19 weeks, more daylight running and a tangible incentive for finishing

I signed up for this race what feels like an eternity ago, Donald Trump wasn’t President of the United States, Great Britain hadn’t voted for Brexit and a much larger contingent of my favourite celebrities were still alive!

One of the things I like about running is it gives you a sense of control for an area of your life when you might feel events around you are out of your control. As an incentive for those of us who signed up so early, the event organisers agreed they would provide us with a technical running shirt each providing we did so by the end of June.

I started the week with a very laborious 4 miles on Tuesday morning. It felt like every step of the run from Sunday was still in my legs. On the plus side, this was in daylight which was a nice change from last week. My 7.5 mile runs on Wednesday night and Thursday morning were slightly more comfortable and I managed to get into a sort of rhythm for large parts of them. When I came home from work on Thursday, my race shirt had arrived in the post. This was a surprise as I had expected to get it at the kit check during the event weekend.

I did 5.4 miles on Saturday morning and appreciated it being a few degrees warmer than the same run I’d done the Saturday before. I wore my new race shirt which helped as I could imagine it was a small section of the 100km route I was running.

I spent some time that evening looking up quotes from running books I’d already read and came across one from Born to Run which was written by one of my running idols, Chris McDougall. He is around my size and has completed huge ultra distance races. In the book he describes a race in Leadville, Colorado, which covers 100 miles over the Rocky Mountains. The race’s founder Ken Chloubler wanted to bring visitors to the city during a recession as he thought creating one of the toughest races in the world would attract the most runners (he wasn’t wrong!). He has a very unorthodox view on pain which I took as my quote for the 18 miles today. This is at the end of this blog post.

I took some of the Decibel Nutrition Pre-workout drink at 7:20am before setting off at 8am. The plan for my 18 miles was to do 1 lap of my 7.5 mile route then 2 laps of the 5.4 mile route. I got 2/3 of the way through and had another serving of the pre-workout for the last bit. My calves were locking out with cramp for large parts of this and the quote certainly helped. There will no doubt be times on race day where I am in a similar position and hopefully the memory of persevering through training runs like this will get me through. I also know I won’t want to wear this in training afterwards if I haven’t managed to finish the race.