A race for insane people
I am just after finishing what might possibly be one of the most intense experiences of my short span of life so far. A couple of weeks ago, myself, Colm and Matthias participated in our first hill race (thats where the above photo comes from), and enjoyed it so much we decided to go to the second race, which was held in the foothills of the Wicklow mountains this morning.
Darkened skies and plenty of rain greeted our arrival, but of course silly me saw no reason to change from my shorts and flimsy T-shirt apparel. The first part of the race didn’t give much of a sign as to what was to come. as we clambered up the mountain, we were well protected by forest cover, and began to settle down and pace ourselves.
About 20 minutes into the race, myself, Colm and Matthias were following each other as the path turned to go up another mountain. And then things started getting surreal. First we went into open country, with no protection from the winds that were blowing. The road was straight, uphill and seemed to go on forever and ever. And then came the hailstones. Big ones. And we thought that was bad, but then we reached the top of the mountain only to find that we had actually been protected from the full force of the wind, now coming at us from the side at sixty or seventy miles an hour. All the big heavyset runners had an advantage here; for me it was all I could to to stop the wind blowing me off the path. At one stage, I got pelted by a particularly vicious hailstone, which was kind of the straw which broke the camel’s back; I just yelled out loud at the top of my voice, declared I wasn’t going to take this nonsense anymore, and set off at top speed to show Mother Nature that it had just messed with the wrong Irishman.
We turned again, with a near-hurricane at our backs, and into a whole different kind of craziness. Such was the force of the wind that it carried you along at top speed without any say-so on your part, and I had to summon all the dexterity at my command to stay upright amongst all the rocks and boulders. Such was the strength of the wind that it even blew me straight up a steep uphill section without any effort on my part. But then I had a crucial lapse of concentration and followed two other runners into what proved to be a wrong turn! It was pretty galling after all that effort to look back and see a slew of runners who were behind you make the right turn and powering on ahead. I did my best to recover but the damage was largely done and I ended up 20th or thereabouts, where I could have at least been in the top 10. Colm ended up sixth overall, the best runner from our Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team. He said he really had a nice experience during the entire race where he was chanting ‘I am not the body, I am the soul’ over and over again and he could feel some soul’s quality powerfully bursting to the fore.
Upon finishing, we all agreed we must be insane, because nobody in their right mind would find themselves doing something like this. But then again, nobody in their ‘right mind’ seems to be as cheerful, smiling and appreciative of the joys of life as the people you find participating in these mountain races. And yes, we’ll probably do it again, crazy people that we are.
