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Day 2: On Marie-Galante Island; a day to pay attention

Jacqueline Windh / 07.04.2010

First of all I have to say a quick note about yesterday’s third-place finishers: Guadarun 2009 reigning champion Christophe Le Saux, and Fred Langrai. Of course I didn’t see them finish (I was an hour and a half behind them!) but I noted in the results that they recorded th exact same finish time, so I asked if it had been a sprint finish. But no! The two of them crossed the finish together hand in hand! That just symbolizes for me the whole mood here - I just can’t fully put into words how friendly everyone is - the organizers, the volunteers, the locals everywhere we pass through, and th racers themselves.

So, today: Well, it was a tough morning for all of us, as it was the third night trying to sleep on beach with crazy-loud music pounding away til the wee hours. Doesn’t leave you much time to sleep when you have to be up at 4:30am for 5am breakfast.

Marie-Galante island is about 25 km across. It has five day-hiking trails on it, and our 28 km route would take us along three of them, running most of the island’s east coast. We were bussed to the race start in the northeast part of Marie-Galante island, and at 7:17 am we set off.

It was hot right from the start - even at that hour! It was scary thinking what the temperature would be like by the time we finish. Christophe Le Saux’s record time from last year for this same route was 2:19, but organizers expected an average time to be around 4 hours.

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