Training is over. As pleasing as it was to behold dawn from Yonphu-la – the first orange light fingering the long, jagged line of snowy Tibetan peaks – rising in the dark to run in winter was nothing less than brutal. The saddle is a thousand feet above Kanglung and it took an hour to reach it. Suddenly, from neutral, horizontal and definitely parked, I was in third gear and trying hard to coax the engine into running smoothly. To manage my daily two-hour jog before work, I had to begin under the stars.
But I am done with that. Now I can sleep in and feel nervous about Friday, the day the Lama of Trashigang comes to pour holy water on our heads and give us his blessing, the day we run out of the gates of Sherubtse College never to return, the day when a hundred shouting school kids will descend the mountain with us preceded by a bus marked ‘Tara-thon’. Four days before Christmas, our five-week marathon through the Himalayas will begin.
“I will bring big flask wid speshull suja.” Nadya and I have this to look forward to. Mr Rongthong Sangay, ex-national football star, ex-royal bodyguard, newly retired sports director of our college, and ‘Tara-thon’ event coordinator promises to serve us rancid butter tea at regular intervals en route. It’s a disgusting drink, but I have a feeling the fat and salt will do us good. It’ll probably bring tears of joy to my eyes when a gloved hand passes a cup of it out of the window of the support bus on my way up to Thrumsing-la in the second week. Legs wilting and wobbly, snot dripping from my nose, chest heaving in the thin air. Thrumsing-la is close to 12, 000 feet - nearly twice as high as Yonphu-la.
I am hopeful that the ten students running with us are reincarnated mountain goats, Bhutan being a Buddhist country, inclined in their past lives to race up and down mountainsides for pleasure. Nadya and I have put them all through a trial: runs to Yonphu-la on three consecutive days. I wasn’t expecting them to make it round four bends in the road. The common practice during the Sherubtse Annual Marathon, the sole distance running event on the college calendar, is to sprint the first, flat 300 metres to the college gates, begin walking after the first kilometre of uphill thereafter and stop at someone’s house for tea around the third kilometre. Few people run in Bhutan; with steep mountains on all sides, walking is exhausting enough. No one has ever run across the country before. Yet, on day three of our trial, six of our ten runners were at the destination ahead of me and the other four not far behind…
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As exhaustion begins to exact its toll, my journal entries on this blog will undoubtedly become at best babbling and repetitious, at worst incoherent and desperate. I offer no apology. An interesting new form of literary expression may result.
Tony Robinson-Smith,
Project Leader
