Oxfam Trailwalker winners rely on team spirit to overcome emotional highs and lows on gruelling 100km race
- Gone Running-Joint Dynamics take first place in the Oxfam Trailwalker despite having only one training session as a team before the race
- One runner collapses at the finish line, physically and emotionally drained, as the four athletes help each other during difficult times to complete the race
Team Gone Running-Joint Dynamics (GRJD) won the 100km Oxfam Trailwalker (OTW) in 14 hours and 55 minutes, despite having only one training session as a team. The four women – Ann Cheng-Echevarria, Katrin Gottschalk, Candice Lanzoni and Karen Tse – were relatively inexperienced when it came to OTW, and to team races, but quickly established a team spirit.
The OTW is a four-person team race, 100km from Sai Kung to near Tai Tong. Because of the pandemic, organisers decided to hold a “virtual” race in which teams run the course when they can within a certain period, and time themselves.
Their one team training sessions was just a week before the race.
“I have supported it three or four times and just thought it was a pretty amazing event, the camaraderie, the number of teams involved and the banter on the day,” Cheng-Echevarria said.
She trained for the 2019 event with another team, and when it was cancelled she tagged along with GRJD on the unofficial day – her first 100km.
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“When I did it as support, I just ran one or two sections. I was just completely in awe and thought that there is no way I could run 100km,” she said. “And then, early in 2019, one of my running friends convinced me to give it a go and that was it. My focus has been on ultras since.”
She was a road runner, and had earned a podium place at the Standard Chartered Marathon half marathon. But trail running is a different skill set.
“We had a goal in mind but different members of the team had different ideas if we could actually reach it. I would have been happy with 15 hours something, like 15:15 or even 15:30. I would have been personally very, very happy. To finish five minutes ahead of our target time was a real treat and real surprise for me,” she said.
“I think for me, it was good to have other people to think about,” Cheng-Echevarria said. “For my solo races, I go into myself, I go into this pain cave and start questioning why I’m doing this. But with a team, you don’t go there.”
The team experience was better than Lanzoni expected.
“I don’t think I would have been able to run that time on my own,” Lanzoni said. “I was really happy and thankful that I had a team that could bring me along. It’s kind of different when you have four girls running instead of one. It’s a lot of planning.
“We were all pacing each other. But also, when you are going slow, you know you can’t let people down. If I was tired on my own, it’s easier to go slower on your own,” she said.
The four ran in a line. They were aware of their order. If one of them was slowing down or struggling, they would put them at the front so they could set the pace and not lag behind. Tse began to really suffer at 40km. “If it was on my own, I would have pulled out, but I was running on behalf of the team,” she said.
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For 60km, she battled on. The team fed her salt pills, let her run at the front or in second, and even stopped to massage her calves. “They knew I wasn’t going to be very talkative, so they chatted around me and kept talking. So I could just listen in to their conversations,” Tse said.
“It’s a really bad feeling, the main thing is you don’t want to let down the team. I tried to be as open as possible, and communicating, so there could be a discussion on what we should do.”
As she crossed the finish line, Tse collapsed, exhausted mentally and physically. For her, it was about more than a race. Since 2018, she has suffered a string of injuries and had not been able to bounce back. As recently as six months ago, she had a tear in a meniscus.
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“I just thought, at the back of my mind, it was about pushing through. The team was really supportive. It was to prove I could come back stronger. I collapsed on the finish line. It was pretty emotional, all of us were pretty emotional. It was a long day out for me,” Tse said.
Gottschalk’s main concern was she did not know the course. She had run the HK100 in 2017 when she stopped in Hong Kong for a few days layover, flying from Germany to New Zealand. So she knew what kind of trails to expect. And she had trained on sections including Needle Hill and Tai Mo Shan.
“But after that, I didn’t quite know where the finish was,” Gottschalk said. “I wanted to mentally prepare for the finish line but that was tough because I honestly didn’t know if I’d had to run for another half an hour or another hour, or if it was road or trail, up or down. That was the hardest bit.”
Finally, they did finish. “At the finish, I’ve never been so emotional,” Gottschalk said. “At a solo race, I’m happy but not this emotional. That was to do with the team, we had been through the highs and lows together, all those feelings were compounded. It was more intense.”
