Finally, we had a proper winter vacation, with snow and skiing and all. First, we spent a week in the village of Le Rosier in Vallée de la Clarée in Hautes-Alpes (our third time there in three months) running and skiing, and then three days in Entre-Deux-Guiers on the Chartreuse range running, and last but not least, having our annual dentist appointments (still no cavities!).
The weather was mostly favorable; we had a couple of gloomy days in Le Rosier, but the rest of the time it was sunny. The same in Chartreuse. What surprised us was that while the morning temperatures in Le Rosier (at 1500 meters) were chilly they were even chillier in Entre-Deux-Guiers (at 400 meters). Also in Le Rosier the temperature rose a lot faster and higher after the sun climbed above the mountain, reaching +16°C at about 11am.
We both started and ended our vacation with a long run (2h & 3h), since we tried to keep up with our marathon training program. We knew that training while on vacation is not always easy for multiple reasons: scheduling runs and other exercises around traveling is always a challenge, and the weather, altitude, and simply the landscape or the environment in general constrain what is possible. I think this time we managed our training quite well.
Of our six days in Vallée de la Clarée we spent three days skiing and three days running; in addition to the above mentioned long run we did a one-hour regular run and some interval training, which turned up hard at that altitude. Even if the road we ran on looked deceptively flat, it consisted of considerable, still gentle, up and downhills.
Usually it has taken me about a day to adapt to the higher altitude, but this time I felt it never happened. We have read (I think it was in Runners’ World magazine) that if one plans to race at a higher than normal living or training altitude one should either arrive at the race location one day before the race, so that the altitude effect does no really kick in before the race, or well in advance, say two weeks, so there will be enough time to adapt. According to that source, the worst possible time to race is about four to five days after entering the higher altitude, since that is when the altitude change effect is the strongest. This was exactly when we did some of our runs on this vacation. No wonder it felt so hard!
And that reminded us of the mistake we made when booking flights to Madrid (at about 700m) to be there four days before the race. Eventually, we solved the issue by planning to get out of Madrid right away and stay at the lower altitude until the race day.
We had checked the weather forecast for the day we were planning to drive from Hautes-Alpes to Isère, and it promised snowfall with 100 percent probability. Having been on the road in a blizzard before, we were still not sure what to expect. When we woke up in the morning it was snowing quite heavily. Luckily by the time we started driving, the roads had been cleared, and as the temperature stayed at zero degrees Celsius or a little above, they were not icy either. Actually, it got a lot more scary when we crossed the border back to France (*), since there the thing coming down from the sky was not white fluffy stuff, but heavy downpour, with a lot of water on the motorway.
(*) When returning from Vallée de la Clarée through the Frejus tunnel, we first crossed the border from France to Italy in Montgenèvre, and then back to France in the tunnel.
Our first day in Entre-Deux-Guiers started grey and cold, and we decided to move our long run to the next day, and went for a shorter run to warm up.
The next day started quite different, sunny with sub-zero temperatures. By the time we started our run, the frost on the ground had melted, and by the time we returned, the temperature was in mid-teens. Again the trail we were on looked deceptively flat, but we felt we were running uphill to both directions. Luckily we recovered before the early-evening dentist appointments.
Time to go home! Our last morning started sunny and freezing. There was a also a layer of fog at the bottom of the valley that took a long time to dissipate. This was a nice vacation, even if nothing remarkable happened. We will certainly return to Vallée de la Clarée to ski. A bientôt!
