Starting at 300 m above sea level, the first 5 km section almost immediately climbed to 800 meter before flattening out. At this point I seriously doubted that it was doable to finish the track before the sun would set. It was 17:30 when I started running and considering that most hikers do the track in 8 hours my initial estimation was to run at half the time and be back before nightfall. I ran the track the Wildman style, with mountaineering boots and a daypack containing my Crossfit rings, a camera and a bottle of water. Yeah, I seriously planed to do a 10 min Cindy WOD halfway into the track but well there couldn’t. My main reason was that I couldn’t find a tree to hang up the rings because I was above the tree line. The reality was somewhat different - I was ready to die when I arrived and there was no way I could do a Crossfit WOD. It took me 1 hour and 40 min to run the first 12.5 km of the track and now the conditions were to change. I had to run downhill, which is a mixed blessing - you run faster but it’s more tiresome for the legs and the risk of injuries are increased. I was hoping that the downhill phase would be easier but I turned out to be only 10 min faster – I was really tired! Altogether it took me a little over 3 hours to finish the 25km run. I probably would have done better with proper shoes but the important thing is that I did it. After all, my goal is to continuously improve myself no matter what !
When I came to the hostel I found a hole on the back of my t-shirt and I had two large bruises on my back, probably caused by the friction from the backpack. Two days later I still haven’t recovered from the mountain run, my legs are sore and the hips are weakened; additionally I spent most of the day yesterday resting with a pretty bad tension headache. Was it worth it? Of Course it was I learned a lot!
/Chris