July. 4th 2015
Grassland Extreme Marathon in XiWuQi in Inner Mongolia on July. 4th 2015
Before taking part at the Grassland Marathon, a marathon journey had to be completed. First, a three-hour flight from Guangzhou to Beijing. Then an overnight stay in Beijing close to the airport (to not to miss the connecting flight the next day at 6:40). And then at the following morning the one-hour flight to XiLinHot.
And from XiLinHot it took another two hours in the shuttle bus provided by the organizer to XiWuQi. Finally I arrived the hotel in time for lunch. At the time I registered for the Marathon my favourite hotel which also hosted the organization office, was already fully booked. Therefore I had booked two nights at the hotel called "Electricity Hotel" (...).
Surprisingly, it turned out that a fellow runner from Guangzhou, who had moved to Beijing a few months earlier, had also registered for the marathon. And funny was that she and her family were staying in the same hotel just in the neighbour room.
The small and somehow desolate town of XiWuQi is already well-known in the running and biking scene because of this Grassland Marathon and the mountain bike races which also take place. To win the title of "King of Grassland" or "Queen of Grassland", it is requested to complete three more mountain bike races in addition to the marathon (or half marathon for the short distance).
On the list of registered participants for the marathon a total of about 600 runners could be found and out of them about 100 with foreign names.
On Saturday morning at 7am we started for our Grassland journey. The temperatures were pleasant but the sun was already extremely bright. It would have been impossible for me to run without sunglasses. The first kilometer was announced as a "warm up", so the total distance was about 43km.
Overall, it was a lot of fun, even though the route wasn't as flat as I thought. As I was only able to do a few long runs during the weeks before the marathon, Therefore I was happy with my finish time of just over 5 hours.
All in all the organization was perfect (Swedish organization team !). Water was offered every 5 km. Starting from km 30 even every 3 km water was available and additionally bananas and other snacks.
Here some more pictures:
Here is the link to the official homepage: