Arrived in San Pedro de Atacama and the home town for our upcoming race. It was a 10 hour flight to Santiago, hour flight to Calama and a two hour bus ride to San Pedro.

We already traveled through some Mars like terrain just on the bus ride to town.

Town has maybe a couple thousand people and all the houses are built with stacked boulders. It’s a very rugged landscape set back against the volcanoes and mountain range.

We sit at 8,000 feet of elevation and you can already feel it in the lunges. I met a couple fellow racers on the bus ride down and spent a little time getting to know them. Mike from the Virgin Islands and Clare from London.

We went for a 6 Mile training run yesterday to test out the air and landscape. We ran right out of town in 10 minutes and into the desert! Soft shale and sand that is sure to get into our shoes. Definitely was feeling the heavier air in the lungs. Good to get that under our belt. Everyday we’ll acclimatize more.

While we had some free time in the afternoon we jumped on an excursion up to the mountain Laguna’s to see some amazing landscape. Below is a Laguna at about 12,000 feet. We saw some incredible moon like landscape. We could defiantly feel the heavier air up there and was much colder than low 80’s in town. The yellowish shrub only grows at that elevation and the lama’s feed on it. We saw many of them!

We were also fortunate to see pink flamingos at another lake on the salt flats at the same elevation! We’ll likely see them again when we run over the crusty salt during the race.

Really an incredible day!

This morning I’m getting my gear ready for final check in tomorrow morning and will be heading out for another 6 mile run with full gear. Will be helpful to get any last minute kinks ironed out.

Will have race updates posted on my chatter page by a colleague if you are interested in following along.