In Training

I will be talked about in China for years to come. I’m surprised there’s not already a Wikipedia page dedicated to my achievements.

First, I got a nickname. It’s 'One Per Basket'. Which inevitably got shortened to 'One Basket'.

I like it. It sounds philosophical, or maybe to do with a mental illness. As in,

“Hey, what’s wrong with him?”

“Oh, him. He’s only shopping with one basket.”

It came about totally logically. We were about to go hot-air-ballooning, and the head pilot (?) was dividing us up into groups, for the balloons. Everybody got the same number of people in their basket, except my group. He indicated that because I was a big round-eye, I was worth two people in a basket. Much hilarity and the name is born.

My second big achievement this week was a relativistic one.

Shanghai has a maglev train. It’s a monorail type arrangement that levitates the train magnetically. This means it can go quite fast. When I say “quite fast” I mean faster than Veyron. Faster than bullet trains. I mean doing the Kessle run in 7-and-a-half minutes. It's fast enough for you old round-eye.

“How fast, One Basket?” I hear you ask. Well, it routinely shuffles between downtown Shanghai and the airport at a 441 km/h. When you are doing 441 km/h alongside an expressway (where you know the cars are doing somewhere between 100 and 130) you get a real feeling for how unbelievably quick that is.

They’re just standing still.

The blurred image, above, is me trying to hold steady enough to get a photo of the speed read-out in the carriage. There is so much vibration from the air, I just couldn‘t get a still shot. When the maglev going in the opposite direction passed, I almost had a heart-attack. They have a combined closing speed of 900 km/h (that’s very nearly the speed of sound) so you don’t see it coming. There’s just a huge bang with the air-pressure change and all the windows move in and out and that’s it. You don’t get to see it. You just hear the bang.

So, I’m on the maglev - and it gets to 442 km/h. A tiny bit faster than normal (they’ve actually trialled it at over 500 kph, so it was really only just starting to stretch its mags) and I take the opportunity by the horns. I go down to the back of the train and run up to the front.

I estimate that I have now run at 452 kph.

A new PB for One Basket!