At our year-end meetings in Phoenix, www.OneMileRunner.com made some changes to our upcoming event beginning in May, 2011. “5 Wonders Under 25 Minutes” will now begin at The Grand Canyon instead of The Great Wall of China in Beijing. After numerous phone calls to race officials, we realized that we would not be able to sprint on the Great Wall. We discovered that parts of the Wall are so severe that you need to hold onto a rope to descend and climb up small steps to reach elevations. With 8000km of Wall to run, very little of the Great Wall can actually be sprinted on – maybe there is a spot where you can open up for 2/10ths of a mile. The race director recommended that we run the first mile of the 10K course which ran through a parking lot up to the foot of the Great Wall. As our marketing director said, “It is a long way to go to run through a parking lot…”
So with this new found awareness, our quest of running a fast mile ON the Wall was put to rest. We replaced the Great Wall with The Golden Gate Bridge. And here is our updated schedule for 2011:
- Grand Canyon (USA) – Natural Wonder of The World – May 29th
- Stonehenge (England) – Medieval Wonder of The World – June 25th
- Golden Gate Bridge (USA) – Modern Wonder of The World – July 16th
- Taj Mahal (India) – New Wonder of The World – August 20th
- Petra (Jordan) – New Wonder of The World – September 10th
We begin training for our May start on February 1st.
Running on the Great Wall would be an amazing experience, I also had no idea it was in that bad of shape with it being so long you would think at least a mile of it would be good enough to run on. I will definitely be following you through your blog as you run these 5 races in 25mins. I hope to some day get to the point of being able to run a 5 min. mile, I am in the high 7 min. range currently. Good luck and have fun visiting all the wonders of the world.
-Dave