Getting Ready for Ski Touring with La Sportiva
Working with La Sportiva
There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes before we can make this video…
What you see on my Instagram or on my website is often a culmination of lots of meetings, emails, pitch decks and awkward conversations with clients about money. I’m collaborating with Davide, my good friend and mountain athlete, and La Sportiva this winter to create a 6 episode series all about ski touring - how to prepare, stay safe and grow your skills in the mountains. It’s a really exciting opportunity for both of us, to work with a brand we both feel so passionate about, and we can’t wait to show you more as the season develops.
Dreaming and Planning
Davide and I have spent countless hours physically training to complete this project and spend multiple nights a week on phone calls together dreaming up how to make this project a success. It takes a lot of work to make it look like we don’t work. So, now that we’ve moved into the next stage of making the photos and videos happen, we’re incredibly excited to be sharing more ski related adventures to our communities.
On this episode, Davide walks us through his process for getting ready for ski season. As a mountain endurance athlete, staying in shape all times of the year can lead to really exciting adventures regardless of how much snow is on the ground. For Davide, mountain running is a great opportunity to keep his legs moving and explore the mountains an adventurous manner before the snow starts to fall.
How We Filmed The Video
To film this, Davide and I drove about 30 minutes from our homes in Boulder up into the Indian Peaks Wilderness on a Thursday morning before the sunrise. I was in the final stages of training from my ultramarathon so felt relatively prepared to run about 10 miles with my camera and gimbal stabilizer up to the top of South Arapahoe Peak. I’m obviously not an elite mountain athlete like Davide but I’m doing what I can to help minimize the gap in our fitness and keep us moving efficiently in the mountains.
How we filmed this video episode - trail running with cameras :)
Halfway up the mountain Davide realized that he could potentially get the fastest known time, also known as the FKT, up South Arapahoe Peak. So, two days later he bopped up there again and completed the round trip trail run in one hour and 40 minutes. In case you never have done that trail, it’s steep, has a high elevation summit making it difficult to breath and is normally completed in over 3hrs for most runners. It took us 3.5 hours to summit, film and return the trailhead. Davide is quite an impressive athlete and his knowledge and finesse really shows in this video.
Stay tuned as our next video in this series with La Sportiva is an epic adventure straight from our front door in Boulder where we complete a bike to run adventure with a group of other athletes to demonstrate how to mentally think through long days out in the mountains!
Chat with Me!
Roo is a commercial/documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Boulder, Colorado but travels all around the world for his filmmaking career.
He has produced films for Outside Magazine in Ireland, camera operated for Netflix in the Rocky Mountain West, photographed among indigenous communities in Peru and Ecuador, directed videos with professional climbers in Mexico and has received notable recognition in his hometown of Orcas Island in Washington State for his work telling uplifting stories in the outdoor space.