Western Ghats Ultra 2015

The Western Ghats Ultra was announced soon after the completion of Pune Ultra on 22 Nov 2015. It was a pleasant surprise to em as I was feeling low for not having been able to run a 50km in Pune Ultra being the Race Director of the event. I felt happy though that we had initiated/ pioneered the Ultramarathon in Pune and given confidence to organisers to conduct the same. I was anyway planning to run a 50km soon along with Parag Dongre, who also could not complete the run on 22 Nov 2015 due to official commitments. 

So we decided to register for this event and run our 50km here. The Western Ghats Ultra was organised at Oxford Golf Course club/ resort which is a very beautiful place located on top of a hill. The route comprised of a 12.5km stretch which had to be done out and back twice to complete 50kms. This 12.5kms stretch had the first 1.5km downhill, and then a 3.7km stretch through a trail( pebbled/mud path) followed by a road leading to vilage Chande and then further to another village where the turn around point was located. We had to cross a river( bridge) and a "shamshan Bhumi(funeral place)" enroute. There were four Check Points (CP0, CP1, CP2 and CP3). There were many water stations in the intial stretch and then for a good stretch of about 5kms, there was no water station and then again two water stations just about 2km apart on the main road to village Chande. 

As we started the run, the morning was dark and chilled, with a full moon but because we were going down-slope and we turned into a trail path, the moon was almost hidden behind the hills and we were in absolute darkness. As we were running downhill, I was constantly checking myself to run slowly and towards that, I had purposely not warmed up. So the warming up was just not happening as it was quite cold and I was wearing a sleeveless vest and a shorts. I met the famous Piyush Shah during the run, and saw many people overtake us in the beginning. We just started