The Hell Ultra is not the most prestigious ultramarathon, and certainly does not draw crowds of spectators or participants, much less sponsors. It is a grueling 298-mile (480 km) race that passes through the Himalayan mountains on a course that reaches 17,500 feet in altitude. Participants must climb more than 30,000 feet over several inclines. And if you don’t finish in 120 hours, you’re disqualified. In four annual races, only one person has ever finished.
Once you’ve been on it, the Leh-Manali “Highway” becomes a hilarious misnomer. It’s little more than a 1.5-lane road that is often not a road at all, but rather a smattering of craters, the results of snowmelt and near-constant landslides. Drivers lucky enough not to be obliterated by falling boulders often have to wait in miles-long traffic jams until soldiers clear debris. Sitting alongside Sindhu on the way to Leh, I watched as he swerved around a gigantic rock in the middle of the road as if he was casually navigating a roundabout. Later, we waited to cross a strip of mountain that soldiers had recently flattened. Just to the left, all that remained of the road was a jagged edge of asphalt, not thick enough for a single tire.
Sometimes, the road is actually a river. The highway is only open for six months in a good year, because the rest of the time it’s so choked with snow that it’s impossible for cars to pass. As the snow melts, water floods over stretches of road with such depth and force that, well, things can go very wrong. This year, Sindhu parked at the bank of one such river as a family on the opposite side shoved their half-submerged Hyundai back onto dry land. As temperatures drop, melted snow puddles in potholes and freezes into pools of black ice. Just a short slide away are the crumbling edges of a railless road where, down below, you can spot rusted truck bones, a reminder of the cost of impatience, imprecision, and bad luck.
Follow several of the seven participants of the 2019 Hell Ultra and see what they went through at Deadspin. -via Digg
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Source: neatorama