It’d been 3 months since the Global Runners successfully completed the Shanghai Half Marathon challenge before I saw The North Face 100 Endurance Beijing Challenge promotional ad in the Mar09 issue of Outside magazine.  Our Global Runners’ spirit had been spread widely and well across our various offices.  In HK, the runners had been running consistently and regularly; Ricky participated the 1st Zhuhai Half Marathon and Tokyo Marathon; Nick-the-CEO grew the Team Taipei from 1 to over 10 runners.  The Shanghai Marathon jersey, however, stayed in my closet for the entire 3 months.

When it came to that I was the only Global Runner who didn’t run the Shanghai Half and that I’d never run a road race….I felt the need to run TNF100. I also wanted to know if I could run a distant race again since I injured my leg last Oct when I was preparing for the Shanghai Half-Marathon.  So almost immediately after I saw the ad, I registered the 10k race. And I also asked one of my best friends to come along and run with me.

The North Face has sponsored a series of endurance runs around the global and in Asia-Pacific the race is named after TNF100 because the longest distance in these races is 100km. The series come to China on 25Apr09 for the first time this year and the 100km route starts from Juyongguan Great Wall site and ends at Ming Tomb Reservoir. The 10k route, which is actually 11.6km long, goes around the Ming Tomb Reservoir where 2008 Olympics triathlon was hosted. The registration closed at 98 participants in 100k, >250 in 40k and 2,600 in 10k.

100k started at 5:45am and 40k/10k at 9am.  40k/10k runners were asked to arrive at the Start at 7am for registration that was later found not required to 10 runners at all. So I had enough time resting and warming up.  Having found that it would took around 2hrs to get to the Ming Tomb Reservoir from home, I got up at 4am so as to catch the first subway train at 5:09am. After 30min train ride, I needed to take a bus at its origin stop and got off at the last stop where shuttle bus took runners to the Start.

It was bright and sunny day with highest temperature at 20 degrees Celsius, and the view of the reservoir was undoubtfully beautiful. But wind kills - it was cold at the Start when I only wore the Global Runners jersey and short. 10k runners were not provided with chips so I managed to slip into the crowds at the front as possible as I could, to have a better starting position and at the same time to avoid wind in the crowd.

The view along the first 5k was also beautiful with reservoir at one side and Mangshan National Park at the other. And runners could run in the shade of lush trees almost all the way along the route.   Road condition was very good, probably because there’s less traffic than in the city, with ups and downs that differs the 10k from road races such as marathon, though many runners wished there would’ve been dirt road in the 10k as there was in 40k/100k races.  After the first and also the only water station, runners ran on a 600m-long dam and then went into the last half of the race, which was also the most difficult part as the altitude map showed that runners needed to go almost all the way uphill for 3k. During this 3k, I felt I had run a little bit faster in the first half of the race than I expected because I felt my legs heavier and some runners surpassed me (of course, I surpassed some others). The last 1.5k had more downhill than uphill so I tried to make full use of it to ran faster and surpass others.

Finally I completed the 11.6km in 56min39sec, the 123rd out of 2600 registrants (or the 153rd, I didn't know the staff at the Finish was announcing the ranking when I crossed the finish line so I didn’t pay attention, but definitely within the first 200 runners).  I’m happy with the result given it’s my first road race and I’m also happy with the fact that I believe the number of runners I surpassed is much bigger than that of runners surpassing me.

Overall I think it was a good race, both in terms of my own performance and the race itself that was well organized from the beginning. The North Face made a beautiful website for this event with regular update on routes, altitude maps, traffic suggestion, news and announcement.  If TNF100 series continue to be there in Beijing in the next few years, I hope I could register the 40k in 2 years by when I hope I could finish my first full marathon.

Btw, 3 hours after I crossed the finished line, Kaburaki Tsuyoushi completed his 100km in 6hr52min! And the runner up who completed in 7hr14min is a college student!

2 days later, it’s the 1st anniversary of 5.12 Sichuan Earthquake. It will remind me why Global Runners started to run and why we will keep running.