It's tough up North!

Flushed with my success at the Dorset coastal I was looking forward to my next race, The Tour Deh Helvellyn. 38 miles in, over and around Helvellyn and the Lakes.

On the way up we had driving rain, snow and wind so strong I struggled to keep the car pointing in the right direction, this was going to be fun!

I had company for this race, I'd managed to pursuade my brother that it would be fun to come along, and besides he gets a lift home for Christmas. On arriving at the pub we had a nasty shock when they said we werb't booked in untill tommorrow and then to find the kitchen was closed early! Hmm a bad omen perhaps!?

I must admit I was more than a little aprehensive about this one, it had a ompulsory kit list as long as my arm, it was blowing an absolute hooley outside, there were lots of big hills and it was really far! haha, but that's why I do this stuff, scary stuff is fun, eventually, and you don't have adventures doing nothing!

That said I was almost happily disapointed when my Pertex over trousers where scrutinised at kit check and I was nearly not allowed to do the race. After a gentle bolocking for not having proper trousers I was allowed to get on with it though!

I've asked myself before when trail shoes are no longer sufficient and a pair of fell shoes would be necessary, turns out this would have been a great time to own some! I don't think I've ever properly fallen over flat on my face, rolling down hills, skidding around on my backside ect, but I must have spent more time on my arse than my feet, big chunky lumps of rubber would have been usefull, hell football boots would have been welcome!

This race provided everything underfoot from Tarmac, Scree, mud and rock you name it we had, even a swimming stage! The weather was a veritable delight of variation as well, one moment there was wind that knocked you off your feet, the next it was sunny and you were a boil in the bag runner! It was brilliant, brutal, but great!

I finished in a time of 8:00:42 in 38th place, pretty good.

 

Highlight of the winter

After a shakey few races, and pretty poor performances, things finally started to feel a little better, both in myself and my running.

I'd signed up for the Dorset Coastal Challenge, starting and ending at Lulworth Cove. Having done a lot of the coast path before I new this was going to be exciting and tough, but I was going with a mindset of give it everything and race really hard.

So that's exactly what I did, head down and powered on. If you know Lulworth you'll know the coastpath is, well, undulating! The course had a total ascent of over 6000ft, so that gives you an idea of the undulations.

Any way, all was going pretty much to plan, sun was shining, I had a target in my sights that I was gaining on, the only problem was the bloke behind me wasn't disapearing. Try as I might I couldn't shake the pesky little blighter! Then all of a sudden a group of runners formed in front of me, scratching there heads!

Oh come on, we're not lost! this is supposed to be an easy well marked route with bugger all navigation! But yes, somehow we'd gone wrong, it was at this point that the guy behind me caught up, and I realised he'd been chasing me for the last few miles in an effort to give me back a gel I'd dropped! haha.

So after wandering around Dorset for 3 miles further than we needed to, we eventually got back onto the right track and the rather large group broke up rapidly, with everyone starting to race again! Funny how we revert to herd behaviour when lost, then back to solitude when we feel safe!

Unfortunately I dropped the ball on my water intake and started cramping at about mile 13, a bit sooner than I would have liked!

It's a funny one this race, you've got about 3 or 4 races going on at once, an ultra, a marathon, a 10 k all sorts. So doing the Ultra you run past the finish to do a 6 mile loop or so. This was tough, the worst part was that noone was saying ultra runners this way, finish that way. Instead they where cheering and cajolling you to the finish line. This could mean two things, I was really far back and the rest of the pack had finished, or I was reasonably far at the front. I'll be honest by this point I didn't care, I trudged on, dreading the set of hills to come. These just about finished me off, and rolling into the last checkpoint with three miles to go, I looked rough, and was seriously regretting those extra 3 miles I'd done!!

All in all a great race, finishing in a time of 6:50:35 in 14th place, rather pleased with that!

Long Time No Blog

It's been a while since my last blog, for a few reasons, the main one being an injury I picked up that knocked me out for most of the summer. Not entirely positive what it was, possible stress fracture, possible lower compartment syndrome or tendinitis.

Whatever it was it was a complete pig! Being injured and wanting to run your socks off is the worst thing ever, you don't realise how addictive it is until you can't do it, and there's no miracle cure, you just have to stop running and rest. The only thing I can compare it to is giving up smoking, I was irritable, short tempered depressed you name it, the worst thing was knowing that everything I had worked so hard for, fitness wise was slowly slipping away and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except rest and consume copious amounts of deep heat and Ibuprofen!

Still, looking on the bright side, every cloud and all that, I did a bit of marshaling and this enabled me to see a race from every angle. Right the way from the freak of nature that's an hour ahead of everyone else and looking as fresh as a daisy at mile 60, to the people coming in an hour after the checkpoint has closed and to be brutal shouldn't have been there in the first place. Seeing a race from every angle had a profound effect, I knew where I wanted to be. At the back is grim, reminiscent of the walk of shame after a hard night on the beers, with the sun just creeping over the horizon, birds starting to sing and you hanging so far out of your arse your forehead is scraping along the tarmac, and to top it all you've still got 40 miles to go! No thanks I want to be that freak out front, just once.

I also learnt a lot about injury prevention and treatment, and perhaps more importantly about myself. It doesn't mater if you have a niggle and have to miss a day or maybe two's training, a niggle can quickly become a monumental, incapacitating ball ache! This is exactly what happened to me, being young, green and bloody minded I thought taking a break would spell disaster for my training, so I kept pounding on regardless making things worse and buggering up what was turning out to be a decent level of fitness.

The last lesson injury taught me was to race hard. I'd not been doing too bad, starting to finish races top 10's or so, but I would always be comfortable for the whole race. I've since found that being comfortably uncomfortable the whole way, and racing hard gets so much more out of my races, and who knows, I may one day be that freak at the front.