Today we arrived in Verbier, starting point of our 6 stage mountain race which crosses the Swiss Wallis or Valais from southwest to east. Finish line will be in famous Zermatt village next to the most pictured mountain in the world – the Matterhorn. We plan to update the mag every day until September 20th (the last stage).
Tomorrow we will ride the prologue of this first edition of Swiss Epic race. Marco is teaming up with Andy Benz and join the Swiss Epic Flow edition, the “enduro format” of the first Swiss stage mountain race. As said, we arrived in Verbier and are happy to have sunny decent weather up here. Overall the race will be 300km of racing our bikes including climbing of 8000m vertical. As an extra in our Flow format, other than the regular Swiss Epic format, we will be shuttled up with several chairlifts and gondolas. Our mission is to ride the fabulous singletracks with great fun and enjoy especially the downhill sections.
We just had our accreditation and race registration. Everything is arranged properly with Swiss precision and detail. And there are really a thousand details you don’t think about when going for a ride – starting with number plates, transponders, live tracking device, bike safety check, medical forms, race nutrition…
To acclimatise we rode the track we will be riding tomorrow (Prologue).
We were so glad to be on our full suspension bikes coming back down to Verbier after the climb – the track basically follows the Verbier bikepark and we can guarantee that this is a truly epic downhill ride – many berms, double jumps, flowy fast sections first, then it gets into the woods where it gets tighter – wooden ladder bridges, steep slopes and tight manoeuvring between the trees. Not to imagine this ride on a hardtail race bike with a seatpost up high!
You can follow us tomorrow live on this website. We will start at 11:13 and should be back down in town after a good hour of riding. Keep your finger crossed!
