Treacle Hills

Lucian and I were about thirty minutes in, hauling ourselves up a mountainside of bushes and mud, in the dark and the rain, when we realised the Akha Trail wasn’t turning out as expected. 

The 30km (2000m elevation) race wasn’t really a run– it was some kind of endurance test, with the course deliberately routed up steep, muddy climbs where just staying upright took all our effort. On the downhills, you clung to vegetation or risked sliding down. There were queues at the tricky bits because everyone had slowed right up. The first 7km took over 2 hours. 

We settled on the technical term for this race— it was a fucking mud run.

We weren’t equipped— this was not a race you could do in sandals. I watched Lucian struggle with his Lunas, heard the sucking sounds of the tug-of-war between sole and mud.

We only had one set of trekking poles between us. Lucian used them until he DNFed at 24km. By this time, his sandals were so heavily caked in mud you could barely see his feet.

On my own, over the last 6kms, I realised I might not have made it without the poles. The rain didn’t let up and the end was just one long slog.

At the finish line, one of the organisers congratulated me on finishing, adding that the race had a DNF rate of 50%. Would I run it again next year? Maybe I said.

Lucian said: Definitely. Better equipped, he wanted to beat the race that beat him.

— Liam Salter