It’s
hot, and I’m tired. Sensible people are sitting inside, enjoying the air
conditioning. Or they’re still asleep. I got up at 6am in an attempt (in vain,
it turns out) to beat the heat and humidity. All I did was beat up myself.
Still, I got through my 20 km (13 miles), each step part of the base I need for
the real event that’s coming. The first 12 km went pretty well but it started
to get really hot (about 30 deg C, or 86 F, by 8 am) and I ran out of puff for the last 8.
Then I got home, drank a litre of sports drink, and spent the rest of the day
trying to fight off lethargy.
The
reason I was out for two hours this morning in the tropical summer heat is that
in five weeks today I’m going to try to run 100 miles. More than that, I’m
running it in the legendary Western States Endurance Run, the original 100
miler that started as a horse trek until Gordy Ainsleigh decided to run it in
1974. Western States is an iconic event that a few thousand people try to enter
every year, and only the lucky (and foolish) have their names drawn out of the
hat that allows them to show up at the start line in Squaw Valley, near Lake
Tahoe in northern California. I had the “luck” of having my name drawn last
December. I didn’t expect to be drawn at all – as this was my first year in the
draw I had only a 7% chance of success. You get more chances each year you miss
out and some other people had missed up four or five times. But sometimes your
number comes up, and this time it did. I got a huge surprise when I learned
that I was in. Surprise quickly turned to terror. And I’ve been in non-stop
training ever since.
It’s
the last week in May 2013. So far this year I’ve run 1560 km (about 1000
miles). That’s about 10 km per day. As much as possible, I’ve run on trails,
mainly around the interior of Hong Kong Island. Hong Kong may seem like an
unlikely place to train for an ultramarathon, given its reputation as Manhattan
of the East. But imagine that Manhattan was a series of steep hills, and all
the buildings were just around the shores of the East and Hudson rivers. That’s
Hong Kong, with a green interior made up largely of country parks and water
catchment. Other areas like the New Territories and Lantau Island have even
better, more remote trail systems, but Hong Kong Island remains a decent place
to train. I walk out of my house, up 300 steps, and immediately start running
for as long as I want (60 km is the furthest I’ve made it so far in one run).
This
is my first 100 mile race. I’ve done a few other ultras; I started with the 60
km Kepler Challenge in New Zealand (where I’m originally from, and where I’m
moving in January 2014), and then moved up to 100 km, which I’ve done several
times. The most striking of these, and the race that qualified me for Western
States, was the 100 km CCC (Courmayeur-Champex-Chamonix) race around Mont Blanc
in Europe, the junior version of the 100 mile epic known as the Ultra-Trail du
Mont Blanc. I did that in August 2012, running through a storm that had us
climbing up to 2500 m above sea level in a blizzard. By the end of the race (18
hours after I started) I had lost feeling in most of my fingers, and it didn’t
totally return for about six months. But I did have the best quiche of my life
at a patisserie just across from the finish line at Chamonix.
Many runner’s blogs are from the elite, telling the ease with which they glided along running their 6 minute miles at the end of their 100 miler. I’m a decent runner but I’ve never been overly burdened with talent. I’ve found the blogs of other mid-pack runners to be helpful in figuring out what to expect in races that I’ve entered, so maybe you'll find the same here. Or not. Let's see.
