Runner Still Missing After Starting Malaysian Ultra 10 Days Ago

Runner's World ^ | April 2, 2019 | Jacob Meschke

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Ten days after disappearing in the middle of a trail race on March 23, a Malaysian runner is still nowhere to be found.

Encik Amri, the technical director of Gopeng Ultra Trail (GUT), confirmed to Runner’s World that Mohammad Ashraf bin Hasan was missing, and that a search and rescue mission of various local groups continues to scour the area of his last known whereabouts. Local authorities, who are directing the search, asked him not to give a full interview before their investigation was complete, he said.

Ashraf was one of several hundred competing in the 25K distance (others attempted 10, 50, and 100K) of this year’s race, a three-year-old ultra in the forests outside of Gopeng, a city of roughly 2.5 million in the Malaysian state of Perak.

He was last seen at the race’s sixth checkpoint roughly two hours after the 7:30 a.m. local time start, a GUT Facebook post said. A friend alerted organizers when Ashraf failed to make the 2 p.m. cutoff time and didn’t respond to messages, according to Malaysian newspaper the Malay Mail. After searching unsuccessfully all day, the friend filed a missing persons report that night, and the official rescue mission launched the next morning.

The course, based on satellite maps of the area and video footage from last year’s race, is a mix of trails and dirt roads through tropical jungle and lightly forested rural areas. According to AccuWeather, the temperature in Gopeng ranged from 75 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit on the day of the race.

[FrankR]

Does everything just disappear in Malaysia? Airplanes, people, etc.

[gundog]

Python.

[Celtic Conservative]

“Python”

Monty?

CC

[gundog]

I wouldn’t presume to know his or her name.

[Zhang Fei]

Tiger. Maybe cobra. Heck, orangutan.

[Zhang Fei]

Komodo dragon.

[gundog]

Helluva place for a race.

[kaehurowing]

Run, Forest, run!

[gnarledmaw]

After extensive, ah...payload increase procedures...he set off to become a martyr then got an itch.

[Deaf Smith]

Mohammed quit and went home.

He always was such a loser.

"That boy's got a lot of quit in him"

[Berlin_Freeper]

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Run Through The Jungle
https://youtu.be/EbI0cMyyw_M

[Zhang Fei]

[Helluva place for a race.]

---

“Rainforest” is too tame a word for the wilderness in these places. I like “jungle” because it provides a feel for the exotic and dangerous critters and diseases you are likely encounter.

[Mogger]

If you’ve ever been in a jungle (I have), you know a person or about anything else could be a foot away from you and you’d never know it.

[RightGeek]

[wally_bert]

It wouldn’t bother me if the Cooper River Bridge and related run vanished.

[FreedomPoster]

Dead in a ditch with bugs up his nose.

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

I hope he is found but on a technical note, only the 50K and 100K are Ultra races. The 10K and 25K are not.

[Caipirabob]

On my last trip to Brasil we met up with a party group during carnaval and decided to go climb a local mountain and cross through a favela and then the jungle to get to a hidden beach, it was called Itaquitanduva. You can pull it up on YouTube and follow several young kids doing the same crossing decades later. I saw some of the biggest spiders and things I never expected to even be real at that age, including one six incher with black and yellow stripes I dubbed a "turbo spider". The morenas were laughing when they saw the look on my face but this gringo was more amazed than anything else. We all ended up following a trioelectric later that night for miles down the beach. Good times.

Hidden and dangerous things in the jungle? I'm a believer.

[Travis McGee]

Malaysian tigers gotta eat too.