Winging it

Country to Capital 2020 Right, back to the season opener "Country to Capital" after last years introduction to it , I thought I had it all sorted... I thought I'd done my homework this year, and there would be no surprises. I had a plan, got a room booked and geared up. Getting to the start line A standard saying for running motivation is often "the hardest part is getting to the start line" I feel this was taken too literally for this race. Things weren't off to a good start right from the off. I had liked getting to this event last year, nice and simple, you could get the first City to Country express out from Marylebone in the morning, get to Wendover just before the start and run. ideal. So I'd got my room booked near the station like last year.... However, in the pre-race email it mentioned in passing that there was going to be a replacement bus service for a section, but it would arrive at 8:23 so they'd moved the start back 15 min...

First up.... I hadn't written anything for a few months didn't want to pre-empt/jinx doing the POSFR by saying everything was awesome, I was ready etc. and then it all going wrong... Going good But now it's done... so (briefly) it *had* indeed been an excellent couple of months, I'd been feeling much better and finally fit at last. 2nd and 1st Firstly running a local 10k trail race - the " Titsey Trail 10k " - coming 2nd place (my goal for the day was top 5, perhaps 1st vet) so was really really happy with that and I didn't mind coming 2nd to Hugo who stormed back in 1st (must remember not to enter him next year.) Serious bling! Then an SVN ( Saxons Vikings and Normans ) run in the Ashdown Forest, conditions weren't ideal with all the rain and Traviss the RD *had* announced at the start that it wasn't going to be a day for more than 7 laps. My plan had simply been do this is a mental test, just keep running for 6 hours straight, wi...

Right. The Extreme Energy "Humanity Direct" Tring Ultra . A Plan Another race, a bit shorter (at 50km) than the usual stuff so I have a plan. a cunning plan. A cunning plan... This time I think I'm ready for it, I have it in the calendar - no learning about it four days before , I rest for the week before. I still don't sleep the night beforehand, but on the morning I feel like a coiled spring and for the first time in ages I really feel ready. Excellent. I've been looking at the course profile and previous year’s times and I actually, really, honestly do have a plan. The course profile is like so: Flat and Lumpy So it's a little unusual and different to my normal sort of race with some long flat sections between some lumpy bits. My goal - I reckon I can get well into the top 10, perhaps top 5 and I want to go for the Vet40 win. I intend to start at marathon pace for the first 10k or so, and see what the rest of the field i...

How I discovered I was supposed to be running 86 miles at the weekend... ( The Ridgeway Challenge ) Shit Why had I signed up? What was I thinking? Well, I ran the Country to Capital in January, it had gone well considering my ongoing head injury recovery , so I'd decided to see what I could aim for towards the middle of the year - this would give me plenty of time to build up, plan train, judge my ability and so on, etc etc. Then I completely forgot about it. In my defence my short term memory is still a bit of a mess, and it's possible I did just completely forget as soon as I'd entered. Also, there were no follow up update or reminder emails that you usually get for these sort of events. So it was a bit of a surprise to learn from twitter that I had four days to prepare. Right. So what to do? Do I DNS? Do I try to finish? or something else? I'd been OK for a few days at the start of the week, but then it all went wrong towards the end with ni...

One year anniversary! 12 months on from  that accident . Wow. That flew by, it really only feels like a few months. Although with my shaky short term memory, that's probably actually my elapsed time. First off admin. I have a race report to include that I've been meaning to write up for ages, but just couldn't think of how to cover it or what to say. It didn't go so well, but then there was no real drama or events to mention like normal ultra races. On the 13th April I attempted my first "track ultra", this was the Crawley 24 hour track ultra. 6, 12 and 24 hour run events all happening at the same time. The venue was the running track behind the K2 sports centre in Crawley. K2 with the camping I had two "big" races lined up for the year, this one and the GUCR retry. The plan was, see how the track ultra goes then decide if the GUCR was realistic. Recovery had been going well, although I (obviously) had some massive holes ...