A friend just sent me a link to this which is at once horrifying and inspiring…

High school runner breaks leg in meet, crawls to finish anyway.

A friend has just pointed me to this article in the Australian press which appears to be drawn from this from Xinhua.

Wild boar are apparently a real problem here in Hangzhou and are encroaching more into the city. They’ve even been attacking university canteens and scaring the tourists. The city is acting to cull their numbers with professional hunting teams and police are guarding the road junctions (?!). The Xinhua piece even partially attributes the increase in boar numbers to a hunting ban. Which might explain why neither piece mentions the poor people who get stuck in the traps that apparently aren’t there any more!

What a weekend. All I can say is there should be more weekends like that.

It started with good intentions, the usual Friday post work dinner and drinks being modified to be a carb-loading and hydrating do. However selecting a bar as the venue was probably a mistake and the hash members present who weren’t running over the weekend did nothing to help the resolve of the runners trying to do the right thing. In the end I managed a relatively sensible bowl of past, 4 pints of larger interspersed with 3 pints of water. Other faired less well.

Saturday was the 2007 Vasque West Lake Mountain Race and mindful of commitments on Sunday 6 of us from the hash had decided to run it as an unofficial 6 person relay. We’d drawn names from a hat and all set out Saturday morning to our designated change over points. I was leg 3, a nice run along a ridge over a couple of little peaks down to Nine Creeks. It was probably about 5k and not too bad an undertaking for the day before a half Marathon. We were, of course, the fastest unofficial 6 person ‘fun relay’ team. Photos here and results here. Team ‘Fun Relay’ finished in 4 hours 27 minutes which would have placed us 30th if we’d officially been in it.

Sunday was the Hangzhou International Marathon and was supposed to be the big event, my first full marathon. The training, as those of you who were following it know, wasn’t exactly going to plan but I think I could have pulled it off it wasn’t for the boar trap incident. I lost 2 weeks of training at a point where I couldn’t really afford to and that was the end of that. It’s a shame, as it would have been nice to do my first full in Hangzhou where a year earlier I’d done my first half. Still, it could have been worse and I was happy to be out running a half.

I’m not sure what caused it but the first 10k were an exercise in keeping going for me, I had sore legs from the start. It could have been lack of training in the last couple of weeks, it might have been that I was running with someone who naturally runs faster than me so the pace was an uneasy compromise where we sped up and slowed down a lot. It could have been my climb to the top of, and the run along, the ridge the day before – I don’t know. A little before 10k though my legs returned to normal operation and I started to enjoy the run. As we descended Hupao Lu I was starting to feel good. The friend I was running with started to suffer a bit at this point and it was nice to be able to return the favour and pull her along for a bit. I’m generally quite antisocial as a runner but I think on the day we were both glad to have run together. In the end we finished in 2hours and 12 minutes which is slightly slower than last year’s Hangzhou Half but the fastest one I’ve done this year. A couple of runners from the Tuesday running group were placed in the top 10 of the Women’s half which is cool.

After a brief trip home for a much needed shower we all congregated at Maya for a BBQ, a couple of non-runners had prepared a top-notch selection of pasta which was a good complement to the grilled sausage and chicken they prepared for us. Over the course of the afternoon we were joined by various people including some we’d met on the runs. Sitting outside in November eating BBQ and supping a few cold beers, how cool is that?

Sunday of course is Hash Run day and marathon or no marathon there had to be a hash. So we set off and followed a trail to the beer shop round the corner and back and continued celebrating.

What a weekend.