2023-08-11 17:17:00
Belgian extreme athlete Louis-Philippe Loncke broke a new record and achieved a new world first by crossing the French Alps without assistance in 24 days, he posted on his Facebook page on Friday.
Aged 46, he left Nice, in the south of France, on July 18 to reach Thonon-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva.
To carry out his expedition and beat the official record for this course without assistance, he had taken with him a quantity of provisions reduced to a minimum, contained in a backpack, the weight of which was limited to 34 kilos, once morest 40 to 60 kilos usually.
The native of Mouscron is not his first feat. Far from there. He has already distinguished himself on the Kungsleden, a trekking trail of regarding 425 km lost in northern Sweden. He also ran through the Pyrenees for… 700 km, still without restocking. Specialists in the discipline also remember it for the Grande Traversée des Alpes (GTA), i.e. 623 km without assistance covered in 24 days.
In 2016, he distinguished himself once more by becoming the first man to cross on foot, from side to side and always in complete autonomy, the great salt deserts Salar de Coipasa and Salar d’Uyunile in Bolivia at the rate of 14 hours of walk per day, all at an average altitude of 3700 m. In short, a kind of superman.
In 2018, when he crisscrossed Tasmania in the middle of the southern winter, still without supplies, his great specialty will have been understood, the Australian press baptized him “Mad Belgian”.
During his recent crossing of the Alps, this industrial engineer by training, who also holds a master’s degree in industrial management from KULeuven, had to face some difficulties on the way, such as a backpack strap that broke at the end of the fourth day or the top of his tent tearing because of the wind, we read in a summary of his journey. Pain in his Achilles tendon from the fifth day, the closure of certain sources following water restrictions and one less welding of his air mattress came to add to the obstacles encountered during his trip. All this sometimes in the heat wave. But nothing, ultimately, serious enough to stop him.
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