Stage 5
 
The 100km is now behind us and we are all looking forward to finishing our token 10km tomorrow. We are expecting beers and pizza which will be very welcome given the over-consumption of warm water and freeze dried food over the last week. Yesterday and today have been some of the most challenging of my life, so it will take quite a while to recount here. On Wednesday night, I spent the night sleeping under the stars until I was awoken at 3am by a dust storm. Everyone rose at 4am to find out that it was a false alarm and that the fifth stage would begin at 8am, not 6am as expected. Frustrated and buzzing after drinking coffee, I headed back to bed. It was a cloudy day when we began the huge 100km slog and if I had not been, I am certain that almost no-one would have finished. I will break the race down by checkpoints:
 
CP1: Ran down a river canyon, going waist high in the river over 6 times. Ran past some ancient cave ruins and then got lost in vineyards as children had stolen the pink flags.
 
CP2: Ran through a Uighur town on concrete road. This went on for ages, and my foot started to feel the impact of the tarmac. Still not too hot.
 
CP3: Started to run in a small group and we passed several mosques and ancient ruins. We then walked through an uneven, bushy field.
 
CP4: Worked with my tent-mate Charlie on a 10 minute run, 5 minute fast walk regime. Moved into the second lowest place on earth (after Dead Sea) which was supposedly a salt flat. I was pretty disappointed after Bolivia's salt flats-this place was grim-cracked brown mud for miles and miles. One of the most miserable and desolate places I have ever been.
 
CP5: Continued with Charlie on a 5 minute run, 10 minute walk regime. He hadnt eaten so felt a bit weak coming into next CP.
 
CP6: Topped up on food and felt strong moving out of salt flats and along a straight, dirt track. Started to feel some blisters by the end, but now at over 60km into the stage, we thought that we had it in the bag with "only" a marathon to go. This would prove very wrong.
 
CP7: Evening was approaching at this stage and the dehydration/exhaustion meant that my walking was very slow and my mind stopped working properly. This was supposed to be a 11km leg, and ended up being more like 15km. The sun poked its head out for 1 hour showing us how powerful the Turpan heat can be. We managed to shower in some irrigation canals before arriving at CP7 in a tired and sorry state. We had a hot meal and after 1/2hour we headed out around 9pm.
 
CP8: We passed through a small town as it began to become dark. The pink flags were supposed to be replaced with glow-sticks for the last stage but we were ahead of the guy laying out the sticks meaning we would become stuck and slightly lost, waiting for the guide to show us the way in the dark. We lost at least 45 minutes as a result but we were feeling strong as the heat of the day had dissipated.
 
CP9: Very dark by this stage. We bumped into 3 other competitors and moved into the night as a group of 5. After 5km we came across the dreaded 6km sand-dune stage. I was too tired to put on my sand-gaiters which I immediately regretted. My feet were on fire. Suddenly out of nowhere I managed to acquire 5 blisters on my feet. In addition, my foot problem came back full force. I was feeling pretty low as we passed sand dune after sand dune, false summit after false summit. After at least an hour and a half in this hellish landscape we finally spotted the lights at camp. We stumbled in as a group of 5 to the familiar sound of the drum.
 
We had begun the 100km at 8am and arrived just after 3am-a total of 19 hours in the wild! We finished in joint 26th place. There would be people who would take at least double this to complete the track and I honestly don’t know how they found the will power to do this. I headed back to the tent and collapsed into a disturbed state of sleep. Throughout the night people would return to the tent in dribs and drabs. Cold sweats, tunnel vision and paranoia followed me through the night. Today was a hot day and we spent most of it sweating in the tent. The day was inhumanly hot and the camp consumed tonnes of water.
 
I am currently placed 26th/160 in the race, which would be 23rd had I not been penalised for the toilet incident. Tomorrow I plan to take the 10km easy and walk with my tent so I could slip down to the early 30s. Either way, I had not expected to place so high in the event. In the days leading up to the event I could barely walk around my hotel room and spent hours practicing using my walking poles as crutches (it doesn’t work). The day before the race I was looking at the bottom of an empty beer glass contemplating pulling out altogether, so I am hugely pleased that I was able to complete the event-well providing I manage the 10km tomorrow. I will write more later, but I have really enjoyed this race and learnt a lot about myself and my body. I currently look like something out of an Oxfam famine relief poster given the calories I have burned through, so one of my first priorities is to eat lots and rest my body.
 
One step at a time....(only 10km to go...)

Stage 4
 
Finally, we are now over the halfway mark and there are two stages left. Our tent had a bad night's sleep as we decided to sleep on an outside bed in our Uighur house. The family were very inconsiderate and were shouting at each other well past midnight. Even more inconsiderate was the smell of their cooking which haunted my hungry dreams. I imagined how the endlessly bleating lamb across the road would taste in a hotpot. And then at 3am, we were awoken to prepare for the day. We jumped on coaches at 4am and drove down the valley into the Turpan Basin. We passed some familiar sights for me, and the Chinese characters on the late night restaurants made me feel homesick-for China not for England. I would have preferred to stay in the mountains.
 
We started Stage 4 in Grape Valley at 6am. The staff looked nervous on account of the expected heat and I was keen to make a fast start to get as far as I could before the day wore on. I ran the entire first leg, 13.5k with the top 10 pack. They called me "pole boy" referring to my strange running method of using poles to propel myself along. I reached CP1 in good shape and pushed on just as the sun was poking over the cliffs. Halfway into section two we came across a section of tennis ball-sized rocks and I had to significantly slow down my pace to watch my foot. I got chatting to a British guy who lives in Beijing and we started an ascent of the sand dunes together. This section was very windy and seemed to go up, up & up, at least 500m altitude gain. By the time I reached CP 2 I was shattered. I was surprised to see two of the top 10 competitors sitting in the tent trying to recover from dehydration and exhaustion. I was quickly followed by another guy who proceeded to vomit everywhere. I sat down for 5 minutes trying to re-hydrate, taking electrolytes and energy bars in order to recover. However, time was ticking on and it was getting hotter and hotter (at only 9am!) so I decided to press on. As I walked out of the tent into the wild I could hardly walk in a straight line and I think this was the closest I have ever come to fainting. My head was spinning and I was starting to lose the feeling in both my arms. I deliriously plodded on, focusing my efforts on my feet. About 5 competitors passed me, all checking to see if I was ok (which I wasnt really) and if I wanted any food (I had just eaten). I was then overtaken by a guy I had met running in Hong Kong who again checked if I was fine. As he walked off, I realised that trying to do this on my own was a bad (and slightly dangerous idea) so pushed to catch up with him. Luckily, my energy and senses had started to return by this stage and I managed to maintain a fast march. We kept pushing through sandy canyon after sandy canyon. It seemed never ending and definitely longer than the stated 12km. It was getting hotter and hotter, but we managed to continue, taking it in turns to lead the way. Finally, we got to the top of a canyon and could see the finish line below. We jogged in from this stage and arrived in joint 26th position.
 
We are staying in a random Chinese museum, full of the usual fake rubbish. I was lucky to get the opportunity to swim in the river below, before the fun police put a ban on this. It had taken me 5 hours to complete today's 36km stage, and throughout the afternoon, the walking wounded have arrived, completely beaten by the never ending heat. It is currently 5pm and some competitors are still out there meaning they have been out there for 11hours. I cannot imagine how horrible this must be. Tomorrow we have our Long March of 100km in the Turpan Basin-the hottest place in China. When I was there last week it was over 50c! My tactics are to slowly run the first 20km and then walk the remaining 80km. Before today, I had found this race easier than I had expected and foolishly assumed that it was all in the bag. After today that was clearly a judgment of error. My problems today, in addition to people arriving at the finish line only to collapse and vomit, have made me realise how dangerous this desert can be. I intend to take things very cautiously tomorrow and I will hopefully find someone to team up with as this is both safer and easier.
 
Still really enjoying things here. The next time I blog I will know whether I can finish this race or not. One step at a time....

With the third stage out of the way, we are now over a 1/3 of our way into the 250km. The campsite last night was pretty rocky and I had a pretty terrible night's kip as a result. This morning I was not feeling great-a little stiff and weak-probably down to the lack of calories that my ration is supplying me. The course was 33k in total split into three sections. The first was along a river and we had to jump in up to our waists about 5 times. Wet feet are terrible for blisters but there wasn't much that could be done about it except for pushing on. I found this section really tricky because the rocks were of a really uneven size and I was paranoid that I would slip up, hurt my foot, and prematurely end my race. I walked the entire section pretty slowly and I was overtaken by a lot of people. By the time we reached CP1 I was in about 60th place. I decided not to change my socks or dress my feet given my feet and shoes were so wet, although a lot of people did. After a steep hill, section 2 led onto a flat plateau with a soft dirt track. I decided that this would be the perfect place to test my feet out for running, so I put some music on my iPod, put my head down and went for it. It was very liberating to be running properly for the first time this race. It all went pretty smoothly up to CP2 as it was fairly flat and I made up some ground. The last section was hilly-my speciality. It seems that relative to the field, I find hills pretty straightforward. Going up I treat it like moving up a hill covered in snow-digging my poles in 2 at a time and lunging forwards. On the downhill, I just let my self go and charge down as fast as gravity will carry me. There were several instances when I had flashbacks of being 5 years old and smashing my face open in the Pyrenees doing a similar thing. However, I emerged unscathed. These hill skills have earnt me the name mountain goat in my tent. After the hills I thought I could see the final checkpoint in the distance so I pushed as hard as I could to get there. However, on arrival it cruely transpired to be just an unscheduled water refill tent. The cruelty continued as the staff informed me that it was only 5km to the end. 5km my foot! More like 5 miles! This was agonising as it was impossible to spot camp as we circled a mountain. Finally I arrived at the finish line in 25th place. Instead of camping, today we are staying in a small Uigher village. I guess for most competitors it is their first experience of anything like this, and it is certainly the same for the residents. I am heading for an early bed tonight because we have to rise at 3am tomorrow to take a 2hr bus to the starting line. Tomorrow is 36km. I had SpagBol for dinner which was awesome although I could have eaten about 5x as much. (Chloe and Leslie-you would have been appalled at how small my portions are!). Currently I am lying in 29th place, although excluding my time penalty I should have been in 18th. There is a slight tactical advantage of staying out of the top 20, because they typcially have to start the 100km day two hours behind everyone else. Given how hot I know the Turpan Basin will be-you can imagine how smug I feel about the time penalty potentially working to my advantage. Toilet and foot issues aside, I am loving the race and the people-it has been an awesome experience so far. Keep the comments coming-they really help after a long day in the desert.

All was well last night-that was until I got caught having a pee 150m away from the campsite around 9pm, and I was told that I would be receiving a time penalty. Apparently this is not allowed under the rules, which is all very well if we had been told this before hand. All morning and afternoon people had been using this method of relief and I was working on the basis that the 4 bog tents were specifically for more serious matters. Not so! Thus, all 160 runners plus upwards of 50 staff are expected to use the bog tents for all forms of relief. So there are 4 tents for over 200 people!! I was scolded like a schoolboy for being "unhygienic" yet I would like to know what is hygienic about 200 people using 4 toilets. Especially considering that all the runners are consuming upwards of 5 litres of water every afternoon and eating freeze-dried food which can often have unexpected results on one's bowels. In addition to this, some competitors seem to be unable to use the toilets accurately and by this morning 2 of the 4 toilets were essentially unusable given defecation around the toilet area. I lay in bed fuming, and it took half an hour of some hard Metallica to calm down and forget about it. I resolved that it wasn’t really in anyone's interest to kick up a fuss and just to get on with finishing the event.
 
However, by morning, every competitor on camp seemed to know about this event  and said that it was outrageous that I should be given a 1 hour time penalty for my crime. The boys in my tent, who are absolute legends, managed to take a photo of the no.2 competitor having a pee this morning in the wild and they are keen to kick up a protest about this. I am not sure I want to get involved in politics as it is not what I am here for, although as those of you who know me know, the petulant school boy inside is gagging to stick up for myself.
 
Anyway, enough about my the toilet drama and back to the race. My foot felt relatively ok this morning, and I started on the hills with the top 10 competitors. They would generally run the flats and get ahead of me, and I would tend to overtake on the ups and downs which was where I had significant help from my poles. The hills lasted for 14km and I rolled into CP1 in around 15th position.  The next section was a long plod for me across a dried riverbed and some awesome cliffs and fields. By the time I reached CP2 after 8km I had been overtaken by several people and I was in around 25th position. Given that I walked virtually the whole day, it was interesting to see that people were significantly faster today than Day 1 and most of the people in front tended to run the downhill and flat, and walk uphill, while I tried to continue my marching effort with the help of the poles. The last stage was pretty short at 7km and we had to cross a canyon and a river before we arrived at camp. I got fed up with all the walking and I decided to sprint the last 1km into the finish-line coming in 19th. This was pretty immature but my foot had been really getting on my nerves as I could easily have run sections 2 & 3 had I not been paranoid about my foot.
 
So far, I have found the terrain pretty straightforward, although this is mainly due to the fact that I have been walking the whole time. I have a few hot spots on my feet which I need to strap up and I have slightly stiff shoulders-hopefully this will dissipate after I eat my dried chicken korma tonight. The next two days are expected to be roughly more of the same, with the 4th day ending near the Flaming Mountains in Turpan. The fifth day is supposed to be 100km and I think this will haunt people's dreams over the next few days. Toilets aside, the event is incredibly well organised and it is a privilege to be in such a beautiful location with no tourists!! I was beginning to feel it was nearly impossible to escape the tourist traps in China, but Racing the Planet have definitely come through with the goods on the location. Both the staff and the other competitors are awesome and it is great to meet such a range of people from various backgrounds.
 
My plan is to continue my plodding, as it seems to work well and to run the downhill sections. One step at a time....

I can report that Stage 1 has now been accomplished. Before I discuss today, I will give a quick recap on yesterday. We all gathered at our 5* Hotel (bringing me back to my JPMorgan Caz days) and nervously discussed clothing/gear/how much does your bag weight etc? We spent several hours on a bus travelling south from Urumqi and into the mountains. After stopping for a singing and speech performance by some local dignitaries, we arrived at our campsite around 8 in the evening. I was impressed with the organization of tents and general camp atmosphere. There was an awesome sunset with snow capped mountains in the background. It was quite hard to sleep due to several snoring culprits in the tent and nervousness about the week ahead. It was also damn cold and I was glad that for once I had listened to someone's advice and packed a decent ground-mat.
 
Stage 1 started at 9.30am and was due to be 33k and fairly easy. I tried as hard as I could to stick to walking on account of my foot (which felt good after the cold night). There was a packed dirt track for the first 2 checkpoints (8km and 9km respectively). It was fairly similar in terrain to Richmond Park and I had to be very disciplined not to run. The third section was a more tricky 15km going off the track and winding through various undulating, grassy valleys. There were two particularly steep hills at the beginning of the stage and I decided to zig-zag rather than push straight up the hills. People kept calling at me as they thought I was going off the track, but I just find this way of ascending grassy hills more easy. I power walked the rest of this section which ended with a long, uphill gully. The terrain here was like an upside down rice-terrace-making it hard to get a footing. Finally at the top of this particular hill I could see several cameramen. Guessing the end was near, I upped my pace. Camp looked close but actually it ended up being about 3km-deception was not welcome at this stage!
 
One of my tent-mates (a Brit) and I ran in to camp in joint 15th/150 position in bang on 4.5 hours. Now I know that you must think that I just gave up on walking and started running sections, but this was genuinely down to the power walking. The only two times I allowed myself to run were if I saw a checkpoint (collectively 4km) and if there was modest, grassy downhill (4km) so I think I ran about 8/33km. My foot feels ok given 2 days ago I could hardly walk. It feels slightly bruised so am using the two cure-alls of ibuprofen and Tiger Balm, and I have strapped it up. Hopefully it will hold out!!
 
Camp 2 is in a beautiful setting, but it is at altitude and I suspect that tonight will be even colder-survival blanket definitely being used tonight. Tomorrow is supposed to be roughly similar to the last stage today-undulating and around 33km. I intend to stick to my plan of power walking with the occasional jog and see how things progress. Everything else is going well and I have a freeze-dried Chicken Tikka curry for tonight.
 
More tomorrow. One step at a time.....
 

I have arrived in Urumqi and leave for the race in less than 24hrs. Being realistic it is better described as a slog than a race given my right foot which is being a downright nuisance. The majority of people have flown here directly from Beijing and I dont envy their potential stresses in this regard-interchanging directly to Xinjiang is not an easy prospect. Almost exactly this time last year, Urumqi saw deadly riots with residents being stabbed by infected needles. However, getting here hasnt been so simple for me either. An overnight journey in a bus with bed's half my height wasnt conducive to preparing my body for the race.

Having faced temperatures of nearly 50c in Turpan, two hours up the road in Urumqi it is around 20c and raining hard. It was so windy in the bus you could feel the torque for the entire journey. I dont know whether this means I should be reconsidering my kit because I am quite enjoying the rain and cold so far. I have just purchsed my final piece of equipment for the race-a large pizza for tomorrow night :)

The mantra for the next week is definitely "one step at a time"....

Well its three days to go until the race, and i am still having problems with my right foot. This is highly frustrating given the amount of training i have put in for this event. However, i have tried to think positively and i will give it my best shot to finish the course. I have spent the last 3 days in Turpan which is the town around which the race is held. Located in the province of Xijiang, Western China, 80% of the people here are of Uighur ethnicity and it is clear that this is not the same China I am accustomed to. The people look very Western in their features, and Islam dominates their culture. It has been difficult trying to communicate with people as the majority do not speak English or Mandarin. Turpan is famous for its extreme climate, and i have experienced highs of 47c since I have been here. I walked for 10k in this heat and it was truly amazing how overwhelming it was. It is akin to putting your face in front of an oven. When the wind blows, dont expect a cool breeze-it is like someone blowing a hairdryer at you. However, yesterday it rained and temperatures were as low as 25c, so it is very unpredictable. In addition to the problems with my foot, my experience of the high temperatures has led me to alter my expectations for the event. In my view, running in these temperatures is highly inefficient given the necessary water (which is limited anyway) and the risk of exhaustion. The rough outline of the event is as follows:

Stage 1 32km / 20 miles
Stage 2 30km / 19 miles
Stage 3 42km / 26 miles
Stage 4 37km / 23  miles
Stage 5 90km / 56 miles
Stage 6 19km / 11 miles

My plan for now is to take the first few days easy and to see how my foot feels. Having come this far, both in training and all those train rides, i dont intend to just throw in the towel, but i will listen to my body and take it as it comes. 

I am sure I speak for most people with the nervous feeling that the race is approaching very fast. Over the last few days I have spent further long bus and train journeys travelling West through China's Gansu province. I stopped at Jiayuguan to see the end of the Great Wall. Historically, Jiayuguan has a somewhat fearsome reputation because Chinese people who were banished were ordered to leave from here to the deserts of the West. I spent my morning doing the tourist sights and trying to scope out a running route for the afternoon. I departed for my run around 2pm to the curious stares of the receptionists in my hotel. Given there was nowhere to buy water en-route I was carrying over 3L of water. I ran along the road in the desert for over 10km until I came to a gap in the Great Wall that lead to the barren desert beyond. The first thing that came to my mind was how pleasant it was not to be running on tarmac which I have been unavoidably doing for the last 4-5 months. Next it occured to me that I should probably have told someone my whereabouts before embarking in the desert alone, but there was no-one to tell except for the receptionists in my hotel, who would have thought I was even more crazy than they currently did. After about 2k dehydration and the heat of the day (35c+) started to take its toll on my mind. Having been attacked by some rather unpleasant large insects I started to consider what other nasty animals lived in this desert. Snakes? Scorpions? (I came across none, although I saw a few lizards). I then noticed strange white piles in the distance and went to inspect one of them close up. It transpired that they were piles of used-hyperdermic needles and other medical waste. The desert was full of these white mole-hills as far as the eye could see. Fantastic-I was running in Gansu's medical dumping ground! I started to become even more paranoid about my little desert adventure. I made for some hills on the judgement that whoever was idle enough to dump medical waste here would be too lazy to do it on top of a hill. As I stumbled up the steep, dusty hill I noticed that I had been followed by a man on a motorbike for the last 2km over the desert. He stopped his bike at the bottom of my hill and sat there watching me. My mind ran through 3 possibilities: 1) He was curious about why a laowai (foriegn person) was running through the desert in the middle of the day, 2) He was a policeman and I was trespassing, or 3) He was looking for trouble. I pushed on to the summit where I found a pleasant little ruin which had some shade. The man was still waiting at the bottom, so I played "King of the Castle" and waited for him to get bored. After about 15mins he decided to leave, and so I was able to descend only having to worry about spiking my foot on a rogue needle. Back on the road, it was interesting to see how compassionate all the drivers were in the desert. Almost every truck driver or taxi driver stopped to ask if I wanted a lift back to town, and all said I was crazy to want to keep running. Anyway, an hour later as I ended up back in town, the sole of my right foot started giving out some pain. Unable to find anywhere that sold ice, i bought some water falvoured ice lollies for 5 mao (5p) each and used them to ease the pain when I returned to the hotel.

I am now in Dunhuang which is where I believe the first 4Deserts event was held in 2003. It is an Oasis famous for its Buddhist caves but it also has some amazing sand dunes. My foot is still in pain, but I managed to test out my 4Deserts gaiters in the dunes. They seemed to work fairly well 95% of the time, although sometimes the velcro came undone when running down the dunes (which is more like skiing than running). To be fair though, I didnt get any sand in my shoes, so hopefully this wont be a problem during the race. I am quite worried about my foot, which could make the difference between me running/walking the Gobi March to flat out walking the race, thus transforming it into the Long March. The 4Deserts company have recently reminded competitors that last time the event was held in the Turpan Basin that temperatures reached over 50c. And last time the event was held in April , not at the end of June! From my small experience (comprising the above) of running in China's deserts, the air is so dry that your sweat evaporates instantly, meaning that my body seemed to stay quite cool. However, the top of my head got quite hot so a hat will prove vital. The biggest problem I found is that my throat became dry within seconds of drinking. I think it is this aspect of the heat that may prove the hardest. I also noticed that on the second half of my Jiayuguan 25k that the cloud cover made a significant temperature difference (maybe as much as 10c?). I for one, will be praying for clouds on the Long Day. With that said, I have yet to run in temperatures over 40c so maybe sweating doesnt sufficiently cool the body? Looking at the weather forecast for Turpan it is apparently 45c today and 47c tomorrow. http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/51573.html.

I am taking a night bus to Turpan tonight so it will be interesting to see what these temperatures feel like. Given that the people who founded this oasis were unlikely to be stupid, I would imagine that it is likely to be considerably hotter outside the town. I personally find this quite a daunting prospect. For those looking for an idea of terrain, I found these photos on flickr of a competitors view from the 2005 race http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenkoh/sets/72157594236347775/. Some of it looks awesome.

I hope that next time I post I can report full foot recovery and a cloudy forecast for next week, although currently I am sceptical about both.

Last week I put in my final 20k on the streets of Beijing and have been travelling West since. I stopped for a few days in the small Tibetan town of Xiahe in Gansu province, famous for the Labrang Monastery. At 3000m, the air was pretty thin but i didnt realise notice much until I went running. I decided to put in a small 5k run with a full bag, having hiked the circuit earlier in the day. I made for the initial steep hill like a headless chicken and within 2 minutes I was totally winded-I felt as though someone had punched me in the lungs. I staggered up to the ridge above the Monastery and paused to regain my breath. I have never felt so unfit. I managed to pick myself up and run the rest of the route. This turned out to be good fun with amazing views and varied terrain. I was chased by some wild dogs at one point, but luckily some local kids scared them away by throwing stones-thanks guys! It was a surreal experience to run through this town with Buddhist monks walking around, but I definitely dont intend to run at this altitude without aclimitization again!

Under 3 weeks to go now, and I have been busy getting my race equipment in order. Even restricting luxury goods to my iPod, my bag already weighs around 7kg-and I still need to top up on food. I managed to put in two 40k runs in close succession with this weight, and I found both significantly harder than with the 3.5kg I had been using for the past month. Post-run autopsy included a bruised upper-back and rub marks on my shoulders. Given I am looking at carrying at least 8.5kg for the Gobi March, I have been feeling pretty apprehensive lately. I noticed that the Raid-Lite bottle holders I have been using-while very practical for drinking on the run, tend to jump around when full causing some rib-bruising. This is something I need to look into. However, my legs feel strong right now, which is clearly a good thing. Running-wise, the highlight of my week was being overtaken by a cyclist wheeling another bike alongside him. He waited at the next crossroads and offered me his spare bike-a generous suggestion which I reluctantly declined. Bearing in mind this was at the 35k mark, it was a very tempting proposal!

A pretty slack week on the running front. I was feeling quite tired in my legs after the previous month of training and I was definitely getting sick of running on these polluted streets. I put in a few 10ks and then the week ended prematurely as I rolled my ankle on a 20k. It didnt hurt until I got home, but then it made walking pretty uncomfortable for a few days. Luckily the pain has now passed so one less thing to worry about.

A brief overview of my training last week:

Mon-20k
Weds-40k
Thurs-10k
Sat-10k

These training runs were done along Beijing cycle lanes-all as flat as a pancake. Summer has evidently arrived in BJ-Weds and Thurs were a tasty 32°c and 36°c respectively. Running the roads in what has to be one of the world`s most polluted capitals has its obvious drawbacks. Apparently the air quality is so poor that it is equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. There are many other hazards that include cars not stopping at traffic lights, cars driving the wrong way down cycle lanes, people everywhere, taxi doors opening in your face and cyclists crashing into you. Still, not wishing to complain too much, it is a great way to appreciate the scale and grandeur of the city.

My first blog post, so I will give a brief outline of my training so far. January 2010-based in sub-zero Beijing, I reluctantly signed up to a gym for a month and took to the treadmill. This was a pretty dull experience, and I tried to multi-task by listening to Mandarin podcasts during my 10-15k workouts. February 2010-travelled down to Hong Kong on a visa mission and managed to squeeze in a few 15-20k runs on the steep hills around Hong Kong Island. Moved to Kunming in Yunnan for a slightly more civilized climate in which to study/train. After adjusting to the altitude (~2000m) I put in several 20-30k weekend runs, alongside 10k runs throughout the week. The month ended in a bit of a disaster as I managed to injure my foot, making all but the shortest of walks painful and putting training off limits. March 2010-not a good month with foot problems persisting. April 2010-Foot feeling a lot better as the month progressed. I started by putting in 10k runs in the evenings to see how my foot would hold up. By the end of the month I was able to reach 30k again, taking in some beautiful countryside on my "Bamboo Temple" route. 1-7 May 2010-Spent a week in Hong Kong buying equipment for the race and catching up with friends. Did the 50k Hong Kong trail twice. The first time, I bumped into a fellow Gobi March competitor-small world syndrome! The weather was awesome on this run with sweeping views on both sides of Hong Kong island. The second run was awful by comparison, with 100% humidity and about 30m of visibility. The trail had a particularly nasty section of steps in the middle and I was forced to walk up these and then try to speed things up going down them. 8-16 May 2010-Travelled with friends to the Expo in Shanghai and didn't find time to train. Now settled back in Beijing and did a 40k route encompassing the Olympic Stadium, Tsinghua University and the Summer Palace. Not much fun having to run in the cycle lane and cope with the pollution and traffic. Plan to make a trip out to the mountains for my next big run. Six weeks to go, and my plan is to up the distances over the next 3 weeks and do at least one back to back marathon. Then I will taper down over the last 3 weeks and make necessary equipment tweaks.