After many years thinking about it, I finally registered for the great wall marathon on 1st of may. Wait, actually not THE great wall marathon but one of them, we found 4 different ones…

We’ll be running the great wall of china marathon on the 1st of may 2018:

https://www.active.com/beijing-northernchina/running/distance-running-trail-heads/the-17th-great-wall-of-china-marathon-2018?int=

The other 3 are:

The great wall marathon: https://great-wall-marathon.com/race-info

Conquer the wall marathon: https://conquerthewallmarathon.com

Run the great wall: https://rungreatwall.com

Races seem to be different but it’s hard to get all the details from abroad. So far the organizers have been very responsive and quite active on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/yifan.zhu.946). One of the good point of this race is that foreigners can register just got the race (including transport from and to the official hotel), while some other races require you to book a tour package.

Anyway here we go, race registration is done, hotel and flights are booked (we’ll stay in Beijing for 5 days so we can do a bit of tourism as well). There was just a bit of stress when requesting the visa with a warning that your passport is damaged and visa may get rejected (luckily it didn’t happen).

Now we need to finalise the preparation for a race that seems to be quite difficult… with many steps (steep and irregular), uneven surface, stones… sounds like fun. Not sure yet about the weather it can be very different depending on the years, quite cool at the moment with snow few days ago, but it may heat up quickly. Luckily, training in Bangkok does mean that we are ready for bit weather and if it is cooler, it will be better.

Plan was to run 40k per week, last month I logged 134 km, not the target but not so bad. However these are mostly flat km… I need to do more stairs… here’s one of training advice from the organizers… “do a lot of stairs running/training. It would be best to run over 20000 stairs in a day training in March or april”…

With about 3 weeks left, I’m trying to focus on quality rather than quantity, let’s see how that goes. I’ll tell you how the race went when I’m back.

Cheers,

Yannick