Everest Marathon -- Done

Just a quick post. Gerry and I finished the Everest Marathon today. Yippee!! It was the toughest thing that I have done. We ran the race and finished together in 7:46. The winning time was 3:41. The fastest time out of our group was by Richard the Aussie who ran 6:09.

Everest Base Camp is a brutal, brutal place. It's all rock and ice. Temperatures ranged from about 10 degrees in the morning to 90 degrees if the sun was out in the afternoon. It was difficult even just to walk around. Just to go to the dinner tent required a rock scramble from your tent. You were always slipping and sliding from the snow, ice and the rocks

The first 5K of the race was a dance over loose rocky moraine. It took an hour to do the 5K which normally would take 21 or 22 minutes in a regular race. Even though the course was overall downhill, from 17,500 ft to 11,200 ft, there was a lot of uphill -- over 3,000 ft. The last hour was was basically a climb with the exception of the last 2 kilometers which dropped straight down 1,000 ft. It was tough, tough, tough.

Since I've been without internet for the last several days, I'll try to update with more info and pictures tomorrow or Monday when we get back to Lukla for our flight to Kathmandu and "civilization".