After a long and gruesome flight, I am now in Shanghai. First impression? A slum on steroid. High-rises and Skyscrapers are going up everywhere, butting up against old two to three stories houses and housing compounds. Streets don’t follow a grid system, or even a pattern for that matter. The airport is about an hour away, connected through a network of highways. As we get closer to the city, we see massive new constructions underway. One development I saw was like a few stadium-sized space-framed spaceships landed randomly on the plain field. To be fair, all we did yesterday was just landing in Shanghai and drove to the airport. Perhaps my first impression will change after all. I look forward to getting out of the city today and see some organic old villages and towns in Suzhou. Oh, by the way, connecting to facebook and twitter is next to impossible (perhaps illegal as well). It took some maneuvering to even be on tumblr.
I probably wouldn't admit how stressed I was the whole week leading up to Highlands Sky 40. Now that it's over, I realized I was partly in denial and partly rationalizing it as healthy nervousness. A 40-mile race is long for me. It's technical. And I pulled my lat muscle carrying a handheld bottle a week before the race. I am out of my comfort zone. At the start As everything in this world that is governed by time, the race is bound to happen like an unstoppable incoming train. A line from Bridges of Spies came to mind the evening before the race. When his lawyer James Donovan observes the alleged Russian Spy Rudolf Abel doesn't seem a bit nervous about his pending trial, he asks him about it and to which Abel responds: "Is it going to help?" Of the many things that I am concerned about the race, weather isn't one of them. We start the race in cool mountain temperature and I find myself nestle in the crowd, just going with the flow. There are dist...
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