Istarted running long distance back in high school. I joined the cross-country team and wore out my fair share of Nike Waffle Trainers, New Balance 320s, and Brooks Villanovas over the course of the next four years. My younger brother was also a runner. He continued running both cross-country and track at the University of Iowa while I decided to continue running on my own.

I completed the Chicago Marathon during my freshman year in college. I joined the military not too long after my university years, and while other soldiers dreaded PT (physical training) in the morning, I had come to enjoy the 10-mile runs and the 20-mile road marches with a lot of weight on my back. These were fun endurance tests for me. I was a medic in the Army, stationed about 10 miles from the demilitarized zone in Korea. Our medical platoon would run twice a week up a mountain that we called “Schoolhouse Hill” because there was a little schoolhouse situated near the peak. We would run at a 45-degree incline in our flak jackets. Coming back down from the top was the hardest part. Heading downhill at ever-increasing speed, I felt like an 18-wheeler without brakes.

South Korea, the “land of the morning calm,” and the Far East in general left a deep impression on me, and when I left the military, I moved to nearby Changchun, China. Changchun is the capital of Jilin province, which borders North Korea and is not far from the Russian border. This part of the world is very, very cold. As a teacher at a university, I would marvel at how Russian students on scholarship from Siberia would come to Changchun “to get away from the cold.” I found myself sometimes running in some fairly unconventional attire just to keep warm. Often looking like a giant bear, I trotted along the streets and sidewalks in my tracksuit and my ubiquitous fur-lined comrade hat with a red star on it.

Last year I decided to trade the clean air and cold weather of Jilin Province for the warmer weather—and smog—of Beijing. Unless you live under a rock,

you know from media reports that Beijing is not exactly a runner’s paradise. So far, I have run two half-marathons in and near Beijing: the Beijing International Half-Marathon and the Great Wall Half-Marathon. My motivation for running each race was simple. Having recently moved to Beijing, I thought running the Beijing International Half-Marathon might be a fun way to get to learn about Beijing’s streets and sights while participating in a sport I love in a city of 23 million that I now call home. Running the Great Wall Half-Marathon also made perfect sense to me. I thought it would be the best way to explore what is often called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Here is my story comparing my race in Beijing with my race along the Great Wall of China. Names have not been changed to protect the guilty.

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Running the Great Wall Marathon is best way to explore what is often called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Courtesy of Jeff Walsh

Great Wall Marathon. Famous Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Every year in the middle of May, 2,000 brave souls set forth like modern-day Marco Polos in the dirt, dust, and blazing heat and take that first single step at the start of the Great Wall Marathon in Tianjin, China, three hours outside of Beijing.

This single, serpentine, dragonlike structure climbs over mountains, plunges deep into valleys, and snakes through the countryside and villages of China, passing farmers tilling their fields. The wall is made of mud, straw, rocks, and bricks and stands defiantly today, having survived thousands of years of bitter cold, brutal heat, and endless wars with Mongols and Manchus and modernization. The first Emperor of the Qin Dynasty in AD 221 began integrating this ingenious defense system that sprawls

and winds through nine provinces to protect and defend a nation and its people with more than 1,200 ramparts and watchtowers. Heads of state, the famous and the infamous alike, have walked it, hiked it,

and camped next to it. You could ride your motorcycle on it. In the 2003 movie The Bucket List, two men who are given six months to live decide to do just that. They decide it’s no fun sitting around waiting to die so they sky dive, they drive

stock cars at 200 mph, and they ride motorcycles on the Great Wall. And now, of course, you can run up the Great Wall. Mao Zedong famously said, “He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man.” If Chairman Mao were alive today,

he might make an addition to his famous statement: “He who climbs the Great Wall is a true man. And he who runs the Great Wall Marathon is a superman!” Beijing Marathon. To run in the “Beijing Scare-a-thon,” you had better be

Superman wearing a super-surgical mask. The race being in October, it looked a bit like Halloween with all the masks. There were decorative masks like those that Cinderella might wear at an elegant ball. There were gas masks to filter out

the smog that looked like they could be used if the runners were to come under chemical attack during either the 21K or 42K race. Three weeks after the marathon, factories in Beijing and the surrounding

provinces were closed for one week to give APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) and visiting world leaders clean air to breathe. Maybe for the 2015 Beijing Marathon, factories and automobile traffic will be shut down for one full day for us common folk.

Courtesy of Jeff Walsh

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The race is two weeks before Halloween. Many runners are already wearing masks.

Great Wall Marathon. This is not a race for the timid or the fainthearted. Go on the official marathon website (www.greatwall-marathon.com) and check the marathon course and you will discover that the directions alone will discourage many fence sitters and wannabes from ever reaching the starting line.

For instance: Stretch #1 (highway) “. . . you must watch for traffic at all times.” Stretch #3 (Great Wall) “. . . please note that going downhill is especially dangerous.” Tower #9: “. . . the Wall takes a wide swing with a free fall on one side.” Stretch #6 (unpaved road) “. . . you might see some strange goings on as there will be a lot of people and tractors.” Stretch #6 (Section D-E) “. . . you have lost one of the sure signs of civilization . . . the asphalt road ends . . . you are running next to an irrigation canal. Allow yourself a moment to look at this means of agricultural improvement.” Stretch #9 (mixed road surface) “. . . look out! The villagers will watch out for you but keep an eye out for the occasional chicken or duck darting out.” I guess you can say that runners might prepare for the wildlife and weather as much as hitting a glycogen-depleted “runner’s wall” at the Great Wall Marathon.

I was armed with just a simple pair of new Nike Tailwind 2 running shoes; maybe I should have packed a crash helmet, GPS, road flare, compass, reflective tape, flak jacket, and reserve parachute along with my running gear. (If I get lost, maybe the little chip that was affixed to my shoelace for time splits can beam to a satellite to give me a longitude and latitude fix.)

The website and race packet cautioned about the chickens and ducks on the course but neglected to mention to watch out for camels. Between the first and second kilometer marker, there was (with no apparent explanation) a two-humped camel. Hmm. No sand and deserts here in Tianjin. Maybe the camel was merely a mirage. Nope. This camel was very real. Some runners did a double take and others stopped to take photos with the camel.

Courtesy of Jeff Walsh

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The Great Wall Marathon is not for the faint of heart.

Shortly after seeing the camel, I wondered if I was going to be running in the Great Wall Marathon or was entered in some sort of Silk Road Marathon in Xi’an or Urumqi. The camel didn’t sport a race number so I thought maybe the two-hump camel in question might serve as some sort of medical transport for dehydrated runners en route to a first aid tent or medical clinic. And if the two-hump transport system can’t bring me medical relief, I guess I could always wait until the twilight hours and send a smoke distress signal from watchtower to watchtower as Chinese soldiers did in ancient times.

Billed by the organizers as “probably the greatest running experience ever,” this race, now in its 15th year, certainly lives up to that lofty goal. The course was well organized, the event was well planned and well orchestrated, and the staff was very professional. I felt the entry fee was fairly steep but worth every penny. Beijing Marathon. I have been running races for some 35 years. The

Beijing Marathon and Half-Marathon was the worst race I have ever run and the worstorganized race I have been in. I think there must have been a high-stakes poker game somewhere in Beijing on Saturday, October 18, the night before the marathon. There were seven players. The winner walked out with a quarter-million dollars. The six losers were told that they had to report the following day, on Sunday at 6:00 a.m., to Tiananmen Square to become the Beijing Marathon Committee. Great Wall Marathon. So, you ask, why should I run the Great Wall Marathon? For most people it would be a dream come true just to be able to see the Great Wall or any one of the new or ancient seven wonders of the world. After all, the architectural genius of the Sydney Opera House, the complexity of Angkor Wat, the religious significance of Christ the Redeemer, the pageantry of the Taj Mahal, the awe-inspiring statues of Easter Island, the ancient history of the Pyramids of Egypt, and the mystery surrounding Stonehenge all stand the test of time and are worthy of your attention. So why run the Great Wall? The answer is simple. The Great Wall of China is the most wondrous of the seven wonders, and running it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and history lesson that you will never forget. Beijing Marathon. The “Beijing Scare-a-Thon” is also a race you will never forget. There was a three-hour cutoff for the half-marathon. “Cutoff” is an apt description. We were cut off from the race as we watched pylons, signage, volunteers, and volunteer booths pack up and leave right in front of our very eyes. I felt I was watching the circus pack up the clowns, trapeze artists, elephants, and big tent to move on to another town. Great Wall Marathon. This is the “new” China and the “Wild Wild East,” so you should always expect the unexpected. It was part racing event, part trail

hike, and part scavenger hunt, and the camel sighting was just the beginning of the many fun surprises around every corner at the Great Wall Marathon. Many of the party types who took part in this adventure ran the full course in costumes like it was some sort of mad midsummer Halloween party. Two guys ran the 26.2 miles in construction-worker costumes. One young American ran with a large Chinese coolie hat. Adventurous Australians ran in large packs chanting “Auzzie! Auzzie! Auzzie!” and “Oy, oy, oy!” One guy ran with a plastic thing on his head that looked like a large Lego block. Another runner had cheerleader pompoms.

Local Chinese entrepreneurs had booths seemingly everywhere on the wall, on the route, and at the starting line and finish line, hawking Coke, Great Wall Tshirts, small Great Wall paperweights, Chinese army hats with red stars on them, and a thousand other trinkets. If you weren’t a few pounds lighter at the end of the 26 miles, chances are your wallet was lighter. Beijing Marathon. Trying to get my bag back after the race was worse than trying to reclaim lost luggage at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. When I went to claim my bag, the whole site was gone! In the participant guide, there was no address for the Beijing Marathon Committee nor an address where unclaimed marathon bags might be stored. Neither the guide nor the official Beijing Marathon website had a name or a phone number to contact about your bag. I checked in my bag at 7:40 at a series of giant booths the size of a football field that said “Half-Marathon C1000-C1999.” My bib number was C1039.

The participant guide said I had five days to pick up my bag. I went to one of the marathon sponsors, the Traders East Hotel of Shangri-La. The people there

Courtesy of Jeff Walsh

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An interesting pre-race warmup, with cartoon characters featuring slow dancing, stretching, and selfies.

were kind, cordial, and quite helpful. Unfortunately, they were unable to locate my bag. The marathon committee had stayed at that hotel. Unfortunately, the committee had already checked out. I went to see a journalist at the China Daily

newspaper. The journalist called the marathon committee and got this message: “The marathon committee is on vacation; try back on Monday.” If there is a next time (and I’m fairly certain there won’t be), I will be taking

photos of my bag, the check-in site, and the people laying hands on my bag as though I were a detective. If I scour the local knockoff/fake goods markets in Beijing, I’m sure I will find my stuff. Maybe someone will sell my bag and its

contents back to me at a discount. Great Wall Marathon. Though it was a serious competition for many runners, it didn’t feel like a competition at all. The 20-minute race warm-up felt like we were about to begin some sort of health-club circuit training featuring dance

music, calisthenics, and aerobics. I have run in races in America where the theme song from the movie Rocky and “We Are the Champions” blared through every neighborhood for encouragement. Here local villagers chanted “Jiao! Jiao!” (“Go!

Go!” in Mandarin) as the shop owners, farmers, villagers, children, and local police emptied out onto the streets to look on and cheer. You got the feeling they waited all year long for this race to come

through their little villages. There was also an audience of international curiosity seekers on hand to cheer the runners as they wound their way along this unique and challenging course. You need all

the encouragement and inner fortitude you can muster to complete this course.

Courtesy of Jeff Walsh

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Every participant in the Great Wall Marathon or Great Wall Half Marathon receives a medal. Every Beijing Marathon and Half-Marathon participant should receive a surgical mask or a respirator.

Beijing Marathon. I needed all the encouragement and fortitude I could muster to find my personal belongings after the race. I didn’t feel like a private eye, a sharp Sherlock Holmes hot on the trail to recover my goods. No, I felt like a bumbling, stumbling idiot like Elmer Fudd, who got his stuff back by sheer accident or luck. Luckily, I live in Beijing, so I was on hand to persist. It took me 11 days to recover my bag. Was it my fault because I didn’t know enough Chinese? Was it because of bureaucratic red tape? My bib number was no longer on my bag. It must have “fallen off” somewhere on the way between the course and the China Athletic Office near Line 5 and the Temple of Heaven. Great Wall Marathon. Though it sounds like a lot of fun and frivolity, elaborate preparation goes into a race like this by both race organizers and participants. The Great Wall in the Tianjin section of China is very, very steep. (I’m sure even mountain goats think twice before trying to tackle some of these peaks and summits.) Though technically this is a running race, I never saw anyone running up and down the wall, although some of the top runners may have. The Tianjin section of the Great Wall was built on a steep ridge as an unrelenting series of tough climbs and long steep descents, a combination of short steps, uneven stones, and painful knee-extending high slabs.

Thankfully, at the top of every body-aching, nerve-racking climb there is a cool, dark solitary tower made of thick granite and limestone where medical personnel and volunteers offer words of encouragement, water, and electrolytes. In some parts of the race, you have to run single file, with unexpected drop-offs and hairpin turns because the Great Wall is not all the restored bricks and mortar that you see in the photos. My goal was simple: finish the race. Beijing Marathon. With advance apologies to my fellow US Army veteran brothers-in-arms, my experience crossing the 21-kilometer finish line was my “topple the Saddam statue, mission-accomplished moment.” (In other words, at the finish line there was no sense of triumph, merely the beginning of a seemingly endless set of problems.)

There is nothing worse than training for months to get ready for a race, seemingly for no good reason. There is nothing worse than triumphantly crossing the finish line only to find no timer, no race judges, and no shuttle bus to return you to your starting point. This race has been in existence for 35 years, yet it seems like it was organized only yesterday. Although dead tired at the finish, I had to go to the subway and take Line 10 and then Line 1 to get back to Tiananmen Square.

According to the 2014 Rules and Regulations: “. . . route closure time limit: To ensure the race to be run securely and smoothly, the race route will be closed to the public traffic at successive sections during the race period. After the closure time, the road sections will open to public. Runners failing to finish corresponding

distance at stipulated closing time shall cease the race and quit the race to avoid possible danger. Runners who exit the course may get on the pickup coaches to the finish area.” Sounds good on paper.

Yet because there was no one there to enforce when to “cease the race” or “quit the race,” there were hundreds of runners running into traffic—a very dangerous situation. Great Wall Marathon. Like a horse with blinders, I tried not to glance at those intimidating road racers passing me, looking all toned and tan and lean as though they had just stepped off a cover of a Runner’s World magazine. “Mr. Fitness” came to the race with multiple banana-flavored glycogen gels and the cherry-flavored vitamin drinks strapped around his body like some sort of survival kit/soldier’s bandoleer or emergency medical aid bag. I am sure he and his ilk finished three hours ahead of me, and that’s just for the half-marathon.

Heck, if anything, I’m a realist. A beer-bellied, ex-military, ex-athlete, couch potato weekend warrior like me is just hoping to have enough in the tank to cross the finish line and then collapse in the nearby tent on a massage table. And I pretty much did just that. When I finally reached the finish line after my “everyman” 4:42 slog and they put a medal around my neck, I felt like I had won the gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I had had the advantage of being able to run twice a day up, down, in, and around majestic Mount Tai. Mount Tai proved to be a fantastic training ground for the Great Wall. I actually logged so many miles that I ended up buying a mountain pass so I could ease around the daily hordes of tourists and backpackers.

You will never run a race with such a wide variety of terrain: asphalt, dirt, clay, a goat path, gravel roads, and of course the Great Wall itself. About a quarter of the race is actually on the Great Wall proper: 5,164 steps, to be exact, and 130 kilometers from Beijing. Most of the race takes place in rural settings and traditional Chinese villages—a throwback to a simpler place and time. The crisp and clean air far away from the haze and smog of Beijing proper was a pure delight. Beijing Marathon. There was a note in the participation guide that the cutoff for the half-marathon was three hours and for the full marathon was six hours. If those were the actual cutoff times, the organizers should have stopped half-marathoners at the three-hour point and marathoners at the six-hour point, respectively. Instead, hundreds of runners were left to duck, bob, and weave through the heavy Beijing traffic. Runners (like me) waited at stoplights for the lights to change in their favor. In some cases, course directions and signs were either already taken down or missing. I estimated I ran an extra two or three kilometers going in the wrong direction. The poor air quality was obviously not the only safety hazard. You could very easily be killed by the vehicles that were contributing to the bad air.

Great Wall Marathon. Running between the towers on the wall was by far the most challenging part of the course—the seemingly endless series of staggered stairs up and down 17 individual towers. The arduous climb had the effect of a runaway roller-coaster ride: that slow slog to the top and then the free fall to the bottom. As the kilometer markers seemed to be moving farther apart, I felt like I was running backward or in some sort of slow-motion time warp. I wanted to plant an American flag at the summit of the last tower to mark my accomplishment, Tower 17, like the first American who landed on the moon more than 40 years ago. Or better yet, I could have posted a sign with an arrow pointing east stating “Western USA, 5,000 miles.” The walk-on-the-moon analogy seemed a good one since astronauts reported that the Great Wall is so huge they could see it from outer space. Or maybe I was merely suffering from a lack of oxygen.

Now in its 15th year, the Great Wall Marathon has developed into a premier international competition. The inaugural run in 1999 had just over 50 entrants. The 2014 field swelled to nearly 2,000 competitors and curiosity seekers from 49 countries. This marathon has become very special for showcasing China’s history. The event offers four races: a 5K, 10K, half-marathon, and marathon. Entrants ranged from 8 to 78 years of age. The races were daunting but fulfilling. Beijing Marathon. About 30 percent of the foreign participants did not show up for the 2014 Beijing Marathon. I wish I had been one of those lucky souls and had stayed home. Some years ago when Meb Keflezighi won the New York City Marathon, David Letterman had Meb on his show to give a top 10 list of what goes through your mind when you’re running the New York City Marathon:

10. Cool! I found a five-mile route on MapQuest! 9. Am I experiencing a runner’s high or are those just the bus fumes? 8. Is that the finish line or a crime scene? 7. “Car!” Obviously, Meb’s rendition was done for laughs. The same list could be applied to the Beijing Marathon, but it wouldn’t be funny. Great Wall Marathon. In 2007 Margaret Hegarty became the oldest woman to run the Great Wall; her age was 85. Hegarty is also the current Guinness World Records holder for being the oldest woman to run a marathon on all seven continents. The Great Wall typically takes runners 50 percent longer to complete than their average marathon. There are numerous reasons why runners enter this race. Deborah Lawrence of the United States ran in memory of the recent passing of her mother. Some ran the race for charitable causes. David Bonebrake and Amit Motwani were two American businessmen from Tai’an who donated money to the Qinghai Earthquake Fund based on each kilometer completed. Some runners

ran the Great Wall Marathon to benefit an organization called BRICKS, Great Wall Appeal, which does great work raising money and caring for elderly Chinese who have no formal family support structure. Beijing Marathon. This was not exactly a “celebrity-friendly” race, let alone a “runner-friendly” race. The day after the race, the China Daily newspaper ran a cartoon. It pictured the first-, second-, and third-place finishers on a podium—each was wearing a gas mask.

If there was a high point of the race weekend, it was the race expo a few days before the race. All the race sponsors had booths where they gave out various freebies. My favorite was the fluorescent yellow race belt. Besides the fact that you could store PowerBars and granola bars and such in it, its reflective powers, I’m sure, saved me from at least a few car encounters. Great Wall Marathon. So there you are, chugging toward the 30K marker. You’ve reached a crucial point, a point of no return, a moment of truth. Your body tries to tell you it can’t go any farther: agony, fatigue. Sweat pours from your face in buckets. The impact of your legs hitting a hard surface 5,000 times per mile has accumulated and your legs begin to feel like they are made of Jell-O. Fatigue has long replaced enthusiasm as the reigning emotion. You’re experiencing the Wall at the Great Wall. It seems too poetic. What keeps you going? In part it is the fact that you are running on one of the seven wonders of the world; it is as though you are running inside a postcard. And there is the irony: this thousandsof-years-old military defense structure built to keep foreigners out of China is now the #1 reason people visit China.

In the wake of my radically different marathon experiences, I began to think of the Beijing Marathon as the evil twin of the Great Wall Marathon. But we aren’t supposed to think of it in those terms. An article in a January 2015 edition of China Daily titled “Marathon Critics Have Tainted Vision” by senior correspondent Huang Xiangyang called for patience and tolerance for Chinese races. Mr. Huang Xiangyang mentioned that there are only about 50 races organized in China, while there are more than 1,000 in America. That may be true, but the Beijing Marathon has been around for more than three decades—many more years than the Great Wall Marathon, which raises the question, “If the Great Wall Marathon can be organized so well, why can’t the Beijing Marathon do the same?”

It is unfortunate that a country that managed to put together the 2008 Olympic Games can’t organize a decent race through its premier city. As for me, I’ll take the extreme challenge of the Great Wall Marathon any day. It has earned its reputation as one of the best exotic races in the world through flawless organization and an extreme tourist experience. It’s difficult, but it’s worth every agonizing step.