2,263 meter high “Pyramid of the Alps” on Lake Thun. “I once attended a 24-hour training here. Run up, fly down, run up and so on. In terms of training, it was not the brightest, but I was able to gain experience. It was enough for six and a half climbs.” Extreme training for an extreme race. During the X-Alps, Maurer runs about one marathon a day and climbs an average of 3,500 vertical meters. In addition, there are about six hours in the air, which means constant concentration But it has also happened that he had to climb 5,400 altimeters in one day and walked 70 kilometers in the process.
The game with risk
The professional paraglider athlete casually tells these stories as he prepares his equipment. As if you were talking about a leisurely Sunday afternoon walk. Even the undefeated champion knows what suffering means. «Hips, knees, Achilles tendon, open blisters on the feet. Something is guaranteed to catch fire during the race.” The rule here is: grit your teeth and fly as much as possible. Maurer sees it pragmatically: “Twelve days is too short to destroy your body definitively.”
However, there is one exception. An airborne incident can have fatal consequences. While Maurer has remained virtually accident-free in his 26 years as a paraglider pilot, a residual risk remains. The father of two children is aware of this. “Especially in a match you always have to be clear – no victory is more important than your life. I decide how much risk I take. I make all decisions in the air. And I can live with that.”
hardship for passion
Chrigel Maurer is also being hunted in the X-Alps this year. He doesn’t really know what makes him so strong. A lot comes together. A great team supporting him from the ground up. A good gut feeling. And growing up in the Bernese Oberland, surrounded by the Alps, is certainly a good foundation.
For a long time, the mountains didn’t really matter to the adventurer. “I didn’t do any endurance sports until I was 26.” His father, a mountain climber, occasionally took him to a summit when he was young. At the time, Maurer would have much rather taken the gondola. “That’s what those trains are for,” he says laughing. At that moment, young Adelbodner had only one thing on his mind. Fly, fly, fly. But then he became aware of the X-Alps race. I wanted to participate and progress physically. So I trained and kept at it.”
Now Maurer is at the start of what is probably the toughest adventure race in the world for the eighth time. This edition also comes the moment that he regrets his participation: “Because it is difficult and frustrating. If I no longer see the point of it, it seems hopeless.” Nevertheless, he takes on all these hardships again and again. Because Chrigel Maurer is above all one thing: an adventurer with body and soul. Always on the rise – and yet very down to earth stayed.
Source : Blick
I’m Emma Jack, a news website author at 24 News Reporters. I have been in the industry for over five years and it has been an incredible journey so far. I specialize in sports reporting and am highly knowledgeable about the latest trends and developments in this field.
