The Zillertal, Trailfulness Trip

Four Days, 110 Kilometres, and the Case for Presence

I don't usually write trip reports on this blog. But this one belongs here, because it's where a belief I tell to brands gets tested on me first: that real connection to nature has to be earned, not staged. This July, I ran the Berliner Höhenweg through Austria's Zillertaler Alpen with a small group as part of my Trailfulness Running Trips.

Four days, roughly 110 kilometres, 8,000 metres of climbing, hut to hut. What follows isn't a recap of the route. It's what four days of motion taught me, again, about attention.

Why I Was There

I plan these trips, set the packing list, guide the route, read the weather and act as pacer. But the moment we start moving, the trip belongs to whoever is on the trail that day.

It's worth being honest about scale, too. Four days, 110 kilometres and 8,000 metres of climbing sounds like a lot, and for most people it is. But compared to others, this could be a warm-up. Trailfulness was never built to test human limits. It measures something else entirely, and that's the part worth explaining.

The Handoff

There's a moment on every Trailfulness trip when the everyday world lets go. It happens somewhere between stepping off the train and stepping onto the trail: conversation starts to flow, the noise of ordinary life fades, and attention narrows to something simpler. The trail ahead. The people beside you. The landscape you're walking into.

That's where trailfulness begins. Not by slowing down, but by moving with more attention: to your footing, to the weather, to each other, to the plain fact that you are, for four days, intensely and inescapably alive.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Why Hut to Hut

We carried what fits into a 15L running backpack: running and base layers, a wind jacket, lightweight rain gear, first aid, slings and some carabiners – not much more. No tent. No stove. No need to plan five dinners in advance. That's the quiet logic of a circular hut-to-hut route, and it matters more than it looks.

During the trip I also got the possibility to test two new great jackets from Houdini.

Why real-life testing: A lab tells you what a product should do. A trail tells you what it actually does, how fast you can react when the weather turns, and how little you think about your gear when it's working. That's the type test that matters the most."

The Orange Jacket (rain/running): Most rain jackets fail you from the inside when running in them, not the outside. This one didn't. Not even above 3,000 meters; when the weather turned, rain and cold came in, and we had to move forward at a higher pace. And it's lightweight, so it's earned its place on my hut-to-hut packing lists from here on.

Pace Trail Houdi (windbreaker): Has quietly become my favorite everyday jacket, on the trail and off it. It's so light and roomy I forget I have it on until the wind picks up or the altitude does the work for it, and then I'm glad it's there. Pure Love.

Staying in mountain huts instead of camping doesn't make the days easier. It changes what the days are for. Without the weight of full self-sufficiency, the discipline shifts from survival to movement itself: how you cover ground, how you read terrain, how you pace a body that has to do the same thing again tomorrow. And you're not doing it in isolation. Huts are shared infrastructure, used by climbers and hikers who were on this route before you and will be on it after. You eat at a table with strangers who share the same experience as you, the trail. You sleep in a room you didn't choose, with other people's farts that you didn't choose either. The only deadline that matters each day is dinner. There's something honest about a structure you don't fully control.

When the Mountain Sets the Pace

Some days the terrain lets you run. Others, it tells you to climb. Day two took us into rougher, higher, more exposed ground: loose rock, steep passages, sections where speed simply stopped being the point. The mountain decided the pace, and that demanded full attention. Careful footing. Helping each other through the technical sections. Managing weather as a group, not as individuals.

And inside all that concentration, there was still laughter. Still the feeling of being completely present. That's the actual return on a trip like this. Not the vertical logged on a watch, but the trust built by moving through uncertainty side by side.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

The Trail Becomes the Structure

By the third day, something shifts. The body settles into the rhythm of climbing, descending, moving across the mountain. Sometimes we ran together. Sometimes everyone disappeared into their own thoughts for long stretches, and that was fine too.

This is why I keep coming back to multi-day running. It stops being exercise or a private contest with your own numbers. The unnecessary noise falls away, and what's left is immediate: breathing, terrain, weather, the person next to you, the next section of trail.

We came back tired and dirty, carrying more shared memory than we'd started with. Long climbs, technical passages, mountain lakes, changing weather, a lot of laughter, and at least one moment where someone quietly wanted to kill someone else. The numbers only describe the route. They don't capture the comfortable silences, or the way a day gets smaller and richer when it's reduced to moving, eating, resting, and looking out for the people around you.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Reflection

Trailfulness isn't really about trail running, and it was never about slowing down. It's about what happens to attention when the everyday world is taken away and replaced with something simpler: distance, weather, and the people you're moving with.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

It's the same mechanism I try to build into the branded experiences I create for companies through Above The Clouds, whether that's a product launch on a trail, a leadership team learning to trust each other on exposed terrain, or a brand that wants to stand for something more real than another campaign shoot. Shared effort. Real terrain. Enough discomfort that the connection can't be anything but genuine. The mountains don't care what's in your inbox, and that, more than anything, is why we keep going back. What i do and How i work