Wadi Bih Run race report

It’s 05:00 on a Friday morning in February and the beach just outside the Golden Tulip hotel in Dibba begins to rustle with movement. Usually an empty, sandy expanse, this morning it looks like the site of a festival – hundreds of tents are scattered across the beach; darker patches dotted across the sands are the telltale remains of camp fires and barbecues. Before long, hundreds of people swarm around but, rather than the traditional shorts, flip flops, band t-shirts and beach hats of festivalgoers the world over, here the uniform consists of vests, t-shirts, shorts, trainers and the occasional tutu.

Preparing pre sunrise (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)

Skip forward a few hours and this colourful, brave, energetic and – let’s face it – slightly mad group of early-risers are pounding and climbing and sweating and laughing their way through the legendary Wadi Bih valley that runs through the southern heart of the Musandam – the Omani enclave that is often referred to as the Fjords of Arabia, due to its stunning and dramatic topography.

What could inspire almost a thousand people to take to Wadi Bih with the sun not even fully risen above the mountains? The 20^th edition of the annual Wadi Bih Run – a relay event that sees teams of five tackle the 72km course from the Golden Tulip to the peak of Wadi Bih (more than 1,000m up) and back in stages that range from 1.9km to 4.2km in length. The rules are pretty easy: each team must have at least one female member; each member must cover at least 10km. Er, that’s it. Other than the first and last stages – which four members of the team do together – there’s one member out on the course at any given time, while the others follow or drive ahead in their 4WD. At the next checkpoint, someone jumps out of the 4WD, is handed the baton, and the previous stage’s runner jumps in for a well-deserved rest.

And how do I know so much about these strange, early morning creatures that are competing for little more than the pride of knowing they can? Well, today, I actually am one of them. When the people at Nike Middle East – the main sponsor for this running of Wadi Bih – heard that I was a bit of an endurance junkie, I was kitted out in new Nike Run gear, a pair of Lunarglide3s and thrown into their ‘elite’ team, faster than I could ask ‘erm, excuse me, but what the heck are Lunarglide 3s?’.

The term ‘elite’ was being used generously. Nike decided to enter three teams in total: team 197 was the media team; team 198 consisted of Nike Middle East management; and our team, 199 Movie Stars, contained Brian, Linda and Kerry – fitness professionals who all have associations with Nike – along with Dubai One’s Layne Redman and yours truly. We all met for the first time on the night before the race as we manfully pitched our tents on the beach just outsi... OK, OK, Nike had reserved us some relatively luxurious digs at the Absolute Adventures camp just a few hundred metres from the race start. Over dinner, we began to plot our strategy. Then we got distracted. Then we went to bed.

Team 197 look raring to go (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)

Cut to 06:50 the next morning and, with the other two teams having already set off (teams can leave at any time between 06:00 and 08:00), us ‘elites’ are still trying to find the right sheet on the clipboard and our baton seems to be MIA. Layne emerges from behind a camera – he’s recording segments for his Out & About show – with the baton in hand and I discover not only the correct sheet but also a map, a list of stage distances and a vague understanding of the task at hand. Finally, we’re ready for business.

Just after 07:00, the five of us set off looking like a perfectly unified and integrated mean machine, each member strong enough to tackle the entire 72km solo... until 300m later I jump into our Toyota Land Cruiser and drive alongside the other four for the first 1km section. There, at checkpoint 1, three of the four jump in with me while Linda stays out on the road to tackle the first 3.2km section. For a while, we drive alongside, shouting out encouragement, before heading off to the next checkpoint to wait for her; there, I limber up as I’ve been elected the carrier of our baton through the next 3.8km.

My first section - tackling a hill (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)

The terrain, at this point, is still tarmac. I climb a steep hill and sprint back down the other side and the road gives way to gravel and dust. Breathing hard, lungs burning, sweat forming, I see all the 4WDs in the distance waiting for their runners; I decide that, for my own sense of self-worth alone, I need to overtake the girl just a few hundred metres ahead before I hand over the baton – after all, she is wearing a tutu. Ego intact, just, I pass over to Kerry.

The route winds its way through the mountains of Musandam (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)  

And so it continues. The day becomes a fantastic, enjoyable and unique cocktail of competitiveness (we’d already overtaken one Nike team, we wanted the other too), military planning (‘if we send out our two strongest runners next, we can break the spirit of that team with the inflatable donkey strapped to the roof,’ we strategise) and just plain wonder at the stunning backdrop that the mountains and valleys of Musandam provide at every corner. Sometimes, while right there in the middle of something, you don’t appreciate or completely revel in it, but that isn’t the case for me here; I know that the Wadi Bih Run is a completely unique and special experience and try to lap it all up both as a runner and passenger.

Layne passes the baton and I set off on my next section (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)   

The team performs admirably. While not egging each other on, geeing up the next runner or trading good-natured smack talk with rival teams, we’re generally picking off the teams ahead and have only seen one or two, very professional looking teams, come past us. It bodes well, we decide. ‘Ha, take that, team of overweight middle-aged ladies...’, ‘In your face, computer boffin team’, ‘Eat our dust, team dressed up as Egyptian pharaohs!’

Teams spread out along the dusty road (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)

The couple of stages leading to the midway section, however, are a little less fun and progress slows somewhat, as most of the 1000m of climbing comes here. Brian, a TRX instructor and Nike Master Trainer, proves that they make them tough in Scotland and heaves himself up the more difficult first section; I take over for the second part which ends at the halfway point and, as Layne takes the baton, the rest of us whip out our cameras and attempt to capture the incredible views over Musandam that the halfway marker provides.

The hard switchbacks - hard on the way up, fun on the way down (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)

It’s downhill most of the way back – literally rather than figuratively – and we keep plugging away and putting in hard stints. The beauty of this run is that it’s a relay (at least, it is for the 200 teams; incredibly, 30-odd hardy individuals take on the whole 72km route solo!) so, even for those with minimal running experience, it’s eminently achievable; simply grit your teeth and jog through your 3km and then you’ve an hour or so to recover. That’s not to say that it’s easy either; for the more experienced teams, each section becomes an all-out sprint and 18km of sprinting (as all my sections add up to) isn’t easy in anyone’s book. Another challenge, I discover, is that I stiffen up in the 4WD between my run sections.   

Breathing hard but having fun on the final hill (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)

Finally, after heroic final runs from each member of the team, we hand over the car keys to one of the photographers who’d been with us throughout and head down the final kilometre, back to the Golden Tulip, as a team of five. One of the things I love most about endurance sports (triathlon is my usual poison) is the sense of shared achievement and camaraderie that you feel with fellow racers and that’s here in the wadi-load, but there’s also a genuine sense of fondness and fellowship that’s built up between our team during the 5:54 we spent out there together. As we sprint across the finish line and straight into the poolside buffet at the hotel, it’s clear that all the other teams feel the same. We drain coke cans and hoover down plates of chicken curry as we compare war stories from our morning in the wadi.

The team congratulates each other after crossing the finish line (all images: wouterkingma.com/Nike)

That time [something suspicious happened here - we all had our time as 5:43, which would have earned us 20th overall, but the 'official' timing differed a little...hmmmm] sees us finish 31^st of 197 – a good effort for debutants – and we beat the other two Nike teams, both of whom ran impressively. But, in the end, even for the winners, I wager that the result matters little. As the last bottles of water are downed, tents are shoved roughly back into cars and exhaustion finally starts to take hold of our weary limbs, what’s truly important is that, one morning, a thousand people came together to test themselves against a course that Mother Nature has marked out over thousands of years. And, to a man (oh, and minimum of one woman per team), I recon we’ll all be back to do it again next year.