Well, it wasn't pretty, but I did it! I did the half marathon on the Great Wall. My goal was to finish in under four hours, which I did. Check out the final results here.
We left Shanghai on Friday around 11am. We got to Beijing and started looking for our driver. We had arranged for a driver to take us from the airport to our hotel, which was about 1 1/2 hours from the airport. But alas, no driver to be found! So we started our calls to the travel service and the coordinators. Luckily we found our driver after about half an hour. Not bad for Asia travel! And so we were off. We made it to the Pinggu Yuyang hotel around 4pm. The lobby was filled with tourists who had flown in for the marathon. Some were expatriates in China, but many were just visitors who had flown here just for the race. Crazy. So we checked in and got our first look at our room. Not bad, though they called it a 4-star, and we agreed no way! We did agree though that the beds were absolutely the HARDEST beds ever. All joking aside, all of us had a poor night's sleep. I guess we might as well of chosen to sleep in the Farmer's Hostel at the race start and slept on straw mattresses. They would have been softer. Anyway, after we checked out our rooms, we took a stroll around the area (we were in Pinggua which is northeast of Beijing). It was really different from Shanghai in that they must not see many westerners. The children in particular seemed totally in awe of seeing Westerners close up. They were very friendly and welcomed us to their city. One interesting thing we observed while out shopping for some fruit and water was a food item that all of had only heard rumors about: chicken embryos cooked in the shell and eaten whole. It is actually hard to explain. But the chicken eggs contain really baby chicks that are 1-4 days away from hatching. They are boiled whole and then pealed and eaten whole. We saw them and then were lucky (unlucky?) enough to see a woman buy and eat one. She peeled away the shell, grabbed the chick embryo with chopsticks, poured some red sauce on it, and proceeded to eat it's head. Yuk!!! We thought of some good names: Chicks and Salsa & Chicks on the Half Shell. Back to the hotel where we taught Ceyda to play Euchre (she did great!). Then up to our HARD HARD HARD beds for no sleep!
Our alarms went off around 4 a.m. Packed and to the lobby by 5 am. We are a bit perplexed by the process of what to do with our luggage. The bus we could fit our luggage onto did not have room for us. The coordinator was trying to tell us that our luggage would show up at the hotel we were staying at, but he didn't understand that we had made our own arrangements for Saturday night. We finally decided to take the risk of leaving our luggage on another bus and loaded up into another one. We got to the Wall after about an hour. The race is held at the Huangyaguan section of the wall. We had another panic moment trying to figure out what to do with our luggage during the race, but we drug it up to the square where the race starts and got it checked in. Once we ditched the luggage we had to find the toilet. And then we experienced another first. We have all had to use a squatty potty before, it is pretty common around China. But we had never had the open room squat pot experience! There were 5 slits in the floor with no separations. So we had a group pee! Interesting...
After relieving ourselves of our worldly possessions and our morning hydration, we were ready to go. They left in two groups. Then it was the first group of the half marathon. Then us, the 2nd group of the half marathon. And we were off at 7:51! We were only walking so the large pack left us pretty quickly. The first part of the race was about 6k uphill to the wall. Very hard. The next part was on the wall itself. Frankly, I thought that was not too bad. Very beautiful. Our group separated into two packs: Myself and Raquel, and everyone else. The wall section was about 6k. After that, we headed to the road and through a small village. The village area was very interesting. It was really small but I am sure that this is the big annual event for them! Once through the village we headed back to the start. I ended up running the last 5k, I had planned to run more, but decided not push it. Plus my knees were pretty sore already.
I finished in 3:52:26 (11:02 min/km 5.45 km/h)!
After the race was over, we grabbed our bags and loaded into a bus heading back to Beijing. We had decided to splurge and stay at the Crowne Plaza! Nice splurge. The damn bus ride back took almost 3 hours. We had subway sandwiches after the race, but we are all pretty exhausted. After we got to the hotel, we all showered and shed our stinky clothes. Then to the bar for some post-marathon drinks! We ate dinner across the street and headed hope early!
All in all, a big accomplishment! Not sure I will do it again, but it was well worth the experience. I think I will check out the Polar Circle race in 2009...
