On May 1st I started my attempt at a totally unsupported effort on the Malerweg. I have had my eye on this route for a while, as the guide book I once got of it described it beautifully, and I want to do it as a photography trip with a couple of friends this fall when all the trees are in their fall colours. So this FKT attempt doubled as reconnaissance for that hike.
Having taken the train from Amsterdam the day before, I was a bit lazy in the morning and started later than I had planned. I started by first running about 5 km from my holiday apartment to the start of the route, before doing some stretches and starting the route just before 10 am. At this point I already got my first taste of the heat of the day, and was looking forward to mostly running in the shade of the forests on the route. To adjust for the heat I took my hydration bladder with me in addition to my soft flasks. I would quickly discover that I could have left the bladder at home and saved myself about 2 kilos in weight on the first stretch, as there were plenty of streams running. With the waterfilters in my soft flasks allowing me to refill my water pretty much every half hour, if not more often, I never refilled this bladder once I emptied it out in the first 30km of the run.
The first stretch of the trail went by pretty quick, only being held up by the crowds of day tourists at the Hohenstein castle. I found the stretch through the Sachsische zweisch leading into Schmilka to be the most beautiful part of the trail, and I was still fresh enough to enjoy the views at that point. I made it to Schmilka around 10 hours into my FKT, a fair bit slower than I had hoped due to the heat. At this point I decided to stick with my unsupported FKT style and began the 15-20km loop along the Elbe river to the bridge at Bad Schandau and back up to train station at the other side of the river. This variant allowed me to skip the ferry, and make for a truly unsupported FKT. This loop also treated me to a beautiful sunset on the river.
Arriving at the train station on the opposite side of the Elbe around the 12 hour mark, the best was long gone from my legs and it had become dark. The last ~ 50km from this train station to the finish in Pirna would take me about 9 1/2 hours of powering through the night with a fairly hazy mind. By the time I made it back to Pirna the sun had already risen again, as it was now past 7 am. I made it to the finish at the church with a sense of achievement dampened by my surprise at how log the effort took me, and a deep sense of exhaustion. After this I headed straight to my holiday apartment, a shower, and then to bed.
Unfortunately after waking up in the afternoon, I decided on dinner at a restaurant in town, where I promptly contracted food poisoning from a ceasar salad. The combination of having just done This FKT and the food poisoning would ruin my plans for several other FKT attempts this may.
For anyone that wants to follow this unsupported attempt:
- If it has rained recently and you have waterfilters like the katadyn befree or the salomon XA filter, you don't need to worry about water at all.
- For my unsupported variant of the route, I followed the official route to the Elbe river at Schmilka and then stuck to the river along mostly bike trails to the bridge at Bad Schandau. From here a service road follows the river back up to the Schmilka train station where you link back up with the official route from where the ferry would leave you if you were doing a (self-)supported attempt.