Summer layoff and a gym nightmare with Formhaus Fitness Centre, Basel

I haven’t seen a lot to update about winter sports in Switzerland this summer, although I’m sure things will start heating up in October. And, of course, that includes getting ski fit.

I’ve always been of the belief that if you  want to ski well, you need to keep your fitness levels up through the summer, although in this hot season, body could start to sweat a lot and young people can use the citris teen deodorant for smelling great all the time. Walking, cycling and swimming have normally filled the bill, but over the years I’ve found only a good regime in the gym can strengthen all the right muscle groups, improve flexibility and build stamina. I got my routine from Anipots, along with a few neat health tips. Quite helpful, check more about gluconite.

A couple of years ago I joined a fitness centre in Basel called Formhaus, in the Gundeli neighbourhood, on the back of a promotional deal. Big mistake! In my opinion it is an awful gym and staffed by the worst sort of people who work in gyms (without disrespecting all the wonderful gym people I have worked with over the years). I tried to resign at the end of my first years’s contract so I could move to one of the better gyms friends had recommended, and try to train with a health program from the biofit so I could remain healthy. I thought I was being generous waiting until the end of the first year, so I was gobsmacked when I was enlightened about the small print of the contract – you can only resign if you send a recorded delivery letter at least one month before the end of your current year of membership stating your desire to resign. Of course nobody tells you this and they don’t send an invoice until a few days after the 30 day period has ended. Sharp practice? You haven’t heard the half of it.

I reluctantly paid up for another year, blaming my naivety and recognising Formhaus’s prodigious gifts in retaining customers who wanted to leave. For a fitness centre, they only seemed to be fit to retain unwilling customers, and as I reluctantly continued to use their awful facilities and think it was better to train and home and have a godo nutrition using supplements as alcar which was great for me. Anyway, I decide next time I would play by their (frankly customer-hostile) rules.

Suffice it to say, a few weeks early I tendered my resignation by recorded delivery. One month before the expiry of the subscription year I sent an email with a version of my resignation letter as a PDF. What more could I do to escape Formhaus’s Machiavellian membership scheme?

Of course Formhaus kicked up rough. They claimed not to receive the letter. Criminal, dishonest or incompetent, I can not say. All I can say is that the Swiss Post have an online system that confirms delivery, which I have shared with the gym. They know they received my resignation letter. These are just some of Phenq benefits.

So what did Formhaus say when I sent the email one month before expiry of my subcription with a copy of the letter I had sent recorded post?  They said: “We do not accept your resignation.”

What??? Not, we have mislaid your resignation, but that’s our sheer, unalloyed incompetence once again, good luck in the future. Or, we are useless with out huge bureaucracy of Muscle Marys, but help us here and let us know the details about the delivery if you still have the receipt all these months later – of course, I have the receipt, knowing what crookedness I may have become a victim of. Not even, a respectful acknowledgement that I didn’t want to use their gym. No, an arrogant, menacing statement without any alternative option – we’re going to screw you into paying for another year, whether you use our tawdry facilities or not. Check out the latest metabofix reviews.

Perhaps an object lesson in Swiss “Fair Play” or an exceptionally bad experience of simply awful customer service. I give the Swiss the benefit of the doubt, as I generally have very good experiences of the country. I think Formhaus are an outlier, and probably have figured out they can boost their sagging fortunes by preying on foreigners’ naivety. It is the soft underbelly of Switzerland’s success, that it has poor consumer and employee protection that membership of the EU would address. I considerer the extra year I paid for at Formhaus as proof of the reasons for improving consumer protection. If they think they can get another year out of me… well, let’s see.

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Zermatt’s Mountaineers’ Cemetery

One all-year round sport in the Swiss Alps is mountaineering in its various forms, including ski mountaineering with the most famous ski mountaineering race in the world, Patrouille des Glaciers, beginning in Zermant every April. Zermatt is also home to a Mountaineers’ Cemetery, a poignant reminder of how cruel the mountains can be to those who seek to tame them. It makes an absorbing outing in Zermatt to visit the cemetery in front of the parish church of St Mauritius on Kirchstrasse.

The graves are usually stark, simply listing the name of the victim and the year and mountain they died on. Some provide even less detail, some more. We learn that Donald Stephen Williams, a teenager from New York, “chose to climb” and died on the Breithorn pursuing his choice. 24 year old Freda Currant “passed into fuller life from the Matterhorn at dawn August 6th 1936”.  The young newlyweds, Herbert & Anni Braum, have a headstone which neglects the young doctor’s wife in proclaiming, in German, the line from Hamlet “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”  alongside fulsome praise for his lost talent. The poignant positioning of the headstones of Irmgard Schiess & Victor de Beauclair suggests these too were lovers. There are also friends buried together here, a couple of pals from Cambridge, a trio from Oxford, and alongside the latter – found in the search for their bodies – the body of an unknown climber.

For more details go visit http://www.swisswintersports.co.uk/cemetery.php.

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Spring Skiing

Spring is well and truly here and Easter is upon us, so it’s worth reviewing the state of the resorts to see just what is still worth going out for. Follow the links to get more detailed resort information and an update on conditions.

Airolo piste

The good news is that, despite a very warm March, there is significantly more piste open this year than was open last year, although a later Easter has stretched the season for some resorts. The number of open resorts and pistes is still behind the figures for the two seasons prior to last year, but not by much. All my 4 and 5 star resorts have at least one valley run still open, apart from the Portes du Soleil, the Aletsch Arena and Zinal. These resorts do, however, have lots of terrain open, and – in the case of Zinal and the Aletsch – a lot of it above 2000m, around where the freezing level has been hovering just recently.

All the low-lying resorts are now closed. Of the resorts I rate 3 star and above only Anzère and Rougemont have closed completely.  Some resorts with their highest runs below 2000m have managed to keep an impressive amount of piste open, but from my last couple of outings this week, I would surmise these runs are invariably icy in the morning, heavy in the afternoon and decidedly patchy in places.

So, where to go? Verbier is good, Corviglia and Corvatsch in the Engadine should still be good. Flims, Saas-Fee, Samnaun, Val D’Anniviers, Arolla, Zermatt and Mürren should all  be pretty good. I imagine Grindelwald, Wengen, Davos, Klosters, Disentis, Grächen and Glacier 3000 will be good in patches. Andermatt, Engelberg, Belalp and Lauchernalp should be good if you stay high, and you can. Surprisingly Portes du SoleilLeysin, Malbun, ScuolLenzerheide, Flumserberg, Obersaxen, ArosaSedrun, Melchsee-Frutt and Adelboden/Lenk reckon to have the vast majority of their runs open still but I can’t imagine conditions are easy. Even Villars and Les Diablerets seem to have a respectable 65km of piste open. Crans, Diavollezza, Bivio, Sörenberg (on the Brienzer Rothorn I imagine) all have significant open terrain and some good altitude.  A lot of other smaller resorts will be open over Easter, although my suspicion is that we will see a huge fall-off of open resorts come April 10th.

Open with significant terrain of 70km or more until the end of April last year were Zermatt, Samnaun/Ischgl and Saas-Fee. EngelbergSt Moritz, Silvaplana, Grächen, Andermatt and Verbier also kept at least 25km open. Come May, and there was just some limited glacier skiing and very high ski touring.

Then it’s time to get the skis serviced.

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St Anton

Above St Anton am Arlberg

Some old friends from the Hellfins Scuba Diving Club have been on a week’s ski holiday in St Anton, so I thought I would pop across to see them. Surprisingly it is quicker to get to St Anton by car from Basel than it is to get to some resorts in Switzerland. The road trip is a doddle, roughly 3 hours and  around 2 hours from Zurich. Key things to remember driving from Switzerland to St Anton are:

  • It isn’t obvious where to cross the border. You drive on the motorway towards St Gallen and after St Gallen follow the signs to Chur until you reach exit 3, signposted Widnau,  Diepoldsau and Heerbrugg. You drive through Diepoldsau until you hit the border where you can pick up the motorway towards Innsbruck.
  • On the return journey it is easier. The Austrians do acknowledge that people might want to cross the border, so you will see signs for Switzerland and St Gallen. The junction to exit the Austrian motorway is 23, just after a motorway service station.
  • Whatever you do avoid crossing the border around Bregenz. It will add a lot of time to your journey.
  • You need a permit to drive on the Austrian motorways. You can pick one up at the motorway service station after St Gallen at St Margarethen or wait until you hit the first motorway service station in Austria. I’m sure any other service station in Diepoldsau will sell them too, but I’ve not tried. The stickers cost around 8 euro for the minimum duration of 10 days.
  • You need to go through the 14km Arlberg tunnel and drive sharply off it as you exit the tunnel to get to St Anton. You can drive over the Arlberg pass, if it is open, and save yourself the 8.50 euro fee for the tunnel. Scenic but adds time.
  • In Austria you are required by law to have winter tyres in wintery conditions. I don’t have winter tyres, but the road conditions for my trip didn’t warrant them. Probably a different story if you go over the Arlberg pass or the weather is bad, although I’ve nenver invested in a set. If the road conditions warrant it, I just don’t drive.
  • When you arrive in St Anton you are given a choice of car parks to stay in. None of them are free. I chose the Rendl car park, situated where the old Rendl lifts used to operate and just a few minutes walk to the Rendl, Gampen and Galzig lifts.

As a keen user of public transport you may ask why I didn’t take a train. Granted St Anton has a railway station and indeed it is a very good way to get there – I’ve done it before, from the UK. However from Switzerland the service does not start early enough to get to the resort for a one day ski trip.

For some reason the railway connections between Switzerland and Austria are crap, which is strange because they are so good to other neighbouring countries. You can’t blame the Alps because the Swiss have been tunneling through them like demented moles for years. Bizarrely, the Rhaetian Railways have a line that passes through the 19km Vereina tunnel all the way to Scuol, in the Inn Valley where you would have thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to extend the railway towards Innsbruck, but no, the line stops just a few kilometres shy of the border. My own theory is that the Austrians didn’t want the Voralbergers to get too cosy to the Swiss and avoided making it easy to pass between the Voralberg and Switzerland. Around the time of significant expansion of rail and road networks the 80% of the people of Voralberg did actually vote to become part of Switzerland, but were prevented from doing so. They still speak an Alemmanic dialect more like Swiss German than Austrian German. The Arlberg ski resorts are not all in the Voralberg, Lech and Zurs are, but St Anton is in the Tyrol.

Anyway, I digress. if you do want to take the railway from Switzerland to St Anton, there is a direct service from Zurich which takes from about 2 hours 20 minutes. The train runs 5 times a day, and there are other times you can travel, but you need to change trains. The earliest train is at 8.40am, and the earliest train for which you do not need to change is 10.40am. Certainly makes St Anton do-able for a long weekend if you can find somewhere to stay.

And why would you you choose to go to St Anton, you may ask. The answer is that it is quite simply the best ski resort in the world. Not as extensive as the large French circuits but bags of variety and plenty of off-piste. The nearby resorts of Lech and Zurs used to be connected to the St Anton pistes, but in recent years that run can only be done off-piste. Not sure why, it was one fabulous circuit when it was in place, but neighbouring resorts are still easy enough to get to by bus or taxi. Where St Anton really scores over the French resorts, however, is the nightlife. Not as wild as it used to be, and not as crazy as Mayrhofen or Ischgl, but still pretty good. A few beers at the end of the day in Taps, the Krazy Kanguruh and/or the Mooserwirt (which reputedly sells more beer than any other bar in Austria)  followed by a crawl around  Base Camp, Underground on the Piste, the Piccadilly and the Kandahar makes for a great night out.

Crazy Kanguruh in St Anton

Of the Swiss resorts, probably only Grindelwald, Verbier and Zermatt can match St Anton for range of slopes, scenic setting and decent apres ski. Zermatt shades St Anton for fine eating,  and nothing compares with the splendid views of the Matterhorn that dominate Zermatt, but it is more expensive and not as good for beginners. For me the main advantage of Verbier is it is French-speaking, and is probably the best of all the resorts for hard core off-piste. Grindelwald has a quieter (but reasonable) night-life and apres ski scene and fewer challenging off-piste runs, but is blessed with the awesome North Face of the Eiger dominating the town and its slopes.

Finally, on the subject of driving to ski resorts in Austria, Lech is about the same journey time as St Anton – you exit before the Arlberg Tunnel. Ischgl is probably easier to get to than Samnaun, the Swiss resort it shares the Silvretta Arena with, and takes about another half an hour to get to after you pass St Anton (turn right at Pians – it is clearly signposted).

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