Running a marathon is hard work.
Distance runners often talk about ‘hitting the wall’ during a big race. This is a physiological symptom which happens when your glycogen stores are depleted. It’s not much fun.
Add to that blisters, pulled muscles and nipple chafing, and many people would question why running for 26.2 miles is something any sane person would choose to do.
In terms of a challenge, there’s a world of difference between running a road marathon and running a trail marathon.
Road marathons, such as London or Brighton, are usually relatively flat. The surface underneath your feet is level and the course well marked.
Moving to the trails, the marathon runner faces a different set of challenges; tree roots, exposed rocks, steep hills (up and down).
Yesterday was the second annual Cranleigh Parish Boundary Challenge, an event we are pleased to sponsor here at Informed Choice.
For the first time this year, we added a trail marathon distance option for runners, which attracted a field of around 20 hardy souls, prepared to tackle some big hills and overgrown paths on what turned out to be an unseasonably warm day.
One of our entrants made that challenge of completing a trail marathon even tougher, by dragging a car tyre around the entire course behind her.
Meet The Tyre Lady.
Rima Chai, also known as The Tyre Lady, is on a mission to complete 100 marathons dragging a tyre, all before the year 2020.
The Cranleigh Parish Boundary Challenge was her 60th such marathon, all designed to raise awareness of some important environmental issues.
This includes to get communities to consciously reduce their single use plastic by other means over recycling because, as she says, currently we are pretty “rubbish” at recycling plastics.
In my current state of fitness, I can’t imagine getting round the 26.2 miles of the Cranleigh Parish Boundary Challenge in a respectable time.
I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it dragging a tyre the entire way.
Well done to everyone who completed the Cranleigh Parish Boundary Challenge yesterday and, in doing so, helping to raise over £1,000 for Cranleigh Rotary Youth Project and to enable them to send children from St Joseph’s Specialist School to the Chessington World of Adventure.
St Joseph’s Specialist School caters for children between the ages of 5 – 19 with moderate, complex and severe learning difficulties; it’s a fantastic local organisation to support.
