steps

It is only about five weeks until my race, a fact that fills me with some trepidation! I have been training steadily at times and less so at others. Just to give you an idea of what I am preparing for, here is a picture of the Great Wall:




And here is a picture from last year’s race:



Apparently it is just an urban legend that the Great Wall is the only man-made structure that can be seen from the moon by the naked eye. Nonetheless, it is a rather imposing and impressive structure. The race begins with a 5 ½ mile stretch on the Great Wall itself followed by about 15 miles on roads, and then another 5 ½ miles on the Great Wall. Each Great Wall section features some 3700 steps (both up and down) that are uneven and probably somewhat treacherous (hence the various disclaimers on all the marathon paperwork noting that participants better have their own health insurance and that the race does not cover transport to local hospitals).

Luckily I live on the 11th floor of the building where I’m staying so I’ve been climbing steps, though lately I’ve gotten rather lazy and use the elevator a bit more than when I first arrived here. There are a total of 14 floors in the building, numbered 1-12 (as you’d expect) and then, interestingly, 15 and 16. Of course, 13 is unlucky in the west, and 14 is not terribly lucky here (the word for “four” sounds like the word for “death” in Chinese so, among other things, no one wants mobile phone numbers with 4 in them—even I avoided it when I purchased my number). But there is a 4th floor in the building, just no 14. Sometimes there are strange counting patterns here—for instance, the Beijing subway currently has three lines, numbers 1 and 2 (again, as you’d expect) and number 13 (not so expected).

I’ve started doing step workouts once a week—one time up from bottom to top is 304 steps. Yesterday I did 8 repeats for a total of over 4800 steps (I’m counting the ups and the downs)—it took about 45 minutes. Perhaps this won’t help entirely with the marathon, but it can’t hurt. My plan is to work up to 10 in two weeks (next week I’ll be in the countryside, which will no doubt provide fodder for new running adventures) and then the following week to do 5 repeats, go outside and run a few miles, and then return to do 5 more. Let’s call that a “micro” simulation of the Great Wall Marathon itself.