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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.

<4 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 | 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