Moganshan Running

Last weekend, after a day of listlessly lingering in our Pudong flat, Paul and I looked forlornly at one another.  He barely had the energy to mutter 'next weekend, we need to do something.'  We got stuck in that strange paradox of do nothing=feel exhausted and utterly fed up.  We made a pact to wander the streets of Puxi, to explore, to do something new in our next weekend.

And on Monday, in one of those serendipitous moments of pure coincidence, Marjan, the senior school's librarian invited me to take place in a trail run relay, called the Yodel Run.  The gist:  be part of a team of three in a race leg of about 8km.  She and her daughter would be two of the legs and I would be the third.  Her husband would come to run the whole damn thing; Paul would come to spectate.

In this way, I said yes.

And because I like to stay true to my word, I ignored the warning signs:  the mountain-dotted elevation map; my lack of trail running experience; my lack of running since I moved to Shanghai last August; my coworkers laughing derisively at me--'but have you trained?'; the 5:15am start; the 4-hour bus ride each way.

Bright and early on Saturday morning, we made for a taxi to make for a bus.  Marjan's daughter fell ill so Paul subbed in to run.  We drove, ad nauseum, for four hours--up hills and through gargantuan mud puddles, getting out of the bus at key moments so the driver could make his way over dodgy pavement.  But the views were breathtaking: 

Upon arrival, we appeared to be the least fit by quite a bit.  Lithe, stretchy runners with positive attitudes and proper trail gear relaxed their way to the start line looking confident.  Paul and I formed team second-generation-brown-immigrant-children, cheered Marjan and Roger off and made to our muster stations. 

An hour later, Marjan chugged up the road and I took off through a little village and onto the trail.  There, I was bitch-slapped by the First Hill, a beast of a rock-dotted trail that rivaled my hiking trips in the Adirondacks. Up, up, up it went and as I took to walking, I struggled to catch my breath.  The eventual downhill was much kinder but each downhill was met by a successively longer uphill.  Some of these uphills were deceptive in their twisty, windy, turny nature and what I considered 3k in, I felt like throwing in the towel. 

With Taylor Swift in my ears, I shook it off, got an eventual burst of energy and chugged my way through a field of what smelled like excrement to a water stop that I thought was my relay changeover.  It wasn't.  Instead, I was greeted by a pair of Chinese race officiators with gatorade and water who warned me that I still had 3k to go.  

The worst was yet to come.  I took to walking, had a little mental breakdown, and threw myself up through the bamboo forest and a hill so demoralizing I thought about laying down and curling up for a little death nap.  It was difficult to enjoy the scenery, which looking back, was admittedly gorgeous.  Of course, the up was met with an eventual down so steep that I could only throw myself forward onto the next bamboo tree and struggle my way down the hill in this fashion.  

This was not before sussing out the huge German shepherd noticing me, calmly, quietly, intensely.  I scanned my memory of all things Cesar Milan, dog whisperer, and considered my options:  run?  that already wasn't happening so not possible; hit it with my water bottle?  was death by dog bite a fate worse than dehydration?; stare it down?  I think that was one of Milan's key ways to NOT deal.  Eventually, I just kept on moving.  The dog stayed exactly where it was and I came to the realization that perhaps, maybe, I'd hallucinated the whole thing.

all alone with my sweat and self-delusions in the bamboo forest

Fortunately, the end was near.  I'd made it to a concrete section of the trail and took off across the sloping curves of a road, through a rice paddy and to my checkpoint where I forced cheers out of the waiting runners who'd already finished the leg.  Paul looked at me murderously as we changed over and took off down the next stretch. 

I later learned that, at nearly 10k, the second leg was the longest of the relay.  Marjan had a 7.7k stretch and Paul had a 7k one.  So when I'd made it to the water stop, I'd already run 7k; this would have been beautiful information for my decaying mental attitude at the time.  

Alas.  Paul finished the relay strongly and we were able to enjoy the runner's high and beautiful scenery for about half an hour before struggling onto the bus and back another four-hours to Shanghai. On the upside, Moganshan is a stunningly beautiful national park that bears visiting.  Pizza has also never tasted better.  I'm also pretty certain that out of all the difficult, stupid things I've done, this was one of the most challenging.  Harder than a half marathon, harder than biking three-days with my IA group. 

Whether I'd do it again remains to be seen.