In winter’s postseason Tomi got the chance to travel to Kaprun, Austria for a little snowboarding during the Hungarian national holiday (15th March) which is a typical date for Hungarians to go to ski. The speed record breaking attempts went really well.

He visited Klitzsteinhorn which is a glacier ski resort near Kaprun.

Freeride

The resort provided some freeriding in the first 2 days. First day was foggy but the 40+ cm snow made it a very good day. Second day was much better, because it was sunny, and some lifts were working which were not working on the first day, so new area was reachable with fresh snow.

The locals said, and Tomi also noticed that the snow wasn’t so perfectly soft like it should be, but it was still a big lucky surprise from the postseason.

“The resort has 5 different freeride routes. They are really nice, unfortunatelly it attracts even more people. But if you are lucky you can find the more advanced routes where nobody was before.”

Freestyle

The second part of the trip was more like about freestyle. The resort has huge funparks. Basically there are 4 fun parks:

• Glacier park – it wasn’t been built unfortunatelly, but it must be the best
• Easy park – 2 big kickers (8m, 15m), lot of rails, 3 smaller kickers (2m, 4m, 5m)
• Super pipe – 160m long, 6.5m high
• Central park – Bigger kickers (6m, 8m, 10m, 18m), wallrides and rails

There is a lift that takes you to the top of the Easy park and Superpipe. You can chose which one you take. If you take the superpipe you can still join into the Easy park, and have some jibs.

At the end, you can cross a slope and start the Central park. This round takes around 15mins so you can practise any kind of freestyle here effectively. Though the lift is a big slow and there are many beginners “trying to ruin” your run.

Klitzsteinhorn Superpipe (130m long, 6.5m high)

Speed records

Later on the trip on one of the morning Tomi saw a a nice lonely slope from the lift.

“I immediatelly thought it is a good place for some speed record breaking. It was a long steep slope at the edge of the ski resort, so not too many people were going here.”

In the morning the slopes are pefect, the maintenance team makes a really nice job every night. If you are the first on the slopes you can have a wonderful carving for more than 2 hours. Most of the slopes is still very good in the late afternoon.

Day 1, 1st run

So Tomi decided to measure his speed with the the phone’s GPS. He used a Windows Phone with the app Sports Tracker. He did the first round.

“I felt it was pretty fast, I knew that I reached the 100km/h dream limit. Then checked my phone, it said: 144km/h. I knew that it was a false data, so I decided to make another run”

In the morning in the first hour it is really easy to find a 2-3 minute gap when there is nobody on the slope which is best for the speed record breaking. Unfortunatelly there is no direct lift from the bottom to the top, so I would say 25 minutes per round.

Klitzsteinhorn – route 2 (highlighted)- best for speed tracking

Day 1, 2nd run

After thinking that the first data was a false measurement Tomi decided to make a 2nd run.

“I felt that I was going faster than during the previous one. I already knew that the slope is perfectly maintained, there is a breaking at the half, first time it was a bit scary. The snow was perectly smooth. Cold and icy enough to accelerate fast, but soft enough to have perfect control over the snowboard.”

This time the phone showed: 149.9 km/h. False measurement twice? If you see this number you don’t belive this, but if you see it twice, and also the speed difference looked like valid it makes it believable.

In the evening there was a discussion with other fellow snowboarders about these records. They said it can be valid, but we still hardly belive it.

“Finally we decided to make new measurements on the next day. We took out more phones to make the measurement more precise.”

Check out on Sports Tracker

Second day

In the morning it was obvious that Tomi won’t break his previous record because of the conditions.

• Cloudy sky: shadow on the slopes, hard to see the small bumps
• Colder weather: Icy slope makes it more difficult to control the board at this speed
• Bigger crowed: Harder to find a gap when the slope is empty

Despite these conditions we still thought it can be a good opportunity to make a control measurement. See if Tomi can get close to his previous record, decide if those measurements were valid or not.

Day 2, 1st run

“It was even more scary to go fast because I didn’t have perfect control over the board due to the ice. Also the lack of sunshine made me to recognise the small bumps on the slopes. At these speed you definitely don’t want to go even onto the smallest bump.”

A new Samsung Galaxy S7 was in Tomi’s pocket to measure the speed. We think it is more accurate than the Windows Phone’s GPS module.

The Samsung showed the speed of 111km/h. While the Windows phone just showed 99km/h. (Also on every test tracking the Windows Phone was showing less.

“I knew that it was not so fast as the runs yesterday but the difference shouldn’t be this big (40km/h). So it became quite obvious that yesterday’s measurements were false. It must have been a coincidence that both was almost the same (144kmh and 149 kmh).”

After this we decided to belive to the Samsung phone, Tomi decided to make an other round.

“I was already happy that I reached the 100km/h dream limit officially, but I still wanted to try to go faster”

Day 2, 2nd run

This time Tomi went a bit faster as he felt it, and the phone also showed it. So the official Adrenaline & Endorphin snowboard speed record is 116.6 km/h.

The slope

We analyzed the slope a bit. It seemd like it was a 40% steep slope (it shouldn’t be steep enough for a 150km/h run). The first half is a bit lighter, the second half is steeper.

During the fastest run Tomi needed ~500m to reach this speed. The height difference was ~180m. He did it during 33sec. At the half, where steepness changes, his speed was 85km/h.

GPS measuring

It is a bit disappointing how we cannot trust these gps modules in our smart phones. The differnece between 2 phones was too big. Also the chance of false measurement was also big. We are sure that if we want to keep going and measure speed at this high level we will have to use laser technologies.

More about the resort

To summarize up the ski resort of Klitzsteinhorn we really liked it. Everything is modern. Well mainteined. Lot of interesting things to see also for not adrenaline junkies.

There is a stunning view at 3029m. You can hike up there from the top of the resort, and see Salzburg.

There is also a nice ice buliding at the top of the Central Funpark. Fun to go inside and have a nice drink in this spectecular building.

We were glad to visit this place. We may return here in the close future.