The Great Wall Marathon

I’m surprised the Chinese girl’s plimsolls aren’t melting as she passes me on the hill. It’s 35°C and rising at the start of the second annual Great Wall Marathon.

No amount of sunblock or light-coloured headgear makes it seem like anything less. As this frail form pulls ahead, I notice a red ribbon tied around her ankle. Attached to it is her electronic timing chip, the one the rest of us have looped through our shoelaces. A closer look reveals that not only is the girl running in canvas gym shoes: the slip-on uppers don’t even have laces.

Wang Wei Hua – the girl in question – is one of 85 runners in Tianjiin province today. Our nationalities are as diverse as our abilities – 11 from China, a majority from Denmark (home of the race organisers), half a dozen from the US, some from France, Sweden, Germany, and me from the UK. For the first 5K we’re grinding up a narrow tarmac road in bright, clear sunlight, past a few homes and a small, dusty building site. The seasoned campaigners are going slowly because they know what to expect in a race of this distance. The first-timers are going slowly because they don’t. We’re all going slowly.

At the top of the road a path leads through a brushing of small trees, up 20 stone steps and onto the Great Wall. If you joined all the Wall’s surviving sections together, they could stretch from New York to Los Angeles. Today we’ll just be running a pristine two-mile section which clings to the hilly landscape as if it was drawn on with a pen.

It’s hard, at the best of times, to take in the scale of the Great Wall of China. Not just the mind-boggling physical size of it (it covers 3700 miles, and if rebuilt five metres high and one metre thick would encircle the entire globe), but also the crushing human endeavour that went into its construction at the urgent commands of a succession of emperors. Thousands of workers died of exhaustion as they slaved to separate China from its perceived enemies. Chillingly, their corpses are believed to have been buried in the Wall’s foundations.

We can only reflect on this in the quiet time after the race, however; at the moment the running is taking our complete focus.

The Great Wall is an almost relentless series of climbs and descents; a mixture of small, shallow steps, and painful, knee-high ones. Mercifully, at the top of every head-spinning, gut-wrenching climb there’s a cool, dark watchtower made of thick stone slabs, where clusters of volunteers and medics offer drinks, sponges and words of encouragement. It’s no surprise that the watchtowers also house gatherings of lingering runners steeling themselves for the plunge back into the furnace outside.

I approach the end of the first Wall section and the sight of the main road section with relief, even though it means negotiating a plummeting 562-step descent. This descent, which combines stone steps with short sections of hard dirt path, is lined with small, fragrant trees and stunted shrubs. It’s also lined, at any hint of danger or fork in the path, with unfailingly kind and deferential local helpers. Around the whole course they shyly offer words of encouragement, their broken English putting our Chinese to shame.

Safely back down on the valley road where we started, I fall into step with Søren Skov, a 55-year-old runner from Denmark whose brother ran the inaugural Great Wall Marathon the previous year. He’s a veteran of 25 marathons, and as we seem to be on 4:30 pace I’m surprised to find that he’s predicting himself a finish time nearer six hours. Later I realise he had the advantage of insight.

The valley passes through a one-street village on a smoothly tarmaced main road. The term ‘main road’ is relative – fewer than half a dozen cars pass us in a mile. Villagers watch us quietly, down on their haunches on the hard-packed dirt in front of their houses and shops, or sitting on their concrete steps. They only break out in smiles and return our greetings when we call to them. Some of them practice all their English in a burst – “hello!goodbye!how-are-you!” – while others thrust their delighted, round-faced children forward to wave and beam at the crazy Westerners.

This is a good part of the race – flat, shaded, and the first chance we’ve had to find any kind of rhythm. Still, the kilometre markers are coming awfully slowly.

Soon we’re guided onto one of the undulating scorched-earth tracks that will form nearly half of the course. A riverbed running alongside looks the way the insides of our mouths feel by now. The surface of cracked mud and smooth white stones is bone dry and blazing in the heat.

Further back on the road, runners are already having problems, with little over a third of the marathon under their belts. They’re mindful of the need to keep drinking and they’re trying to make the most of the frequent water stations, but the heat is making them nauseous. The worse they feel, the less they drink, until they find themselves in a downward spiral that grinds some of them to a halt. It’s to the field’s credit that only 17 of the 85 starters drop out.