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!