Trail Tales | What running 100 miles taught me

On Friday, April 26, more than 1,000 people were flagged off from Yagasaki-Kouen, Lake Kawaguchi for a 161km loop in the Ultra Trail Mount Fuji race. My first attempt at the distance, I survived to tell the tale...

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The UTMF course was a loop around Mount Fuji, seen here at dusk at Ryugatake (1,485m) about 26km into the 100-mile race. Photo: Jeanette Wang

Published: 7:26pm, 5 May 2013Updated: 12:26pm, 9 May 2013

Completely spent with not a drop of energy left in me, I sat among the beech-lined forest trail that headed steeply up the 1,320-metre high Mount Mikuni. Having run for more than 19 hours and with more than a third of the Ultra Trail Mount Fuji race left, the prognosis was not good.

My mind was at war: the voice of pain was battling the whispers of courage. In all practical sense I was in no condition to go on; I could barely stand, much less put one foot in front of the other. It didn’t help that my stomach had been a mess since about the 80km mark. Though hungry – and obviously in need of calories – my weak body was rejecting all food: muesli bars, nuts, dried fruit, onigiri, udon, miso soup, fried potato balls, and whatever else the aid stations or my race pack had.

Starting too fast really did me in. You can remind yourself again and again to go slow and steady, that you really do need to save up for the end. The UTMF, after all, is a 100-mile trail race with more than 9,100 metres in cumulative elevation gain (Everest is 8,848 metres high) over tough undulating off-road terrain.

But as the starting gun goes and a tsunami of adrenaline rushes through your veins, and you ride on the draft of eagerness of your fellow competitors, it is hard to hold back. You feel strong and you think you could keep this pace up – everyone does on fresh legs. I hit checkpoint 2, or about 24km into the race, in 10th place. I continued to feel good till about 70km, and got to the halfway checkpoint in 13 hours 42 mins and in 14th place. But it all turned horribly wrong from there, and I struggled through the next two stages.

Yotsuji (1,800m) was the highest point of race and closest racers got to Fuji at about the 94km mark. The volcanic fine gravel mountainside made for an interesting descent. Photo: Jeanette Wang

For five minutes I sunk into the tranquility of the Mikuniyama woods as the war raged on in my head. Fellow racers trudged past me. “Gambatte,” some offered, to which all I could muster was a blink of gratitude. A familiar face soon surfaced, a fellow Hongkonger, Rowley, looking shattered too. “You can’t give up, you’ve got to just put one foot in front of the other. Don’t worry about time, just finish it,” he encouraged. I checked my mobile phone and saw an SMS from a friend: “Come on, go for it, you can do it. A few more mountains and you never have to do 100 miles again.”