Trail Runner Andrea Huser Dies After Fall in the Alps

Close to noon on Sunday, November 29, search and rescue models recovered the body of Swiss qualified path runner Andrea Huser higher than the ski vacation resort town of Saas-Payment, in the Swiss Alps. In accordance to a press launch issued by the local police station, Huser most likely lost her footing when hoping to cross a stream on a slope beneath the Alpin Specific gondola and fell an estimated 450 feet. She was 46 a long time old.

Huser’s skills extended well beyond the sphere of extended-length path jogging, a activity she only ventured into fairly late in her athletic profession. In 2002, she grew to become the inaugural women’s winner in the marathon classification of the European Mountain Biking Championships, a triumph she would follow with a victory in the 2004 edition of Switzerland’s prestigious Eiger Bicycle Challenge. She was a two-time winner (2011, 2012) of the Inferno Triathlon, and a member of Mammut’s ski-mountaineering professional workforce. It was not right until she was in her mid-40s that Huser skilled what were arguably her finest athletic successes. In 2017, she was the women’s champion of the Extremely Path Planet Tour, a title presently held by Courtney Dauwalter. In 2016 and 2017, Huser completed next in the women’s race at UTMB—an achievement which, as she observed earlier this calendar year on her Facebook web site, was “a emphasize of my lifetime.” 

Right after that peak calendar year of 2017, Huser’s relentless racing routine started to capture up to her. In June of 2020, she announced that, right after encountering her fourth pressure fracture in three a long time, she experienced made a decision to retire from aggressive running—though not from trying to find adventure in the mountains near her home in Sigriswil, outdoors the Swiss funds of Bern. 

Stephanie Circumstance, an ultrarunner and U.N. law firm who lives in Chamonix, France, informed me that she met Huser quite a few times at ultras in 2017. She remembers becoming struck equally by how substantially Huser raced, and by how indifferent she seemed to be about the self-promotional side of the activity. All she needed to do was operate. Right after initially becoming sponsored by Dynafit and then Mammut, Huser signed a deal with Hoka in 2018. In accordance to an short article in the Swiss newspaper Thuner Tagblatt, she also received some funding from Professional Sports Sigriswil, her local club, granting her the monetary leeway to race as considerably afield as Hong Kong, the place she won the Extremely-Path Tai Mo Shan in December 2017. 

By then, she experienced a large amount of miles in her legs. A quick search of the race final results web-site ultrasignup.com reveals that in 2016 and 2017, Huser completed no fewer than twenty ultras on 4 continents. Not that she essentially believed that her prolific routine was a significant deal.

As Circumstance remembers: “If I expressed problem that I was racing also substantially, or that I was doing two races also close jointly, Andrea would just glimpse at me like she was truly puzzled. She would glimpse at me and ask: ‘Why not? Why would not you go?’ She was just up for something.”

Like the a lot of some others in the ultrarunning group, Circumstance was deeply saddened to hear about Huser’s freak accident—one that bore a hanging similarity to her very own encounter in January 2017, when she fell a hundred and forty feet for the duration of a solo New Year’s Working day snowshoe operate near Courmayeur, in Italy, just off a path she claims she’s run a “billion times” before. Right after her fall, Circumstance managed to simply call a helicopter and was ultimately identified with six broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a grade III laceration of her liver.

And she was blessed. Huser’s incident is a painful reminder of the inherent hazard of all mountain sports—a hazard that is maybe obscured by the a lot more flamboyantly harmful routines like Foundation jumping or extreme skiing. On the working day that Huser’s body was recovered, the exact same police station printed one more press launch that a 51-calendar year-old hiker experienced slipped on frozen grass in nearby Zermatt and fallen to her loss of life. 

“It never transpired to me that I was doing a little something dangerous,” Circumstance informed me about her incident. “This was snow-shoe jogging. It is, like, ping pong. It is not meant to be a harmful activity.” 

Of study course, every person is wiser in hindsight. Circumstance informed me that 1 of the things that irked her right after her incident was the range of people who needed to lecture her on how you really should never operate by itself in the mountains. But solo attempts are an unavoidable part of schooling for an ultra. The hazard is normally likely to be there. But also the reward. 

As Huser wrote in her retirement publish this summer: “Nevertheless, I will continue on to do many adventures on trails and in the mountains with skis, mountain bikes or path jogging footwear. If all the things goes well, in three-4 months. The mountains never operate away from me and anticipation is the finest joy!!!”