First edition of the Eiger Ultra Trail in Grindelwald / Switzerland with great success

The first edition of the Eiger Ultra Trail was in mother nature’s good graces. Only a summer rainfall towards the end of the day forced the organizers to stop the race for a matter of minutes.

There were three different categories. The E101 for the long distance specialists (with 6,700 meters of altitude change) and the E51 and the E16 courses, which sold out weeks before the event took place. More than 1000 enthusiastic runners from all over the world participated at the competition’s inaugural event.

All in all, it was a well-organized event with a clear winner on the E101km trail. The Spaniard mountain and trail running specialist Iker Karrera from Team Salomon finished first with a time of 11:38.42. Going up the summit of Faulhorn (2,680m), only a small group of runners were able to follow the Spaniard, amongst which was Pascal Giguet, team captain of SCOTT Odlo Les Saisies. But on the following downhill section to the Schynige plate Pascal was forced to withdraw, suffering too much from symptoms of Achilles tendonitis. “It was nice and amazingly beautiful up to Faulhorn. Iker was for sure running his own race, but the podium was a realistic goal. Just after the summit I had to take the only option for today: drop the race, as I’m clearly focused this year again on managing a great race and performance at the UTMB in Chamonix, at the end of August.”    

Fortunately, another SCOTT athlete was much more successful this day with Stephan Wenk winning the E16 with an impressive lead over his competitors of more than seven minutes. He was very happy about his victory. Stephan performed the race with the SCOTT Race Rocker and was happy about his choice to use this minimalistic and lightweight shoe around Grindelwald. His first words after the win, “This race will for sure stay in my memories for a long time. The run, the atmosphere, the landscape- just awesome! “

SCOTT Sports signed a contract with Eiger Ultra Trail as a main sponsor for the event. They presented their new products to all participants and spectators at their booth in the expo area, with special discounted prices for the event. All volunteers received a SCOTT shirt and all participants received a SCOTT Finisher Shirt.

All results:

http://services.datasport.com/2013/lauf/eiger-trail/

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