Kilian Jornet, who will turn 36 on the 27th, has taken a dip in the Pyrenees, enjoyed and suffered in the landscapes of his childhood. In eight days he has climbed 177 three-thousanders of the Pyrenees, which has meant saving more than 43,000 meters of positive slope. The Catalan athlete already hinted on October 1, through social networks, that he was preparing something big, not in the Himalayas or the Alps, but in the mountains where it all began, by posting a photo as a child with his sister Naila in the Pica d’Estats. The adventure started on Monday of last week ascending the Frondella, in Huesca, and ended yesterday morning by summiting the Pica (3,143 m.), The roof of Catalonia, in one of the “toughest” adventures of his.
The journey has been wild, the most difficult yet. Some dizzying figures that he released this morning indicate that in a marathon day, the fifth, he chained 49 peaks, between main and secondary, in the areas of the Eriste, Posets and Perdiguero peaks, and that he walked 39 hours in a row. The total distance he has covered is 485.65 kilometers, of which 105 were pedaling as he used the bicycle to connect the different sections, and the remaining 380 on foot, in a total of 155 hours of physical activity.
“I had climbed these peaks when I was 13 years old but I didn’t remember them, which made it a very intense visual experience,” he reflects. One of the most exciting moments occurred yesterday in Pica de Estats, where her mother, Núria Burgada, was waiting for her; Jordi Canals, her first ski coach and mentor, and also the guards at the Colomina refuge, the skier Marta Riba and Gerard Garreta. The previous days she had trodden the most sought-after mountains of the Pyrenees, the Vignemale, the Monte Perdido, the Aneto, the Garmo Negro, the Posets… One hundred and seventy-seven of the total of 216 three thousand of the mountain range, according to the inventory of the Ghostbusters group. During her journey she has spent the night in the Baysellance, Pineta, Cap Long, Viadós, Llanos del Hospital and Llauset shelters.
Jornet has extensive experience as a mountain runner and mountaineer, with numerous forays into the Himalayas and the Alps. In a challenge of these characteristics, solvency in climbing and speed provide great value. Touring the Pyrenees means returning to his origins, to the patio of his house when he was a child; Not in vain, he grew up in a refuge in Cerdanya, in Cap del Rec, although he now lives in Norway with his partner, the Swedish runner and skier Emelie Forsberg, and his two daughters.
It should be remembered that he had to give up participating in the Mont-Blanc Ultra Trail, the first weekend of September, due to an injury. “After recovering, I considered several projects and it occurred to me to chain the peaks of more than 3,000 meters in the Pyrenees. I had this idea in my head but I didn’t know if it would be a possible challenge or crazy. After consulting it and getting advice from people who They know the routes very well, I decided to do it,” he explains in a statement.
The Catalan athlete’s last adventure took place last spring in the Himalayas. Sixty years after the Americans Willi Unsoeld and Thomas Hornbein made history on Everest by opening a new route to the summit that bears the latter’s name, Jornet attempted to complete the same itinerary. He did not succeed when he was trapped by an avalanche in the demanding corridor that dragged him about 50 meters down the mountain. He did not manage to reach the summit but he was able to practice high-level mountaineering and explore very difficult terrain.
