Trail Runner Andrea Huser Dies After Fall in the Alps

About midday on Sunday, November 29, research and rescue models recovered the body of Swiss professional path runner Andrea Huser over the ski vacation resort city of Saas-Cost, in the Swiss Alps. According to a push release issued by the local law enforcement station, Huser almost certainly dropped her footing whilst striving to cross a stream on a slope beneath the Alpin Express gondola and fell an believed 450 ft. She was 46 a long time old.

Huser’s talents extended very well outside of the sphere of extended-length path managing, a sport she only ventured into rather late in her athletic job. In 2002, she became the inaugural women’s winner in the marathon group of the European Mountain Biking Championships, a triumph she would follow with a victory in the 2004 edition of Switzerland’s prestigious Eiger Bike Problem. She was a two-time winner (2011, 2012) of the Inferno Triathlon, and a member of Mammut’s ski-mountaineering professional crew. It wasn’t right up until she was in her mid-40s that Huser seasoned what had been arguably her biggest athletic successes. In 2017, she was the women’s winner of the Extremely Path Planet Tour, a title currently held by Courtney Dauwalter. In 2016 and 2017, Huser completed 2nd in the women’s race at UTMB—an achievement which, as she pointed out earlier this 12 months on her Facebook webpage, was “a emphasize of my existence.” 

Following that peak 12 months of 2017, Huser’s relentless racing schedule started to catch up to her. In June of 2020, she announced that, following dealing with her fourth anxiety fracture in a few a long time, she experienced resolved to retire from aggressive running—though not from searching for adventure in the mountains near her house in Sigriswil, outside the Swiss money of Bern. 

Stephanie Case, an ultrarunner and U.N. lawyer who life in Chamonix, France, advised me that she achieved Huser numerous moments at ultras in 2017. She recalls getting struck each by how much Huser raced, and by how indifferent she seemed to be about the self-marketing side of the sport. All she desired to do was operate. Following in the beginning getting sponsored by Dynafit and then Mammut, Huser signed a deal with Hoka in 2018. According to an posting in the Swiss newspaper Thuner Tagblatt, she also acquired some funding from Pro Athletics Sigriswil, her local club, granting her the financial leeway to race as much afield as Hong Kong, where she received the Extremely-Path Tai Mo Shan in December 2017. 

By then, she experienced a great deal of miles in her legs. A fast research of the race benefits site ultrasignup.com reveals that in 2016 and 2017, Huser finished no less than 20 ultras on four continents. Not that she essentially thought that her prolific schedule was a significant deal.

As Case recalls: “If I expressed worry that I was racing way too much, or that I was carrying out two races way too close jointly, Andrea would just glimpse at me like she was genuinely puzzled. She would glimpse at me and ask: ‘Why not? Why wouldn’t you go?’ She was just up for nearly anything.”

Like the a lot of other individuals in the ultrarunning neighborhood, Case was deeply saddened to listen to about Huser’s freak accident—one that bore a placing similarity to her have expertise in January 2017, when she fell a hundred and forty ft all through a solo New Year’s Working day snowshoe operate near Courmayeur, in Italy, just off a path she states she’s run a “billion times” just before. Following her fall, Case managed to connect with a helicopter and was inevitably identified with six broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a grade III laceration of her liver.

And she was fortunate. Huser’s accident is a agonizing reminder of the inherent possibility of all mountain sports—a possibility that is maybe obscured by the a lot more flamboyantly harmful routines like Base jumping or intense snowboarding. On the day that Huser’s body was recovered, the identical law enforcement station revealed yet another push release that a 51-12 months-old hiker experienced slipped on frozen grass in nearby Zermatt and fallen to her dying. 

“It hardly ever occurred to me that I was carrying out a thing risky,” Case advised me about her accident. “This was snow-shoe managing. It is, like, ping pong. It is not intended to be a harmful sport.” 

Of study course, anyone is wiser in hindsight. Case advised me that a single of the items that irked her following her accident was the amount of persons who desired to lecture her on how you should hardly ever operate by itself in the mountains. But solo initiatives are an unavoidable aspect of teaching for an extremely. The possibility is always heading to be there. But also the reward. 

As Huser wrote in her retirement write-up this summer time: “Nevertheless, I will continue on to do many adventures on trails and in the mountains with skis, mountain bikes or path managing footwear. If every thing goes very well, in three-4 months. The mountains really don’t operate absent from me and anticipation is the biggest joy!!!”