MAO ZEDONG once said you're not a real man if you haven't climbed the Great Wall of China.
But what if you run a marathon on it?
Winnipeggers Patrick Hastings and Helen Peters got the chance to do just that, running in the seventh annual Great Wall Marathon in the Tianjin province of China last weekend.
Helen Peters
"It was quite an experience," said Hastings, 51. "Definitely an emotional roller coaster, but I'm always up for a challenge."
And what a challenge: the 42-kilometre course subjected runners to 3,700 of the wall's steps, steep inclines, dangerous terrain, and temperatures near 35 degrees.
It would be an extreme test no matter how many marathons you might have under your belt. For Hastings, it was his first.
"I'm a team player, a hockey player, so to have gone through it all by myself was pretty foreign," he said.
"It can be a pretty lonely sport."
Sixty-seven-year-old Peters, on the other hand, is no stranger to marathon running. She's ran in some of the most historic races there are, including the Boston and Athens marathons.
But this one was unlike any she'd experienced.
"It's more mental than physical. You do have to be in very, very good shape to run it. But the Great Wall is what it is. It's the history that makes it so incredible," Peters said.
"It just about did me in. You get an awesome feeling crossing the finish line. It's definitely something to accomplish it."
The course started with a six-kilometre steep uphill section before reaching the Wall for the first time. The steps on the Wall are nearly two feet high in some spots, so runners had to use their hands to pull themselves up. After traversing the Wall, the race flattened out with a run through some of the local villages before looping back onto the Wall and then down towards the start.
"Running through the villages was amazing, especially the children. They came out and greeted us and cheered us on. It was really great to have the encouragement along the way," said Peters.
Hastings was invited to run in the marathon with the team from Widex, a distributor in Denmark that his Hastings Hearing Centre has done business with for more than a decade. The team was raising money for the 2009 Deaflympics for hearing impaired athletes.
"I was very honoured to be asked to run," he said. "I made some lifelong friends from every corner of the world, and just meeting all the people there was incredible."
Hastings was also personally taking donations for Friends of Loa, an organization working to rebuild infrastructure in a Sudanese town. He said running for charity helped keep him motivated to finish despite getting sharp pains in his left knee in the latter half of the race.
"I felt like I was getting stabbed each time I took a step. Any other day I might have just packed it in, but I would have crawled across the finish line if I had to."
He said running marathons is something he'd stick with after his first experience on the Great Wall.
Peters said she'll be running the Manitoba Half Marathon in a few weeks. She'll need some time to recuperate from the Great Wall Marathon before she'll be able to run a full one again.
eric.mackenzie@freepress.mb.ca
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