The mountains remain

Today was one of those days when everything seemed to fall into place.

I ran through the mountains feeling almost weightless. The kind of running where the body seems to know the way by itself, where you stop thinking about your legs and simply move. After the strange heaviness of the past few weeks, it felt almost miraculous.

I have spent most of this summer in the Alps. First two weeks cycling through the Southern Alps, then several weeks in Vorarlberg, where I slowly started running again after an Achilles injury. Eventually I decided to try something new: I took my car into the mountains, turned it into a makeshift bedroom, and spent my days trailrunning and my nights wherever I happened to end up.

It was a wonderful way of travelling.

But towards the end of that first trip, something began to change. I was increasingly tired. Running, which normally feels almost instinctive to me, suddenly demanded effort. I could still go on, but the lightness was gone. I felt less like I had wings.

Eventually, toothache forced me home. And once I got there, the explanation appeared almost embarrassingly clearly: two infections, both of them requiring treatment. Suddenly the strange exhaustion of those weeks made sense.

The operations would have to wait another couple of weeks. So I did what perhaps only seemed logical to me.

I came back to the Alps.

This time with antibiotics.

And somewhere along the way, the wings returned.

I feel wonderfully alive again. Almost absurdly fortunate. There are still moments when the old pain of having spent so many years feeling like an outsider rises to the surface. I have learned, though, that I don't necessarily have to solve those feelings. Sometimes I simply sit down and meditate for a while. Then I get up and start planning the next route.

There is something new on this journey, too: I bought a boat ;) ;)

A tiny inflatable boat, really, but it has already passed its first two tests with flying colours. It takes only a few minutes to set up, and drifting across a quiet mountain lake is unexpectedly wonderful. The mountains look completely different from the water. Everything becomes slower, quieter, more spacious.

And after a long day of trailrunning, there is something almost perfect about climbing into the little boat, letting it drift, and meditating while the water gently rocks beneath you.

A different element, a different rhythm.

I am also beginning to fall in love with via ferratas. You don't run them, obviously, but they are enormous fun. I am starting to feel tempted by some of the more technical ones, although that will mean acquiring some proper ferrata gear first.

Today's route, however, was more than just a beautiful climb.

It followed the old front line of the First World War.

The mountainside is still riddled with the remains of that war: tunnels disappearing into the rock, narrow passages, trenches, firing positions and little openings through which soldiers once watched the opposite side. You move through them almost as if they were part of some extraordinary mountain playground, and then, every so often, you remember what actually happened here.

For two years, Austrian and Italian soldiers faced each other across these mountains. The border ran here at the time, until Austria was forced to cede the territory after the war. Today it is South Tyrol.

What struck me most was that so many of the men who died here were not killed by bullets.

They died from the cold. From snow and avalanches. From hunger, exhaustion and disease. From the sheer brutality of trying to survive a war at these altitudes.

It is a strange thing to move through such a landscape.

The mountains are breathtakingly beautiful. The history beneath your feet is horrifying.

And somehow both are there at once.

Perhaps that is one of the things I keep coming back to the Alps for. They contain an extraordinary mixture of beauty and indifference. They don't explain themselves. They don't care what happened here, or what happens to us now.

They simply remain.