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Skiing fanatic's streak ends just shy of 3,000 days |
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Friday, January 13, 2012 08:33 |
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Rainer Hertrich was hospitalized this week, which ended his streak of consecutive days of skiing. Tripp Fay of Copper Mountain, Special to the Summit Daily
By Geoff Mintz, Summit Daily News
2,993 days.
That'll ultimately be the record for most consecutive days skiing, but first Rainer Hertrich needs to get well enough to alert Guinness World Records that his amazing streak has come to an end.
Hertrich, a Summit County local and 29-year snowcat operator at Copper Mountain, strapped into his telemark skis every day for more than eight years, until Wednesday when a cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) prevented him from hitting the slopes.
For Hertrich, it was a definitely more bitter than sweet, as the streak concluded less than 2 million vertical feet shy of the ultimate goal of 100 million - a figure that once seemed completely out of reach but was within sight this North American season.
“I'm feeling pretty good,” Hertrich said Thursday from the intensive care unit in Frisco. “I've been through a lot of injuries, and I've always joked that the streak would come to an end in the hospital bed, but I thought more along the lines of a broken leg or hip - something really broken. But I didn't expect it to be a broken heart.”
Throughout the course of the record, Hertrich hasn't been merely strapping into his skis, heading out for a run and calling it a day; he was chasing the maximum vertical, logging as many feet as possible and most days skiing the equivalent of Mount Everest. He suspects the demanding regimen at high altitude had something to do with overstressing his ticker.
Read more about Hertrich's record and how he was able to spend so much time on the slopes.
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