29 weeks, 42 miles, one trig point and a disdain for taper weeks
I hate running less than usual when I feel I can run more. The start of this week was really difficult to limit myself to one loop of 5.4 miles a day. I managed to stick to this every day for Tuesday to Friday. My plan was to do 6 days but only have a long training run of 15 miles this week. I found because the weather had warmed up slightly from the last few weeks I didn’t need the extra layers and could cope with one shirt and a jacket for my top half for the midweek running. I still took gloves but left the hats at home.
My long training run yesterday didn’t start until 5.15pm. I had eaten way too much earlier in the day and generally felt lethargic the whole 15 miles! Having downloaded a Bad Boy Running podcast with Robbie Britton to listen to for the first part of this was life saving! He is a professional ultra runner who specialises in 24 hour races. The podcast theme was around cheating and I found it quite interesting the lengths some people go to break course or distance records dishonestly. Apart from the sponsorship some professional runners get, it is still essentially a minority sport and comparably tiny prize money is awarded to race winners against other (definitely more sedentary!) sports.
Since running to Blackstone Edge from Hollingworth Lake earlier in the year, I had been very keen to coerce my friend Paddy to join me on running this at some point this year. The route is only about 7 miles but is substantially more hilly than anything we usually do on roads. An advantage of taper weeks nowadays is I am a lot more disciplined about not flying off too fast at the start, while there wasn’t a massive amount of navigation to remember from last time to reach the trig point. It was still enough to require focusing on. These are what was used before GPS to calculate distances and angles between locations. Apparently when they were first erected it was possible to see 2 other trig points from each one. This system of triangles was then used to measure distances and elevations across the UK.
Because the Paris by Night run has time constraints for the first 5 hours, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on how I managed with the hourly cutoffs from the Last One Standing race I did in 2016. This was a 4.2 mile loop each hour starting at noon that had to be finished by 1 minute inside the next hour. I am fully aware of how arrogant it can sound to be disappointed with running 10 hours when I was aiming for 12. I know this is because what I had covered in 3 months of hard training leading up to that should have been more than enough to cover that distance at that pace. Unfortunately I had dropped out at 10pm because I was a bit cold and my legs hurt. The fact the LOS race organisers have subsequently created an additional medal for people who cover the 12 hours/50 miles hasn’t helped matters either.
One positive from it was that I was adamant about finishing the London to Brighton race earlier this year and would have literally crawled to the finish to avoid that feeling again. Doing this race in 2 weeks will be the first time since where there is a chance of failing due to time cut-offs. Whilst I know there isn’t much I can do at this point to add speed to the pace I’ve been training at, I am reasonably confident about staying under them for the times required. This is partly due to training a bit smarter now in terms or weekly mileage and pacing. Hopefully I will be able to justifiably say I have followed this quote for the past 2 years since LOS.
