Day 7

8 miles

With apologies for the first of probably several Chamonix-related puns… today we took it easy before an actual race that Sarah had managed to enter us into tomorrow just down the valley in Argentière.

We decided to run easy along the river towards Les Houches, naïvely thinking it would be nice and flat when of course it inevitably did have quite a few undulations as the path climbed up and down through the trees.  It was a lovely route though and good to stretch the legs again after travelling yesterday.

The rest of the day was a combination of familiarising ourselves with Chamonix’s cafés and shops, preparing for our race, and enjoying our apartment.

It turns out we needed to find a few mandatory items:

• ‘sifflet’: having summoned the depths of our GCSE vocab, we were relieved to find that our trail packs already have a whistle incorporated
• ‘gobelet’: we are now proud owners of super-light squashable thermoplastic polyurethane cups for scooping water from rivers or aid station buckets
• and the notorious ‘bande pansement’ which after much triangulation of online translations and other race stipulations, we now know is a roll of self-adhesive mesh bandage

With the time and the inclination, Max decided it was the moment for his first ‘flatlay’, only a decade or so behind pre-race social media trends.

And otherwise time to enjoy our apartment, which seems to have an owner with a shared passion for marmottes.  How nice to feel at home!