Training Log Archive: Torino

Hiking with the group at a leisurely pace, talking to people, checking out flowers, birds and butterfly. Time just flew by when we were walking. But we stopped at the restaurant and it took forever to get people moving again up to the lake where I finally had my sandwich.
I had no GPS from the lake about 2 km and 200 m elevation down to the mountain station of the gondola steeply down to the main valley

After a pretty roller-coaster week with good days but also very tired off-days and no training at all nor any minute on the bike, I felt little better (finally!) on Saturday. We had gone to Glarus all the way back to the end of the valley and met Urs's fitness group from Bern for the weekend. We had an over 2-hour tour of a newish power station and huge electrical generating station deep in the mountain and high up in the working area. I often felt as if in a James Bond-movie with all these subterranean installation where the "man" lives who wants the power over the whole world. But this was far from that and the huge tunnels connecting, the immense power generators, the makings of the dams high up, the logistics of building all of this with heavy material transported to remote areas with no road nor trails, it must have been a mind-boggling project.
Anyway, when we finally popped out again into warm sunshine and everybody was getting ready to take another cog train up to Braunwald to have some pre-dinner snacks and wine, I decided I needed to move a bit.
I chose to hike up VERY steeply on a trail and once I was above the village I still had to cross a huge area of small streams merging into one before falling into a beautiful waterfall over one of those high cliffs.
It was a very nice time by myself, doing some exercise, being in the woods, admiring flowers high up and eventually ending up at the hotel just in time for dinner.

Note: in the afternoon I finally started to clean my bike thoroughly, check that everything was working and also started to put things back together: pedals, handlebars, wheels, chain, derailleur etc.
I pumped it up and when I rechecked 15 min later, the flat tire was flat! I thought that I did something wrong so pumped it up again and felt and listened while I slowly turned the tire. Sure enough I heard a faint hiss and pulled out a huge, long, woody thorn!! I must have been so lucky on Sunday at the relay that I managed to finish.