Run Down, Many to Go

Today's weather: High = 26 Low = 9
Sunny

Fitting for this spring season, the temperature went through the roof (relatively speaking) for a short time, just as we were to participate in the Jinqiao 8K run, out in Pudong.

Actually, the weather couldn't have been more perfect.

Every year they hold the annual 8K run in a region of Shanghai that is filled with foreigners. That would of course be Jinqiao in Pudong, second only to Hongqiao in Puxi as the largest concentration of expats in our fine city.

It was rather amazing just to see how many physically fit foreigners actually live in Shanghai, as indicated by how many participated in the run. The count was in the thousands, matched by an equal number of locals. As a point of comparison, the total number of expats in Shanghai is about 300,000. They obviously come here for a reason, as it's the best city to live in China, if not the entire planet. They certainly wouldn't want to be living in Wujiang, as you can tell from my last post.

As an aside, a friend in the hotel development business was ordered by her boss to put Wujiang on the blacklist of places to do business in, because of all the corruption there. So it turns out my earlier posts to slam this region of China weren't all off-base. Other people have also suffered from high levels of curruption in Wujiang -- which I had been suspecting, based on my experiences. Let's just say that corrupt officials torpedoed a business opportunity and almost caused the entire project to fail, if it weren't for other developments in cleaner regions of China that saved the project.

Back to the running story, it was a nice start with thousands of people in yellow shirts going around two laps on major streets, causing quite the media frenzy. Every so often there were kilometer markings and water stations. I was in good shape to do this run, thanks to all the training on the treadmills prior to this. Unfortunately my running partner wasn't in such good shape, but we negotiated a time to meet after the event, and we did separate races.

This was hardly a competition, but the expats in Shanghai sure took it seriously. It felt more intense than the Vancouver 10K Sun Run, as a point in comparision. However, this event was low-tech and lacked all the devices like timing chips, etc. that would be found in the Vancouver run. Despite that, the people went crazy. I was going all out and still getting passed left, right, and center. Most annoying was the pant-pant-pant of others running behind me in close quarters, or the typical cutting off behavior in close proximity that would be more associated with Chinese than foreigners, yet both were the guilty parties.

The thing here was that the police allowed traffic to run on most of the streets and siphoned off the runners to the bicycle lane as the race progressed further from the start line .... hence all the close quarters. They did block off several of the roads near the start line, but it was only for a short distance. Even at 9am on a Sunday morning, this caused a ton of traffic jams, and the police understandably wanted to minimize that effect.

Nevertheless I checked in with 41 minutes and 40 seconds which I figure was pretty damn good. My average treadmill times were 50+ minutes for this distance, and I'm still not in ideal physical shape (i.e. still overweight)

Afterwards, we enjoyed a nice noodle lunch and coffee to relax.

This is part of the training I'm doing to eventually run a marathon by the end of this year. The next event will be a half-marathon around October, so it's now time to start training for that.