PHILOSOPHIE
It is difficult to synthesize briefly the heap of feelings and sensations that taking part in the EVEREST TRAIL RACE can suppose for everyone. Almost so difficult as to define what pushes many of us to raise his/her challenges - a priori unattainable for many other persons- or goals that suppose an excessive effort, in most of cases.
Probably it is our own pretense which drives us to raise such an aims. Six days of effort, 29.000 m. of accumulated altitude and 160 km distance are a wonderfully long time to meet ourselves in everything personal, physical and human being refers to. Long distances, raises without an end, decreases that will end up by starting a new ascent without end.. cold, height, self-sufficiency, loneliness, the weight of the backpack, the permanent dialog with our own limitations, capacities and disabilities, coming to the physical abandonment sometimes… all this, undoubtedly, takes to the bottom of oneself, to the limit, this limit to which we come and state that still it is on some more distant station, or, at least, this is our wish…
With these expositions, you may think that I wants to dissuade you from taking part in this hard and spectacular race, probably one of the hardest of the world. Far from it! who is reading know what I mean …
What does fascinate us of all this? Naturally, each one will have his/her own answers and aims and it would be rash and arrogant for my part to take the freedom of defining the needs of everyone.
Undoubtedly, the EVEREST TRAIL RACE, on the whole, can offer us wild beauty, the showiness of the Himalayas and its people, the encounters with other cultures, the discovery … and in the sports face, probably, one of the hardest races of the world and what it carries: the challenge, the overcoming, to approach the limit … Above all, I sign the words of one of the participants in the edition 2011:
" If this was only a pure and hard competition, it would be a non sense; environment gives its hardness but not the competitiveness itself. We are here to share and to help each other. It is possible to make the effort running any city marathon in the world, but the sensations, the environment and the feelings … to share them with friends, to know new people with whom laughing and weeping… This is what remains in the end and what makes it an unique experience for all”.
We live in a society too often individualist, unsupportive, with a lack of human values and trending to amplify the worse of human nature… Therefore, I wish the spirit of the beginning lasts in all the future editions of the EVEREST TRAIL RACE.