Why The High?
How did La Ultra - The High get started? It hasn’t overnight. A concept difficult to understand in today’s instant gratification society. It’s taken us a while. Below I share pictures from a journey that led to it’s inception. Of course there are other important pieces of the story. I’ll address them along the way.
We kickstart La Ultra Fest with this first blog. I’ll be writing one every day, talking about lesser known facts, if no one else, for the La Ultra family.
This strip by Amit Kumar explains the build up to the first edition of La Ultra - The High.
Along the way you'll find folks who'll simply want to copy-paste what you do without having any idea of the ethos behind the journey. That's what differentiates IPL from EPL as similar sounding as they might be. But then La Ultra is closer to a La Liga, and it's not about the name.
I had called Melvin on a Wednesday saying, ‘let’s go to Manali and run upto Rohtang Pass.’ The response was a simple, ‘sure, let’s do it.’ On Friday we left for Manali taking a local bus.
We had no clue what we were doing. Sometimes that’s the best way to get started. Just do it. Along the way you figure things. And we have.
This board in about a km reinforced those crazy distances.
But we didn’t care much. Weather gods decided to keep us hydrated.
Rohtang Pass looked very far, very high. But we were clear about our goal. We were going to do it.
Our so called rain gear miserably. But then again wind-cheaters can’t cheat rain enough. Yep, learning. Rain is a bit more wet than wind.
The scenery was amazing.
And we kept at it.
We were simply taking it easy peasy.
And we soon enough were Hotter than Hot. And layers started to peal off, revealing our true selves.
Rohtang Pass didn’t seem to be getting any closer or lower.
There were cliffs like crazy high.
And it was all green.
This one pic is the reason why it’s called ‘The High’. No matter whatever distance we ran, Rohtang Pass didn’t budge. It was simply very High for us.
Amazingly lush green.
We simply focused on one step at a time.
It wasn’t a race, but yet we all have our own pace. We would go ahead and after a bit wait for the other to catch up.
Our spectators weren’t really impressed.
Our packed breakfast from Johnson Cafe came in so handy.
In life you repeatedly get signs which you don’t appreciate. Here these workers are walking up to Rohtang Pass so they could earn some money to survive and here we had come all the way from Delhi, spending more money than all of these would make in a month or more.
Rohtang wasn’t moving.
Guess everyone needs to sit back and think about Raja Gulab Singh who once upon a time had invaded China. Beat that!
We were pretty knackered from about 21 kms onwards but boys being boys, you can’t tell the other one that you are tired and wasted. When we got to this point, about 30 kms from the start, there was landslide and we weren’t allowed to go ahead. We just looked at each other and burst out laughing. We simply didn’t have more in our tanks to carry on.
Melvin still can’t wipe away that grin. 9,397 feet! That again was high enough for us. It helped our ego that we didn’t actually stop but we had an external reason that forced us to stop.
This bloody Rohtang till was as high as ever before.
Others there were feeling colder just looking at us. But we were hot.
Worry! It was bound back into La Ultra in the form of Wari-La and become a regular feature, but who would have guessed.
Some folks you meet for a brief period in life but you sync so amazingly well… guess we should just celebrate that rather than keep missing them. It was phenomenal 30 kms. And I am so thankful to Melvin for that. Where ever you are buddy, and whatever you are doing, good luck. Wish you the very best.
I keep saying that if ‘running is your love, strength training is your mother-in-law’. Call me sexist my feminist friends, but in Indian context it makes total sense. Whether you love your mom-in-law or hate, you have to in her good books to get to your love.
I was wearing this 2004 t-shirt from a 10km race in London which took place in the dark. At La Ultra - The High we start our race in the evening for various reasons.
We had started calculating already.
Thank you is all I can say.
Border Road Organisation has played a phenomenal role in La Ultra. Besides the roads, our tagline “Failing is not a crime; Lack of effort is” borrowed from them. Thank you yet again.
That proposed Rohtang bypass still hasn’t seen the light of the day. Hum honge kaamyaab ek din.
These were the altitude maps that got me thinking about bigger plans.
And this.
On our way back, as soon as we sat in the bus, we both were like, “this needs to be more than just us, it needs to become an event.” As luck would have it, India Bulls had decided to give an advert with a tree at the bottom and clouds all over the page. :) Just perfect for us to work on. We used our phone lights to work all night on this. Not that anything worked the way we planned. (It took me 2 hours to find this pic. So worth it.) And India Bulls did come on board for the second edition.