On May 21, anyone flying high above the Great Wall of China could have looked down and seen a mass of tiny specks racing along the enormous structure. Those specks would have been marathon runners, and eventually the lone speck of Gregory Feucht separated from the others and pulled ahead to win the 6th Great Wall Marathon.

Held in Tianjin Municipality in North China, the marathon started and finished on a refurbished part of the Great Wall. Race organizers said the course has more than 3,700 steps.

"It would be pretty cool to run on the actual original wall," Feucht said. "But from what I've heard, it's kind of a crumbling mess."

The course winds its way along rural roads, through farmland and small villages. Feucht, 26, said local villagers hung garlands of flowers on any runners who finished the race.

"I think that this race in general attracts a lot of people that want to come to the race just to have the experience of running on the Great Wall," he said, "not of setting personal bests or being a speed demon on the course."

Though Feucht, an American, couldn't calculate whether his time was a personal best, he was surprised to find that his three-hour-and-25-minute run broke the course record. Feucht said a runner's expected finishing time for the Great Wall Marathon is one to two hours longer than their best marathon time.

"But I didn't really have anything to compare to, because I've never really run a road marathon before," he said.

The only other official marathon Feucht has run is the Pinckney Trail Marathon in April, 2004. It was a training run so he could "pace" his sister, Andrea Feucht, in a grueling 100-mile race through Colorado's mountains. When one runner paces another, it means the pace runner doesn't compete but accompanies the other runner to keep their spirits up. His sister ran and hiked for nearly 44 hours straight, and half-way through the second day Feucht joined her and ran with her to the finish.

He said it was not strange for long-distance runners to experience hallucinations on the trail. His sister, Feucht said, had out of body experiences.

"She did see some strange things," said Feucht, "but I don't think it was nearly as bad as some of the other competitors."

Running seems to be in the family's blood. Both Feucht's older siblings ran in high school.

"I just kind of followed in their footsteps," he said, "because I didn't want to be left out."

When Feucht arrived at the University of Wisconsin, he said, he wasn't good enough to compete with his school's "elite scholarship runners."

"I wasn't quite at that level at the time," he said. He joked that he was somewhere in a "no man's land" of talent.

Feucht will be in Shanghai on business until August.

However, he said running in the city is difficult.

"Shanghai sucks," he said. "There're people everywhere, there're cars everywhere, and you've got to stop at every corner."

He said he mainly confined himself to a treadmill, but suggested Shanghai runners seek out skyscraper stairwells to climb.

Feucht has also been to Hangzhou several times while training for the Great Wall Marathon. But the Great Wall Marathon was only a practice run, said Feucht. The race he's really looking forward to is the 100-kilometre Mongolia Sunrise to Sunset in Lake Hovsgol National Park on June 29.

Feucht said he liked the ultra-runner community, as well as setting and meeting goals.

"There's a lot of things that you learn from running that you can carry on into life."