trainwithgulia On 11 September, Bhawana Datta finished the 2026 Khardung La Challenge in 12 hours 55 minutes 26 seconds, her third finish at the race and her fastest.She ran the last 40 kilometres of it with almost no sight in her left eye. She didn’t stop, and she didn’t tell race officials until she had crossed the line. Around South Pullu, the checkpoint on the descent, she stopped to re-layer. A woman running behind her caught up. “What’s wrong with you? You’re not running straight, you’re wobbling.” Bhawana told her she couldn’t see out of her left eye. The runner guessed acute mountain sickness. Twice she took Bhawana by the arm and moved her away from the open edge of the road, toward the mountain side: “Run on this side. Run on this side.” With nothing on her left, Bhawana kept catching loose pebbles on the broken stretches, and her foot started to hurt. Her coach stayed on the phone with her almost the whole way down, asking again and again where she’d reached. With about 20 kilometres left, she stopped arguing with herself. “Enough of this DNF nonsense. Ab isme kya hi rona. Isse khatam karte hain.” Here’s what goes into her next block. Eye drops join her altitude kit, used before anything goes wrong, not after. When illness takes weeks out of a build, we protect the recovery the way she did this time and set the race target to match, instead of carrying the old number to the start line. And the training goes where this course decides the clock: long, steady climbing. The rest of the block did its job. The 35 km night runs, the patience on the climb, 17 even kilometres with one eye and a 7:26 at kilometre 71 all point to a runner with a faster day in her than the one Ladakh gave her this year. Read the full story by visiting the link in bio. #chasingmeanmiles #trainwithgulia
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