Run The Planet: in the footsteps of legends

Can an ultra runner who has already run two times around the planet and a beginner who has run a few times around the block answer the question: were humans really born to run?

To find out, two runners – master and apprentice – will look to push mind and body to the limit and beyond in a proposed television series, dubbed Run The Planet. The series will will take viewer on a journey following a number of grueling ultra-distance challenges that trace the footsteps of history’s greatest feats of endurance through the wildest environments on the planet.

The pair will investigate what drives endurance runners to push the boundaries of what is possible; is there an evolutionary need to run? Is it part of our DNA? Is there something in our psychology that makes some people push the limits of endurance, to forge past frontiers, to be pioneers, explorers and adventurers? Is there an innate instinct to run? Was the ability to run in an ancient world the difference between life and death – the ultimate survival of the fittest?

Here’s a ‘screener’ – a small abridged taste of Run The Planet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8MEBdHjiKo

From chasing down food as hunter gathers to running hundreds of miles for a message of war, Run The Planet will take viewers to the edge of what is possible to run. And what is not.

During the series Lisa will mentor her student in the art of endurance running, the pair battling through some of the scariest ultra-challenges on earth. Will they make it? Is Chris tough enough to endure Lisa’s world? Can she find an answer to the question she has been asked a million times before: why do you do it?

Viewers will join the pair on an rollercoaster journey as they face medical crises, hallucinations, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, breakdowns, meltdowns, triumph and failures: all part of the experience of extreme running.

The program concept for Run The Planet was developed when Trail Run Mag editor, Chris Ord, journeyed to Kashmir, India, on assignment for Australian Geographic Outdoor Magazine to cover Lisa’s attempt to run La Ultra The High, a 222km ultra through the Himalayas.

While embedded in Lisa’s crew, as he watched her throw up, faint, and push her body and mind to oblivion, Chris got to thinking about why people would consider undertaking such extreme runs in the first place.

Lisa’s answer echoed that of Christopher McDougall and his famous book, Born To Run: humans were born to run. She went further, saying that anyone could be an ultra runner. We all had it in us.

Trying to run with Lisa over two of La Ultra’s 5400m  passes, Chris had doubts.

Conversations ensued about big runs undertaken throughout history. Suddenly the pair had the bet (‘I can turn you into an ultra runner’) and they had plenty of legends to unearth and feats to recreate. And Run The Planet was born.

 More info at www.runtheplanettv.com.

Cash to go trail running? Youbethcha…

…if your idea is good enough.

What is the coolest, most radical, exploratory trail run you reckon your dirty imagination can muster? What’s the challenge you’re gonna lay down that takes trail running to the next level?

Cause if you can come up with something that blows minds, you may get your mits on a cool $8000 cash and $2000 worth of gear, courtesy of the adventurous folk at The North Face, AG Society and AG Outdoor magazine.

Yup The North Face Adventure Grant 2012 is up for grabs but you’re going to have to stop thinking about Father Christmas and start thinking about getting your application in: due 31 December.

Sure, you trail runners are up against climbers, kayakers, explorers, trekkers…but hey, that’s just more motivation to smack out a surreal trail running project that pushes the limits deep into some kind of wilderness.   For inspiration check out Bernadett Benson’s audacious record run along WA’s Bubbulmun Track – as featured in Ed#3 of Trail Run Mag coming out on Monday  19th.

Get on it, dare ya: See all the dirty details here

And if you need more inspiration for ideas buy a TRM hardcopy and read about Beau Miles’ AAWT trail run…
Or download the ezine for a plethora of sweet singletrail inspiration.

How do you apply for the grant?
Please send us a proposal detailing your adventure and expedition plans for 2012. Include concise and relevant info on location, climate, geography, a team profile, objectives, dates, etc. Once the submission period closes, the grant will be awarded by a panel of The North Face and AG Outdoor experts.

Please send your grant submissions to:
adventuregrant@thenorthface.com.au

Or by mail to:

The North Face Adventure Grant 2012
The North Face
19 O’Riordan St
Alexandria 2015 NSW

For more info, please visit: http://www2.thenorthface.com.au/tnf_grant2012.php

LA ULTRA, LA FINISHED

No one died. Six starters, six finishers. The best anticlimax I’ve ever had, really.

Nevertheless, plenty of drama unfolded out there, kilometre by dusty, stinking hot, polluted and sometime snowballed kilometre. As with any good ultra worth its weight in blister blood, there was pain, throwing up, passing out, contentious heat of the moment behavior, and, of course, heroics. And that was just by the race organisers and crews before the starter’s gun had sounded. What the actual athletes went through after the horn had bounced around a cauldron of gigantic mountains 10 kilometres past a small Himalayan village called Khardung, went well beyond.

In the middle of beautiful nowhere, La Ultra The High’s starting banner waits for six people… IMAGE: Chris Ord

By the official altimeter it’s certified as the highest footrace in the world. It’d be all too easy to accuse this particular ultra of being the hardest in the world. But then, who am I to judge? No-one but an ordinary running man, never having run 222km or even a top-notch ultra (Oxfam doesn’t count, it’s a walk in the park, literally). So I’ll leave that judgement to each of the six runners who battled their ultra demons suffocated by heat, cold,  diesel fumes, altitude and Ladakhi curries that just wouldn’t play nice: come the middle of nowhere finish line, each and every racer rated La Ultra the hardest footrace in the world. They’re all well qualified having the requisite belt notches to make fair comparison – they can all reel off Death Valley Badwaters, de Sables Saharan monsters and many more killer ultras as part of their running mettle much like the rest of us can reel off community fun runs. They know what hurts, what is possible and what, if anything, scares the living shit out of them.

Four of the six (L-R): Sharon Gayter, Lisa Tamati, Molly Sheridan, Ray Sanchez IMAGE: Chris Ord

La Ultra did. We’re talking tears at the start line. All except, perhaps, the two characters who jostled in the opinions of others for race favourite and, eventually, with each other for the win: Ray ‘Superman’ Sanchez and Sharon ‘Superwoman’ Gayter. Make no mistake, this pair hailing from opposite ends of the Northern Hemisphere and bred into cultures apart are Sacramento chalk to North Yorkshire cheese, but they have two things in common: (i) habitually bounce-off-the-walls chirpy demeanors and (ii) they are not of this planet. Yes, alien runners. There is no other explanation for their super powers of running very, very, very long distances, very, very fast.

Even so, I suspect that their preternaturally cheerful natures prior to race start were simply coping mechanisms to help process what was was ahead of them and that, if they aren’t actually aliens devoid of earthly emotions, they were feeling the fear, too.

With the very real risk of altitude sickness on everyone’s minds, not to mention the sheer distance of this race, no wonder the race directors, and the rest of us, went slack jawed early on as Sanchez, Gayter, Aussie expat Jason Rita and Aussie rocket Sam Gash steamed up toward the first pass, Khardung La (5,359m), like it was just your regular urban marathon (remember when doing one of those was considered extreme? No longer…).

It was a marathon – 42km to the top of Khardung La. Difference being that this all uphill stretch was the warm up, and it needed to be conquered fuelled on air containing an average of 40% less oxygen than you’ll find at sea level.  At the top of the two passes, the runners’ lungs had to contend with only 33% partial oxygen as compared to sea level. That’s a serious squeeze on anyone’s lungs let alone an asthmatic’s, of which there were two in the field – Sharon and Kiwi Lisa Tamati.

Lisa Tamati dwarfed by the 42km pass headed up KhardungLa. IMAGE: Chris Ord

Lisa, along with the only return competitor who attempted (but didn’t finish) the event last year, Molly Sheridan, took the sensible approach and trotted up at a pensioner’s pace, Lisa afraid of what was ahead, Molly, behind her, knowing what was ahead.

It wasn’t long before the anticipated dramas – examples of which are common to any ultra – started to unfold. Sam Gash started to slow, feeling the effects of the climb early. Tamati, feeling strong, walked with her for a while before pushing on, the unspoken agreement between closely bonded friends who have raced the Sahara and the Gobi together meaning no hard feelings, especially so early, for disappearing over the horizon. It’s a race, after all. But Lisa  – who can rarely  eat much at all when she tackles ultras – soon had an argument with a second cup of noodles, which were refunded without receipt onto the road. Then the convoys of trucks belching diesel started to take their toll, with crews yelling at random drivers and protecting racers with their bodies from the sideswiping lorries: Indian truck drivers care little for mad Westerners running in the gutter of their Livelihood Road.

By the top of Khardung, the medics were getting jumpy – doing their job to keep racers out of the red zone, it was hard for anyone to distinguish between the ‘normal’ vagaries of ultra punishment on the body (lack of appetite, throwing up, diarrhea, extreme fatigue, vagueness, lack of logic, lots of pain – everywhere) and the vagaries of altitude sickness which precedes the beginnings of HACE and HAPE.

Even so, all runners topped out over Khardung La to a welcome reprieve of downhill, lesser traffic as the mountain closed for the night and a mystical sunset that imbued the the valley below, and infused the runners, with a sense of possibility.

Coming down Khardung La IMAGE: Chris Ord

Yet with each disappearing ray came a stabbing of the night and with it the impending long corridor of dark where the sleepmonsters roam and attack with a fearsome appetite for ultra runners in particular. For while the runners can choose to stop, rest, sleep even, with only 60 hours in which to complete the race none were contemplating more than a ten minute reprieve, if that, at any point during the first night. They would all attempt to run the valley – still high at 3500 metres – without a laydown.

Jason Rita, suffering a fever, slowed and eventually rested for half an hour. But the man is, as I came to know him, a Diesel Engine. Same pace, same grunty run pose, same rhythm consistently chipping away the kilometres, a mask of determination not slipping from his face. It was his only hiccup the entire race. Once back on that road, he passed Tamati and remained in third for the remainder of the race, the only competitor other than Sanchez and Gayter to not ‘stake’ – mark their distance on the course and retreat down the second mountain for a rest.

Jason ‘Diesel’ Rita chugs up Khardung La IMAGE: Chris Ord

The valley was, despite the clawings of sleepmonsters, the easy part. Blindfolded by the night and in a semi-conscious state of ‘zombie walking’, the runners’ eyes never registered as such, but they were passing by bucolic fields, the snowfed Indus river and smatterings of Buddhist temples (including one of the Dalai Lama’s residences, this Ladakhi region being home to a large community

of Tibetan refugees and Indian Buddhists). And like the monks, may well they have meditated on what was ahead in their passage. Hooking south west the racers left the banks of the Indus to start slowly climbing again. At the pointy end, Gayter and Sanchez battled the altitude, but higher meant cooler. Back in the valley and running 8-15 hours behind, Lisa Tamati and Sam Gash battled searing heat that at one point smashed Tamati to the earth, unconscious for long enough to crumple, but strong willed enough to continue on.

An hour’s rest at a foothill village was enough to coax her near broken spirit to push on, despite her despondent misgivings at ever finishing. Yet within ten hours of heatstroke hell, Tamati was on the mountainside in pitch black, a snowstorm raging around, and the Devil of Quitsville had shapeshifted from sleepmonsters to panic attacks. Behind her, Sam Gash and Molly also struggled to see hope amid the snowflakes.

By this stage Jason was safely over the pass before the storm hit, the remaining downhill kilometres (31) a slog but the pull of the finishline stronger than that of exhaustion. Ahead, Ray Sanchez and Sharon Gayter had tussled, the latter coping with the altitude well enough to pass not long after the crossing. Sharon came home in an astonishing 37 hours, 34 minutes and 37 seconds, becoming only the second ever to finish the 222km La Ultra, the winner of the 2011 edition, and the fastest ever beating Mark Cockbain’s 48 hours from last year. Pushed to the last by false visions of Sanchez catching, she still went hard enough over the final stretch to have medics in a panic when she vomited blood in a dramatic finish.

Ray Sanchez steams through the Himalayas, looking to change history IMAGE: Chris Ord

Sanchez followed her in 39 hours and 30 minutes, but suffered somewhat, at one stage becoming disorientated and running in the wrong direction when approached by race organisers trying to direct him the right way. For Sanchez, intent  on a win, it was a

bittersweet placing, the Sacramento mechanical engineer once gaining a three-hour lead over Gayter. But medical reasons held him back from surging ahead. The lead had changed hands twice, each time on the two passes, with Gayter overtaking on both occasions.

While Sharon, Ray and Jason recuperated (Ray promising a return next year to win and make race record, Sharon worried about any medicines the crew made her take at the end and what that would mean for drug testing at the impending 24 Hour Commonwealth Champs and Jason just on a high of survival), other stories were still playing out.

Up on the mountain, there were moments, broken moments where for Lisa it was all over. She slumped. She stopped. She sobbed. La Ultra had its third victim (counting the two from the first edition).

It is in these moments where the life-changing beauty of suffering blossoms. Where at the instant that every ounce of reason and energy and indeed life has slipped away from its owner, there occurs a transformation, that births the exact thing that seems a universe away: triumph.

Altitude, freezing temperatures, snow, asthma…and Indian trucks – Lisa Tamati and two of her crew push on through it all. IMAGE: Luke McNee

We know what belted Lisa to a pulp of tragedy: it was as simple as a crewman quipping that there was still six or so kilometres to go to the pass, when in Lisa’s tortured mind she was due to breach the top at any moment. Her ShangriLa of Tanglang La pass had been

ripped from her mental grasp and so too her physical abilities faltered. She didn’t hear ‘six kilometres’. She heard, and knew at her pace in those conditions: ‘two hours’. She didn’t have two hours of footsteps left in her. The plan had been to stake at the top. She had been working toward the reward of a few hours’ recuperation, but needed it at that instant.

For ten minutes there was no bringing her back from the give-up. She was a statue of tears rained upon by darkness and ice.

So what did bring her back? Lisa may tell you it was for other people. For her Dad. For her crew. For her ego. But there is a moment – or moments – in every ultra racer’s career on the trail where it goes beyond such pseudo-couch psychology. It goes to the core of why they put themselves out there to fail so grandly (my argument from a previous post). It is a chase for the defining moment of self – that moment when it is all lost, when one’s world is all but gone, and yet something else takes over, another step is taken over that wall of No Bloody More That’s Me Done For. And the racer goes on regardless powered by nothing they can name. It is what Molly Sheridan told me when I suggested my point about ultra racers chasing failure. No, she said. You’re wrong. We’re not here to fail. We’re here to push beyond the boundary of what is possible. Not find the boundary of what is not. There’s a fundamental difference.

And in that, Molly points toward a higher plane that ultra running seems to have the ability to tap. An existence of the mind and body that ignites only at these extreme, hopeless moments. “The brain uses powers it doesn’t or can’t tap in to in an everyday existence,” says Molly.

She knew what was ahead … and yet she still ran. The effervescent Molly Sheridan. IMAGE: Chris Ord

And so Lisa had cracked the seal on whatever that means. She pushed beyond and in doing so added not just to her story as a runner – for that only matters to her profile, her sponsorship deals, her motivational speeches, her career as an ultra racer – far more importantly what she did was to change in that moment who she is and even the way she views the world. And so it is, I hazard a

guess, for all the La Ultra competitors, some who broke and kept going, others who didn’t scrape so close to the soul, but regardless will have two mountain passes named Khardung La and Tanglang La burned into their being until the day they take their last step forward.

“For the rest of my life I will remember the journey I took,” writes Molly on her blog.

Read any of their blogs (Ray, Molly, Lisa, Sam – Jason and Sharon don’t have one) and there will be defining moments registered in cyberspace – with much less dramatics than my pennings, perhaps, but it’s there in 72dpi, defining moments nonetheless.

They’ll tell their grandkids about La Ultra. I’ll tell my grandkids about La Ultra. And maybe, if I’m lucky, like these inspirational people who for a brief time on the trail live in another ultra universe, I’ll one day break myself and find out what is possible. (Molly, you’re right).

NOTE: Special thanks to those who supported both Lisa Tamati in her mission to conquer La Ultra and Trail Run Magazine in being there to crew and cover the race – The North Face,  Australian Geographic Outdoor Magazine, Air Asia and Nalu Productions. Without supporters like these (and many more who continue to support Lisa), adventures like these don’t happen. So thanks. Keep an eye out for an upcoming feature in AG Outdoor Magazine and for a documentary being produced by Nalu Productions.

LA ULTRA – THE HIGH – PRELUDE 2

“I have about a three and a half-litre lung capacity,” Lisa rasps at me as we plod up the rutted road toward Tanglangla, the ‘World’s Second Highest Motorable Pass’ at 5380m. “My Dad, who’s a lifelong smoker, and most other normal people have a lung capacity of five or more. I shouldn’t be here.”

Rasp, rasp, rasp.

None of us should be here. Not the seven runners who have signed on to tackle the 222km La Ultra The High, nor the 2-5 crew per runner.

But Lisa especially.

If you look past her asthma, her lead-in to this run isn’t exactly mountain goat material. She’s a desert runner specialist. Low and hot is how she likes it.

Here in the Ladakhi township of Leh, we sit out our ten-day acclimatization period at 3500m. Every day or so we trip up to the race route passes which top out at 5600m.

Expected altitudes were at the core of Lisa’s problem’s months earlier, too. Using an altitude acclimatization device back home, she suffered hypoxic concussion, tooth abyss, kidney problems and, bluntly, a fair swing at a trip to the Big Trail in the Sky when she dialed the thing up to 6500m “because she wasn’t feeling any different.”

She soon did and not to good effect.

Lisa Tamati takes in the view over Leh, where she has been acclimatising for two weeks readying for La Ultra

Then, after a good trot in The North Face 100 in the Blue Mountains, she twisted an ankle badly, pulling ligaments on a post event photo shoot.

But blown ankles wouldn’t keep Lisa from La Ultra.

Yesterday, with a 12km training walk/run to the top of Tanglangla, the second pass of the race, we had to stop for Lisa to say goodbye to some local pizza she had tried to refuel with.

Today she’s in bed with stomach cramps and zapped energy levels.

Not an ideal lead in, but she’s not alone.

Everyone here complains of the dry, oppressive heat during the day, the air clogged with fumes that make each breath an exercise in choking on a pair of dirty socks soaked in diesel. It’s enough for Dubai-based Australian racer Catherine Todd to call it a day and go home, exiting the race before starting it.

“I just can’t breath. I wake up nauseous, then an arm goes numb, it’s one thing after another. I’m  flying back to Dubai and then may head to Europe to do a 100 miler there, where at least I’ll feel healthy going in to it. Here I just don’t feel healthy.”

That’s what the atmosphere does to you here: it clogs your immune system. Enough for a tough nut like Cath – as well regarded adventure racer and ultra runner used to extreme conditions, decide it’s just not worth the pain.

Then there’s the waiting. Lisa has been here over two weeks now. There’s still another seven days until race start. That’s a long time for runners to be thinking about the dangers, to be bored, to be filling the mind with what ifs, to be analyzing the topography profiles, to be revising crew strategies, to be worrying about how the hell they’ll pull off a finish. No-one is really thinking about winning. It’s all about just surviving.

The waiting. The waiting. Things roll over in minds. Everything starts to annoy the runners who are fuelling up on tension. The slow service. The overbearing hotel manager. The spicy food. The routine imposed by race organisers. Everyone’s losing weight. Everyone’s wanting to do their own thing. Everyone’s second guessing what everyone else is doing.

You went up KardungLa? How’d you go? Feel sick? Headache?

Everyone wants to hear a yes, to know that others are weak, too.

But few admit to it.

“Fine, feeling fine, you?”

Lisa, who tends to externalise her negativity, lets it out. She’s scared. She feels like shit. She doesn’t know if she can do this. She can’t believe others aren’t as on edge. Why is Sharon Gayter (UK entrant) bouncing off walls after doing a marathon training run the other day? Nuts.

And back to the waiting. This, remember, is a place where two minute noodles take 45 minutes. The only thing that is fast is your taxi driver who just missed a donkey, an old lady carrying grass on her back, a monk, a stoned hippie tourist and a truck, all by an inch while tooting madly as though it was their fault your driver was on the wrong side of the road.

You’d tell everyone to take a deep breath and relax…if only there was enough air.

Postscript: race day is Aug 11. Competitors have 60 hours to complete the 222km course. After heading up to the second pass today with a few runners, the legendary Ray Sanchez, Aussie rocket Sam Gash, Sharon Gayter and Jason Rita, I tried to do the maths on them finishing it on the loooong, rough ride back to Leh. Our journey took 6 hours in a 4WD. We covered less than half the course. I have no idea how the six remaining runners will complete this course in 60 hours, if they can complete it at all. But it’s going to be an adventure for all finding out.

LA ULTRA – THE PRELUDE

Lisa Tamati is scared. She’s said it to me many times. Today, after going to the highest pass competitors in La Ultra will have to run over next week, I’m scared. On paper, on the web, when you say it: 222km over two passes around 5500m – there’s just no way to compute what seven runners and their crews are about to go through come 11-13 August. But I tasted the blind vanity of this mission today and I know it is disrespectful to the mountains here in the Ladakh Ranges in India, to even think it is possible to run over them without going to a very dark, potentially deadly, place.

Of course, it is possible, as Englishman Mark Cockbain proved last year. But only just. He remains, in his words, a changed man and a year later still has ‘spells’ he attributes to the race. Still, his solo finish (two others ended up in hospital) gives a glimmer of hope to this year’s field – two men and five women – who are all, if they’ve any sense, scared witless about the undertaking they have chosen.

Today Team Tamati took a van to the Kardung La Pass, stopping 12 kays out from the target for Lisa to get some distance in her legs and, more importantly, some altitude (and as it happens, some diesel fumes) in her asthmatic lungs. It was a brutal experience. For 12 kilometres a firebrand invisible hand reaches inside your lungs to the very bottom of every branch, and scratches them, crushes them, burns them, turns them inside out. Your lungs grasp desperately at every molecule of oxygen they can scrounge in a mix that holds 60 per cent less than at sea level. Again, stats, words. Means nothing until you’re standing there and you start to run and you try to breathe. It’s then that the mountains slap you. Hard.

“Are you mental?!” the mountains (to anthropomorphize them) laugh. “This is no place for running!”

To a tee, the locals back in Leh agree when you tell them why you are here.

To her credit, Lisa pushed strongly today, aside from a few asthmatic moments and concern that when measured, her blood oxygen level at the top was low.

She ran up. Brit competitor, Sharon Gater showed her steely resolve and perhaps freakish abilities (or impatience) when, only two days after landing at Leh, 3500m, she headed up to the pass to run a marathon distance down. Insane.

Having been in town for two days of acclimatization, I headed up with Lisa today for my first taste of crewing – running alongside for as long as possible, handing water over, and generally just being there: having another human being suffer alongside must help. You each bear the same load, but somehow it is shared rather than doubled.

Even so, suffer I did. A few stints trotting aongside, occasionally glancing up to grandness of the Ladakh Ranges, which soar to well over 6000m, and the dreaded altitude headache started to vice my brain. An early sign of Altitude Sickness, the devil with a death wish (yours) that will sit on the shoulder of everyone involved the race, including crew. Since Lisa has been here in Leh (she was the first competitor to arrive to acclimatise over a week ago) three tourists have died from HACE – High Altitude Cerebral Edema, the result of going up to quickly, and not getting down quickly enough; the result of not respecting the height of these mountains and the atmospheric physics that defines them as much as the snowcapped peaks.

With that in mind, I peeled off two kays from the top to collapse into the support vehicle, knowing we’d be shortly at the top and quickly on our way back down.

That was the remainder of my day down the hole of ‘what the hell just hit me?’

Next thing I was waking up in my hotel room in Leh, with a pounding head and one way ticket to the toilet, but happy in the knowledge that I was now 2km lower than a few hours ago. Go high, sleep low, is the mantra of mountaineers trying to acclimatise. We’re on mantra, and hopefully on track to help get Lisa over the mountains in one piece.

I still struggle, now that I am here, to comprehend what this race is and why anyone would attempt it. There is no way to make a reader feel the altitude and the fear. All runners have a fear of failure. I argue that for ultra runners, it can be what drives them. In a way they want to find the limit of failure. They want to see just where they can push their minds to (and I say minds, not bodies, because bodies give up long before minds do in ultra athletes. The good ones just ignore that minor failure).

Knowing the ultra competitive drives of the seven runners daring enough to sign on this year, I know that in these mountains, in this race unlike in any other, if they cross the line that for them marks failure, they’re dead.

I just hope that for the first time in their running lives, these athletes listen to their bodies, and choose the first failure before the second.

For more reports on Lisa’s La Ultra The High journey, check in to www.lisatamati.co.nz where she will be blogging as often as the intermittent internet connectivity in Leh allows!

LA ULTRA – THE HIGH/THE KIWI CONNECTION

She’s got a reputation for taking on ‘more than you can chew’ runs. But has Lisa Tamati finally stuffed her metaphorical mouth so much with her latest project that she might not be able to breathe let alone swallow? Of course that’d be the altitude causing asphyxiation: from 3500m to 5500m. And anywhere in between – anyone who has ever zoomed up to altitude will know it knocks the stuffing out of you.

La Ultra The high is the Kiwi Ultra Queen’s latest mission, a 222km run tracking those altitudes over the world’s highest motorable passes located in Ladakh, Kashmir, high (like I needed to put that word in) in the Himalaya.

Trail Run Mag will be there every lead-foot step of the way, leaving on Monday to join Lisa in the mountain village of Leh, where she is acclimatising having arrived a few days ago.

We’re there to cover her story for Australian Geographic Outdoor Magazine and, of course, Trail Run Mag, with the kind assistance of Air Asia and The North Face Australia/NZ, who sponsor Lisa and make mad missions like this possible.Travelling with us will be a director/cameraman from Nalu Productions, who will film a cracking documentary about the attempt. And it is an attempt. First run last year, La Ultra The High only counts one actual finisher, Mark Cockbain, from the UK. Every other competitor last year ended up in hospital. No wonder some are rating this the hardest ultra in the world, the sheer altitude and risk of AMS the defining hurdle that pushes this race above many others.

There are three Australians also in the fray this year: Samantha Gash, the youngest and the only female competitor to finish all the Four Deserts Races run by Racing The Planet; Jason Rita, who has completed many 100 mile races and started the Tanzanian running organisation www.kilimanjaroathletics.org; and Catherine Todd, running under UAE flag but really an Aussie, another who has completed many 100 milers plus adventure races. We’ll keep you updated on how they all fare. But you will cop a fair bit of Lisa, purely because we’re crewing for her, too, which will be a learning experience in itself.

We caught up with Lisa on Skype today, here discussing how it is up at Leh, India, where she’s spending her time re-learning how to breathe.

Check the (scratchy) audio (video is still images of Lisa’s shoot in the Blue Mountains post TNF100 with Mark Watson / Incite Images):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V5tznPPmdE&w=560&h=349]

Trail Run Mag believes that it is important to recognise those who support our trail runners undertaking wicked adventures that the rest of us want to be doing, too. Without brand support, adventures like this do not happen. Lisa is being supported in her attempt to conquer La Ultra  – The High by those below (notably, there’s a culture link (obvious for TNF and Outdoor), but the CEO of Air Asia is running ten marathons in a season, so there’s true understanding behind the support being offered):

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