The North Face Challenge 100km

This is what team mate Will Kelsay and I are up to this weekend: The Beijing leg of the North Face Challenge Series – of which Will is doing the 50km race and I am doing the 100km race – is taking place this Saturday.

Here's the course profile and maps

For me, the first 20km's is on the Great Wall of China, and the rest is in and around the nearby tombs, mountains and forests. The whole route should be stunning. Not only is it a 100km route, there's some aggressive climbs in there - like a 500m climb on the Great Wall in under 3kms (between km 9 and km 12). Sounds to me like that's just a set of stairs! In fact the whole profile looks more like an ECG than a route profile. There are 200 entrants running the 100km, 400 running the 50km (which Will is racing) and several thousand I think participate in the 10km which is around the reservoir where all three races finish.

Race day is Saturday 7th May. I have a 4:30am start, although the early start will be probably be a little irrelevant as I am not going to have any idea what time of day it is as we arrive on thursday morning for the saturday race. I am hoping that my brain will not get to Beijing before Sunday. Planning on wearing the GT for the race as it should capture some great data.

At the moment I'm trying to pack. So far, the Global Trainer is in the bag, with LOADS of Nathan products as I've not decided what to use yet, some PowerBar to keep me going, my On's, some BC compression socks and some run kit. Now back to packing...