But the runners did not expect extreme weather, according to Wandering in the South, the WeChat name of a race participant whose account has been widely shared and quoted by state media, although he has chosen to remain anonymous. And unfortunately now, in Gansu, everything came at once.” A chilly start “I was always a bit concerned," said Van de Velde, "about what is going to happen if one day the weather really turns nasty or people get stuck high up on the mountain with dehydration, hypothermia, serious dangers. The most common causes are hypothermia and falling off cliffs. The first sign is shivering, followed by mental disorientation, fatigue, blurred vision and stiff limbs.Ī handful of deaths among trail runners have occurred around the world, including elite athletes in Germany, France, Spain, the U.S. That can happen even in non-freezing weather, especially with wind and rain. One risk of trail running, especially in mountains and through unpredictable weather, is hypothermia, when a runner experiences a dangerously low body temperature. At the same time, runners and organizers have become “a bit complacent” about the sport’s dangers, he said, holding increasingly extreme events without preparing for the consequences. Low-budget organizers often cut costs, forgoing equipment like GPS devices or not having a professional rescue team on standby, Van de Velde said. Trail running has boomed in popularity over the last decade in Asia, but safety guidelines have not kept up, mostly due to budget problems, said Kris van de Velde, race director at Nordic Ways, an outdoor-sports company that organizes cycling and running races in China. And he ran: 10 to 20 kilometers a day, working his way up to marathons, accumulating a bagful of medals and certificates that he showed the reporter one by one. He learned computer and embroidery skills at a vocational school. He left school after seventh grade, unable to keep up with the class. She’d noticed him at a marathon that year at which he placed second out of 40 racers from his home city of Mianyang.īorn to farmers, Huang lost his hearing and speech due to an injection given to treat illness when he was 1 year old, the report said. He was pale and skinny at the time, “like a student,” she wrote. In 2014, a reporter named Yan Jing profiled Huang for a local paper in Sichuan province. Huang, 33, had been marathon champion of China’s 2019 National Paralympic Games. Fellow runners nicknamed him “Liang God.” He had won the Gansu race three times before, usually finishing in less than nine hours. The victims were among China’s best runners: Liang Jing, 31, won the 400-kilometer Ultra Gobi in 2018, running for 3½ days across a desert trail that included a nighttime, 4,000-meter climb in frigid temperatures.
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