10km musings

This morning was my first full ten kilometre early morning run in Kathmandu as I train for my competitive fundraising 10km events of this year. And I ran the course this morning in 53 minutes which is five minutes faster than when I competed in Hong Kong two months' ago. Extrapolation of this improving performance would indicate that in 20 months time I should be able to complete the distance in 3 minutes, which would surely be some kind of record?

En route at 6.30 a.m. I met a squad of Nepali armed police out on their own training run. Rather bizarrely they were running with rather than against the flow of traffic; maybe they know something that I don't. They were also running in their boots, a practice that is all good macho stuff, but one that was abandoned by the British Army about 25 years' ago. That followed the realisation that running in boots wrecks knee joints creating long term disabilities that were usually compounded by well-intentioned attempts by cack-handed military surgeons to repair the damage. Fit young soldiers were being turned into cripples. It is all very well running in boots (very quickly) when the bullets are flying, but the rest of the time it makes much more sense to wear trainers.

There are two sources of aerial pollution to contend with in early morning Kathmandu. The first is the clouds of dust that are swept into the air by Nepali women whose obsessional use of brooms seems to rival my current obsession for training. Given how common spitting is over here and the incidence of pulmonary TB this must constitute a major health hazard. The second pollution source is the smoke from the burning of rubbish which in Nepal tends to be done at the beginning or end of the day. One of my friends who is visiting at the moment deals with proper waste management back in the UK. He said to me that it would be so easy to use a modern incinerator to replace these bonfires, filtering out the toxins (apart from the CO2) and generate some badly-needed electricity for the city. That is something for me to chew upon - much like the free range cows of Kathmandu view the piles of combustible rubbish by the roadside.

Things you didn't know about Hong Kong

Well, first off, it was where The Esther Benjamins Trust effectively took off back in 2000. That's all thanks to my friends Ronnie and Carol Ford who at that time were teachers at Sha Tin international school. Ronnie, who has since become an accomplished professional artist (http://www.ronnieford.com/), staged an art exhibition as a fundraiser for the Trust. That was reported on by The Hong Kong Standard newspaper with its report of the charity's origins and early work in Nepal being hijacked by the South China Morning Post. A press visit to Nepal led to a feature making cover story in The South China Morning Post Sunday magazine; the very powerful story that was written by journalist Fionnuala McHugh then moved sideways to the UK's Daily Telegraph and we had the initial publicity we needed to ensure that the Trust didn't go the way of so many other new charities and wither on the vine. So Hong Kong is a very special place for me and it feels good to be back.

Other interesting, but fairly useless, facts from Hong Kong:

• Tomorrow's Marathon and associated running events will attract 54,272 runners.
• Of these 32,907 will be joining me in the 10km event.
• The record time for that event is 30 minutes 19 seconds, a target that has gone unbeaten since it was set in 2002.

I am not impressed with this time; I am sure that I can double that. That is if I can get out of bed early enough to be there for the 5.15 a.m. start.

There's still time to sponsor me and win a beautiful work of art from Nepal:

www.justgiving.com/philipholmesbupa