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ski mountaineering: my journey
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Competitive ski mountaineer Maximilien Drion, left, notched second and third places in World Cup events in Andorra early this year. Writer Simon Akam, bottom right, got the chance to train with the champion in St-Luc, Switzerland.Illustration by Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail. Source photos courtesy of Simon Akam.


Last week, I waited at the base station of the funicular in St-Luc, the neighbouring village to Chandolin in Switzerland’s Val d’Anniviers, in the sunshine of the late afternoon. I’d just completed my final day of instruction before moving up the valley with Christophe Hagin, the head of Chandolin’s ski school. We’d had a red-letter day under bluebird skies, off-piste runs back-to-back, including some of the steepest ground I’d ever skied.

I was exhausted, though, and a little apprehensive given I’d grafted onto that downhill work a stint in the other direction, the uphill tussle with gravity that is the heart of this project. But I was still looking forward to meeting one of the area’s preeminent competitive ski mountaineers, 25-year-old Maximilien Drion.

Drion notched second and third places in World Cup events in Andorra early this year. In 2018 he won the “Petite” Patrouille des Glaciers, the short-course variant of the race I hope to take part in next year, covering 30 kilometres and 1,900 metres of climb in 2 hours 44 minutes. In 2019 Drion was also filmed in a less formal but no less dramatic event: He raced a ski lift uphill, and comfortably won.

We walked away from the funicular and picked up the trail. I knew Drion would be going at a fraction of his normal pace for me, but what struck me was his rhythm. As we headed up from St-Luc, in the flat light at the end of an alpine day, my impression was of a very powerful engine set to a very low gear.

Drion is not Swiss. He was born in Belgium but his family moved to the Val d’Anniviers when he was 10. A local trail running race called La Dérupe – where he covered 2.5 horizontal km and 400 m of vertical in 21 minutes – revealed an aptitude for uphill athleticism. After that he began trail running in summer and competitive ski mountaineering in winter with increasing seriousness, at a time when the sport was booming. “Now there are many more professional ski mountaineers than 10 years ago,” he told me, estimating there are about 30 men and 20 women in the category. He hopes to have a shot at the winter Olympics in 2026, when ski mountaineering will debut as an event.

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Simon Akam is a British journalist and author.

Maximilien Drion, left, and and Simon Akam during a ski training session in Switzerland.Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail

Drion’s body fat currently sits at 7 per cent – by comparison, for men aged 20 to 39, above 25 per cent is classed as obese, and below 5 per cent is dangerously low. Beyond this greyhound physique I was struck by his equipment. I’d not previously seen a set of true ski mountaineering race kit at close quarters – material where much downhill functionality is traded for reduced weight for the climb. His boots looked like the protective footwear of a medieval knight, albeit hewn from carbon fibre. They weighed about 510 grams each (a typical downhill ski boot can be 2 kg) and they were not fully enclosed; when his ankles flexed I saw his socks. Next to mine, his skis were spindly too, 162 centimetres long and 64 millimetres wide, compared with mine at 180 cm and 94 mm. They weighed, including bindings, just 850 g each.

I also had to make swift psychological adjustments. Put two men together in any sporting context and the potential for competition is present. But the idea of competition with Drion was absurd. There is absolutely no way that I will ever be able to engage in competitive ski mountaineering at his level. He is 12 years younger than me, an international athlete. I’m a writer with a book project about mental as well as physical reassembly.

I had to promptly shift any notion of a bro workout session, and instead appreciate that it was just a privilege to spend some time on skis with someone at this level. I could not help wondering too what he thought of me, as I fiddled amateurishly with my bindings. His demeanour was polite, friendly. I thought of another Swiss athlete, Roger Federer, always so polished at even the most banal events his sponsors asked him to attend. Did Drion, I wonder, privately consider my project – and perhaps me – ridiculous?

Open this photo in gallery:
Simon Akam is a British journalist and author.

Drion, above, looks over a mountain ridge in St-Luc. The 25-year-old is one of the area’s preeminent competitive ski mountaineers.Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail

Open this photo in gallery:
Simon Akam is a British journalist and author.

Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail

But I was most intrigued to ask Drion whether professional sport had cost him his passion for the mountains. Was it now just a job, an equation of inputs and cardiovascular outputs to be managed by his smartwatch? Did victories pay off up to 25 training hours a week?

As we climbed, I asked if he was interested in hut-to-hut, non-competitive ski touring, the meditative activity that – race objective or none – is really the most important aspect of this project for me. He was not: “What other people do in five or six days, I do in five or six hours.” This came across not as braggadocio, rather a blunt statement of fact. While there is huge range, a group on an average multiday ski tour in the Alps might complete 1,000 m to 1,500 m of climb a day. I asked Drion his own maximum. He gestured around the peaks that rim the valley. At the end of the winter of 2021 he connected Vercorin to Chandolin, via Zinal, the village at the far end of the Val d’Anniviers. Sixty-five horizontal kilometres and 5,200 m of climb took just seven hours and 45 minutes.

But was the magic still there, I pushed? He was adamant it was. He pointed to a training climb he’d made that morning with his father above Vercorin – delaying his own departure so the pair of them arrived at the top at the same time. “In the mountains, each workout is different as the terrain is varied,” he explained later. “I’m never bored. I always manage to be amazed by looking at nature and the landscapes that surround me.”

We spent an hour on skis and ascended 450 m, less than an 11th of Drion’s personal daily record, before clattering down to St-Luc. Even on pygmy skis he was rapid downhill too. It was a humbling experience. But it was also heartening – he’d been gracious to have me along.

A few days later, installed up the valley, I took another marked ski touring trail above Zinal. It had been a frustrating day for various reasons, but some 750 m of climb turned my mood. The reasons may be largely physiological – endorphin is a powerful narcotic – though the view of the great peaks was a salve too. There is magic in skiing uphill, even at a fraction of Drion’s pace.

Simon Akam is a British journalist and author. His first book, The Changing of the Guard – The British Army since 9/11, published in 2021, was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year and won the Templer First Book Prize. Simon can be found at @simonakam on Twitter, @simon.akam on Instagram.

Learn more about Maximilien Drion on Instagram at @maximiliendrion and maximilendrion.com.

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