Signposts

For the occasion of this year’s April Fools’ Day, I have channeled my creativity to try to come up with a (more or less) hilarious joke:

This idea came to mind when even after having spent hundreds of hours on Swiss hiking paths, I consistently over- or underestimate their durations. At first thought, I played with the thought of extending the signposts with another column indicating the time it would take the average trail runner to complete the path. It quickly became clear to me that this would itself raise countless issues and question marks. But since I imagined this overhaul of the Swiss hiking signpost labelling to sound somewhat plausible, I decided to share it and see people’s reactions.

As intended, some people fell for the joke and were completely mislead…

As expected, some people played clowns and added some more fuel to the fire…

And as hoped, some people started discussing the usefulness of time estimates for hiking trails…

Jokes aside, I merely started this controversy to attract attention to the experiment I had in mind: I wanted to launch a trail running challenge to see by how much hiking time estimates could deviate from what a good trail runner can do. Therefore, upon following the mysterious link fmatti.ch/signposts in the description, people were prompted to participate in the following challenge:

find a signed hiking trail with an estimated duration of at least 1 hour;
record yourself following this trail and fill in a form with your details.

I was curious to see which strategy would win: Short or long? Uphill or downhill? Rolling or technical?

In the end, Timothée, a good friend of mine, won the challenge. As a prize, I invited him along for a fun day out in the mountains at my expense.

We first did the Gemmi-running challenge, setting the second- and third-fastest marks at the time, to earn us a free entry to the Spas in Leukerbad. Then, we went up the rather technical trail to the Rinderhorn, and ended our day enjoying the relaxing jacuzzis of Leukerbad. You can read more about our day in Timothées blog post on the the IAFL website.

Summit selfie with Timothée on the cloudy Rinderhorn