I fully completed the Hangzhou International Marathon with Special Friend (SF) on November 9th. Times are not important, what matters is that we finished :) I'll just say it wasn't a PB time (personal best). But it was SF's first ever endurance run and I must give him much respect to have stayed motivated through pretty torturous training conditions and complete the 'thon in a very respectable time. We dealt with 100 degree heat + major humidity, running in one of the most smog infested cities on the planet and just plain a disgusting place to run. But when all was said and done we really enjoyed the actual run and are already talking about the next one. Maybe in more of a smog free city...so LA is out of the picture. The run itself in Hangzhou was really pleasant except for when we were running with traffic which was 70% of the time. For about 6 miles though we were off the main road and running up through tea fields which was one of the most serene trails I've ever run on. But then it was back to the main road with the buses and cars and major exhaust inhalation. Yuck!What was quite inspiring though were the amount of septuagenarians running AND BEATING us
along the way. There was one group of men, about 5 of them, who were all between 70 and 78 (they told us as they passed us... :[ ) Running together in a tight herd. The age of the men isn't so unusual, I saw much of this in the states, but more so their gear- the shoes looked as though they could have been homemade from cardboard and cloth. But damn those guys had endurance! One of them would occasionally pull off for a bathroom break and the rest would go on and that was when I thought we had them broken down but I'll be damned they would always come right back up behind us in a little trot say a friendly "Ni hao" and keep right on going. And here we are in our latest "high-tech, turbo-mode, dri-fit" Nike gear and Chocolate Outrage Gu super energy gels strapped all around my waist for "ultimate endurance!!" And I'm pretty confident they had never heard of a little chafe-saver called Body Glide in which we were sufficiently lubed up in. Of course in the end they kicked our buts and finished probably 10minutes ahead of us. I couldn't tell you b/c I couldn't see them ahead of us after mile 20. Siiigh. I don't know if this was worse or the time I got beat in my second marathon by a speed walker.....
It was a great weekend shared with many friends including my cousin Megan who has been in Shanghai for the past few months. She is the Director of the East Asian program at Union College in NY and brought a class out here to study at Fudan University. She brought a flag for us and was my number one fan out on the route. This is marathon number 2 for which she has been my support staff and I'm thinking of hiring her out for all future marathons :) New York next....So there was the good
the bad(ass)
and the just plain ugly
Fun China!!
