If you’re thinking of doing your first marathon, the Great Wall Marathon should not be your first. Apparently there’s 5164 steps and the record time is 3 hours and 18 minutes, 1 hour and 15 minutes slower than the world record of a normal marathon – if you can call a marathon normal!
I’d guess this would take me 6 hours if I was mad enough to contemplate any marathon let alone this one.
This guy from NZ shows you the ups and downs of these hills with steps:
On a personal front I have had a slack week; I missed Wednesday’s and Thursday’s runs and did my 3.2k easy run this morning (Saturday). Up again at 5:30am for what was a very easy run, in fact I never broke a sweat and ran for the first time in ages without my ipod/iphone.
Tomorrow is another early rise for the “de Castella” 10k around Yarra Boulevard and quietly looking forward to the challenging hills and would be happy with any time under 1 hour.
This run is now my last opportunity to achieve my goal of under 50 minutes for a 10k before I’m fifty, which is in 3 weeks time. And this race isn’t the one to do it! I seriously think that it’s probably beyond me and I’ve decided recently that I’m not going to get hung up on my goals, times or distances covered. My new philosophy is that I’m only going to run when I want to and to make it as enjoyable as possible. I’ll have a plan but I’ll use it with a certain degree of flexibility
