Trail Tales | Hong Kong runner Andre Blumberg's Grand Slam quest

Blumberg hopes be among a select few to have ever completed four challenging 100-mile US trail races in 10 weeks

Reading Time:10 minutes

Blumberg in good form Just after the Robinson Flat aid station, or 30-mile mark. Photo: Michael Lebowitz

Published: 12:12pm, 4 Jul 2013Updated: 12:47pm, 4 Jul 2013

While Djokovic and co. fight it out at Wimbledon, there’s another Grand Slam taking place in the US that’s attracting a small but growing crowd – including the attention of Hongkongers.

It’s got nothing to do with tennis, though, but running. Lots of it. We’re talking four 100-mile (160km) races in the span of 10 weeks, traversing the toughest and most iconic trails in the US for a total cumulative elevation gain of nearly 80,000 feet (24,380 metres).

The series flagged off last weekend with the Western States 100 in Squaw Valley, California, and next heads to the Vermont 100 (July 20) in Windsor, Vermont, then the Leadville 100 (Aug 17) in the Colorado Rockies, and finishing off with the Wasatch Front (Sept 6) in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.

Hong Kong is represented by Andre Blumberg, 43, a German IT director who has lived here for 11 years. He is among the 31 brave souls who’ve signed up to the challenge – officially called the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning – this year, and one of the 28 remaining after the Western States. He’s also the only participant who’s not residing in North America (there’s a Chinese guy named Di Wu, but he lives in the US, working as a research associate at the University of California, Davis).

At the second hottest race of the Western States’ 40-year history – where temperatures reportedly rose to 47 deg Celsius in the canyons – Blumberg finished in a very respectable 26 hours 27 minutes 11 seconds. He was 144th among 277 finishers, with about a third of the field dropping out. American Timothy Olson won for the second straight year in 15:17:27.

The Grand Slam was established in 1986 and remains an exclusive club of few. Only 234 people (200 men, 34 women) have successfully completed the Slam, including 20 who’ve done it more than once. Most hail from the US; just 20 are from overseas, including only one from Asia (Japan).