Sunday, January 9, 2011

25 kilometers Wildman run in the Patagonian Mountains

A couple of days ago, a guy from Patagonia adventure gave me a challenge that I couldn’t resist - to run the popular Lagona los Tres track to the foot of Mount Fitzroy and then back to El Chaltén. The track is graded moderate (for trampers) and climbs over 1000 meters.

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



3 comments:

  1. Fantastic to see you're in South America now! Keep going, the experience will only get better.
    Rob

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  2. Thank you Rob we will! Hope everything is good with yaa!

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