Out of 2019 and into 2020
2019: the first half
I started the year fairly broken. My Monarch's Way foot injury was still lingering, and flared up when I tried to run, or walk in rigid shoes without lots of cushioning. Plus I had a long-term leg issue which caused constant discomfort, apart from immediately after spending 2 or 3 days walking.
I'd already entered 2 races for the year: a 24 hour track race in Helsinki in February and the EMU 6 day race in Hungary in May. I soon gave up on getting back to running properly and instead concentrated on improving my walking speed. (My walking is even slower, relatively, than my running and I usually only do alright at multi-day events by running more than most of the rest of the middle and rear of the field.) My foot is OK in heavily cushioned shoes. However unfortunately even men's wide fit Hokas aren't wide enough for my hobbit feet, and both races turned into painful blister fests. Better than feeling like one of your metatarsals is being smashed to pieces with every footstep though…
The 6 day didn't quite go to plan, but I still managed to beat my goal. Walking (or alternating shuffling and walking as it turned out) is a lot harder mentally than running with regular walk breaks. In both the 24 hour and 6 day I wasted a lot of time. And I've definitely got unfinished business at 6 days.
The other highlight of the first half of the year was run/walking every street in Chesterfield. It was a much bigger project than I initially realised, but surprisingly satisfying.
Building up for 2020
I was tempted to throw myself at another 6 day ASAP. But they're mentally tough, and I suspect there's a limit to how many 'good' ones I've got in me. So I've decided that a better plan is to get the injuries fixed (or at least managed so that I can run) before trying again. And in the meantime I need some race goals to focus on where walking fast with a bit of running is good preparation. I've been pondering an arctic race for a while, and since I'm not lecturing in the Spring semester in 2020 I decided to take the opportunity to do the Rovaniemi 150 in February. I'm both excited and scared. Pulling a sled through snow covered wilderness really appeals. But the cold, and in particularly frostbite, is really scary. My wonky-finger incident made my realise how devastated I'd be if I couldn't play the piano. And I can't use my usual approach of meticulously preparing by replicating the race conditions. So this is very much going to be a cautious adventure (with lots of re-reading of race blogs beforehand) rather than a race. As a warm-up I've, slightly randomly, entered the Spine Challenger again in January. Partly to try out my improved walking speed on gnarlier terrain, and partly to stop myself prematurely entering the Across the Years 6 day race in the US.
Training so far has been a mixture of running and walking, either off-road with a pack or fast on a treadmill. I've bought a cheap one so I can watch Netflix, instead of the (2nd rate Chesterfield) muscle-heads at the gym…. I've got hold of a tyre which, after the Challenger (and once we've got around to drilling holes in it…), I'll be dragging around. I also finally got around to doing all of the ~33 mile Round Chesterfield walk route in one go. Over the past 10 years I've done a significant fraction of my training on it, but it's just a bit too long, and (in places) miserable and muddy, for a normal training run.
On the injury front, things appear (fingers, toes and legs crossed) to be getting better. The foot is no worse than slightly achey, provided I only wear cushioned shoes. And, thanks to Northern Runner I've found some running shoes (made by a Finnish brand, Karhu) that are wide enough for me. So hopefully no more Hoka blister fests for me. The leg sometimes feels 'not quite right', and I've got to be a bit careful about forward bends in yoga (no Supta Kurmasana for me anytime soon). But the constant pain is gone. The 6 day race got rid of it, and then sorting out my driving position (by taking a mallet to the head-rest and getting a custom made wedge-shaped seat cushion) seems to have kept it gone.
.
2020 beyond February
I don't have concrete plans beyond February, but will probably enter one of the races at the Kauhajoki Ultra Running Festival in Finland in June/July. I'd initially been thinking of the 72 hour race as a warm-up for another 6 day at Across the Years over New Year 2020/21. But Across the Years probably isn't going be viable for a mixture of reasons, both good (a potential epic 25th anniversary/OH's 50th birthday central American holiday) and bad (a big work deadline plus a new lecture course in the Autumn). So I may well do the 6 day in Finland.
And I have a 'project' in mind. Plotting the 'Round Chesterfield' walk route I realised that there are a significant (but not overwhelming) number of roads within it that I haven't yet walked…
EMU 6 day race
The weather wasn't this nice for most of the race.
The race, roughly
Day 1 went fairly well. Due to various injuries I'd done very little running in training and had instead been working on my walking speed. My plan was to walk from the outset, with one running lap every hour for variety. I don't usually sleep on the first night of a multi-day race, but almost everyone else was stopping and I was feeling a bit sleepy so I had a 2 hour sleep. Despite this I managed 79 miles in the first 24 hours. The one big downside was blisters. I knew the Hokas I was having to wear to keep my injured foot happy would blister my feet. However, despite taping the problem spots and preemptively cutting holes in the Hokas, the first blister appeared within hours. By the end of a rainy day I had them all over the sides of my feet, in places that had never ever blistered before and had cut more holes in my shoes. Looking on the bright-side they were less painful, and easier to manage, than my traditional 'ball of feet' blisters.
How to look tall: have your photo taken next to short male
ultra runners, by somebody on a ladder
My knees started aching early on day 2 and my run and walk laps both continued to get slower. I don't remember much about this day, apart from getting a massage. I'm not usually into massages, but after hearing good things about them from other runners I decided to try one. Having my shorts wedged up felt uncomfortable (both physically and mentally) but my legs felt better for it. And it was a good excuse to spend time lying down.
swollen knees (they're usually really knobbly…)
The big problem came on suddenly, in the morning towards the end of 'day' 3 (the race started at midday, so keeping track of days was a bit tricky). My feet felt like they were being squashed in a vice, so I swapped to a pair of cushioned shoes that weren't Hokas. However they weren't cushioned enough and after a couple of hours my foot became painful. So I switched to a new pair of Hokas that I'd got just before the race. They felt wider but I hadn't had time to try them out properly. I was aware that the tongue was rubbing the tendon on the top of my foot and making it sore. But it only became clear how sore when I came to a stop to get a massage and it felt like someone had hit the front of my ankle with a metal pole. And when I took my sock off it was red and swollen. The massage turned into a medical consultation. To my horror there was much tutting and discussion with other people (in Hungarian so I had no idea what was going on). The massage was put on hold and instead I was made to lie with an ice pack on my ankle, and then lotions and potions were rubbed into it.
After the massage I struggled to make it around the circuit back to my bungalow. Every footstep was agony. Re-lacing my shoes so that the tongue didn't touch my foot didn't help. Was this game over? What was I going to do stuck in Hungary for another 3/4 days? I cut the tongue out of my original shoes and tentatively went back out onto the circuit. Walking still hurt, but after 3 days of walking the pain in my leg had, as usual, gone. So how about running? I'd barely done any for a year, but was my shuffle still there? (My shuffle is what my body does when my brain says 'run' 2+ days into a multi-day. It's slower than a run, but somewhat faster than my multi-day walk pace). Initially I just shuffled the longest, slightly downhill straight on the course. But over the course of some (I can't remember how many) hours I worked up to shuffling most of the course, only walking while I ate something from the food tent. To my amazement I wasn't just moving faster, but by alternating shuffling and walking the pain (in my ankle, knees and feet) became manageable.
Butchered shoes
Days 4 and 5 are a bit of a blur. There was a hot afternoon where I struggled to get comfortable and changed kit 3 times. A usually comfortable pair of capris felt like they were taking cheese wire to my crotch. In the end I dug my favourite multi-day tights out of my dirty washing bag and stuck them back on. Normally I'm happy wearing the same dirty, stinky, but comfy, kit for days on end, so why not do the same here? I'm also usually happy to go days without washing properly, but convinced myself that having 2 showers a day was a good idea for minimising chafing issues (possibly it was, but it was mainly an excuse to spent time not run-walking).
I'm usually fairly efficient about sleeping in multi-days, and the bungalow should have been great for sleeping. But the person I was sharing with alternated between heating it up to sauna temperatures and throwing the windows open, with some noisy, smelly 2am cooking thrown in for good measure. Leg pain also hindered sleeping. I'm used to foot pain after 100+ miles, but legs too were a new one. My plan was to sleep for 3-4 hours in the early hours of every morning. But I struggled to keep going into the night, so would usually stop early and then need another post dawn nap.
There were huge variations in how hard keeping going was. Sometimes I flowed around the circuit, effortlessly racking up laps, occasionally singing along to either the music on my phone or what the organisers were playing. Sometimes I made fairly efficient progress by focussing on completing a given number of laps in a fixed time, and only checking the scoreboard in the timing tent at the end of the time. And sometimes every single lap was a battle.
One evening the weather got really stormy. Branches and birds were blown out of trees (the dead bird was quickly removed from the course) and smaller runners got buffeted around. For once I was grateful not to be a skinny runner type. Fighting against the wind actually made me feel stronger. Bring it on, this is nothing on the Spine! Getting back out into it at 4am after a sleep was hard though. I opened the bungalow door and couldn't see a single person on the circuit. So I sent back inside and spent 20 min eating.
On the final night the organisers put jam jars with candles in out around the course. This was initially uplifting, but after a while they blew out and there was still a lot of hours left. At about midnight something really strange and irritating happened. Despite my time-wasting I'd been steadily working my way up the leader board, to mid-20s overall and 6th woman. The 5th placed woman (who earlier in the race had been wearing a tiny pair of hot pants which wouldn't even contain half my bum…) suddenly started marking me. She'd lurk close to me, walk when I walked, run when I ran, and several times cut in front of me, nearly tripping me up. Initially I was amused (no-one has every marked me in a race before!), but after a couple of laps of this nonsense I was thoroughly pissed off. And perplexed. She was 10+km in front of me and moving fairly well. So all she needed to do was keep moving. Eventually I decided to slow down and have a chat to one of the other British runners. After a couple of laps she went into the timing tent and I snuck past her.
I'd vaguely intended to run through the final night, but didn't manage it. When I got going again, my sleep-deprived brain failed to do maths properly and I convinced myself I'd slept away my 350 mile goal. In fact I made it with >3 hours to go. And celebrated by spending half an hour sat in front of a heater trying to warm up. Eventually I pulled on winter tights and a heavy duty rain coat and got back out on the circuit. Initially I was plodding around fairly half-heartedly. Until one of the other British runners told me I could get the longest distance by a British woman in 2019. My initial response was 'no I can't, Sharon Gayter's run 360 miles' (as a training run for her John O'Groats-Lands End record later in the year). But then I did the maths, and if I got back 'running' again it was doable. And I did (361.6 miles), with my final laps being barely slower than my first run lap, back at the end of hour one.
Post-race musings and future plans
I'm generally happy that, despite the pre- and mid-race injuries, I managed to meet my pre-race super-secret (because I was worried that I'd fail absymally to meet it) goal of 350 miles. However if I'd been more efficient, and spent less time concocting excuses to sit on my arse, I could have got closer to my long-term goal of 400 miles. Normally in point-to-point races I'm pretty good at not wasting time. However in a fixed-time race my 'as fast as I comfortably can' mantra doesn't work so well. Not being able to alternate between running and walking on a fixed time rota made things harder mentally. Alternating between running and walking within a single lap actually worked well physically. But I definitely need to find a way to break the race into pieces mentally. Some people were working to very rigid strategies (run/walk for X hours, rest for Y) but I'm not sure whether that would work for me. I also need to come up with tactics for keeping going through bad patches in the absence of my usual "the less you stop/faster you move, the sooner you'll get to place X" tactic. Maybe some (self-inflicted) external pressure might help. So I'll put my goal for next time 'out there' now: 400 miles. Failure due to illness or injury will be acceptable. Failure because I've spent too long sat (or laid) on my arse won't!
I'm not sure about if, and how, a crew would work for me. Having someone to provide food and sort out changes of clothes would make a significant difference. And I suspect that even just having someone there to witness time-wasting would reduce my tendency to do it. However I don't think I'd like the pressure I'd feel from having someone give up a week of their life to look after me. And I'm far too independent/bloody-minded to hand my race strategy over to someone else. The best way to get me to do something is to tell me to do the opposite, or that it's too hard and I shouldn't do it. I'm not sure how that would work in a 6 day race. "Running all day is way too hard, you should sit down, put your feet up and have a nice long break" would be an interesting approach to crewing!
I definitely want to do another 6 day, the question is where and when. Taking to other runners, this is one of the best organised 6 days, however the accommodation in shared bungalows didn't really work for me. I might actually be happier with either a tent of my own or sleeping in a communal hall. I also struggled to get enough calories in. The organisers delivered 2 hot meals a day to the bungalows, but I found the veggie ones hard to eat, so most of my calories came from the (excellent) snack table. Probably the solution here would be to be more self-sufficient with my food.
Yum, not.
Data!
My laptimes paint a fairly accurate picture of my race:
i) too many long breaks…
ii) walking and running (downward spikes) laps getting progressively slower during days 1 and 2
iii) injury problems in the 2nd half of day 2
iv) speeding up on day 3 when I deployed my shuffle
v) far, far too many moderate breaks
vi) a finishing kick when given a goal
daily milages
team rankings
(4th in a 4-way battle for the podium, largely due to Dan Lawson's winning run,
we were closer to 1st place than 5th)
Streets of Chesterfield
I'm usually fairly analytical and unemotional about running. But there's something about Rickey Gates' writing about running which really resonates with me. His trail runner article about his TransCon run made me so wistful for my own, much shorter, journey runs that I nearly cried. And a TransCon (journey run style rather than as fast as possible) is now firmly on my to do list for when I retire. So it's not surprising that reading about his Every Single Street project inspired me to do something similar in Chesterfield, the much smaller town where I live. It also seemed like a good way of ramping my milage back up post injury.
My initial plan was that I'd stick to my usual long weekend runs on the Transpennine trail, but spend my weekday evening doing increasing long runs around Chesterfield. Chesterfield might be much smaller than San Francisco, but I quickly realised that it was still going to be a significant project. One evening I set out to 'do' Hasland, the area were we live. An hour later I'd done a single housing estate, and was cursing its planners for its rabbit warren like layout. The cul de sac out-and-backs were annoying enough. But even worse were the networks of roads where it wasn't clear what the optimal route was, and sometimes I missed a small section and didn't realise until I got home. There was also the question of what was a public road and what was a private road or someone's drive. Street-lights, tarmac and a road sign (without 'private road') on it and I'd do it. In general I decided to err on the side of not getting the police called on me for looking like a burglar, which meant I sometimes did a U-turn a few metres before the end of a road if curtains were twitching.
End of week 1 and not much progress made
I tried mapping out routes in advance. But it was even harder to tell from a map what was and wasn't a road and some level of 'on the fly' route adjustment was inevitable. It also took a couple of weeks to get the hang of how to navigate. I didn't fancy running around with my phone in my hand and in the end I used this as an excuse to get a new handheld GPS. I'd typically plan out my rough route in my head in advance, but work out exactly which order I was going to do specific roads in smaller blocks, once I got there and saw the exact lie of the land.
The stop start nature of the running meant it wasn't great from a training point of view. Even though I stopped my GPS when making route decisions, my average pace ended up a minute a mile or so slower than my usual easy short-ish run pace.
A couple of weeks in it became apparent that a change of plan was required. Trying to run on icey pavements led to a flare up of one of my long-term injuries. Plus there was the choice between wearing a headtorch and drawing attention to myself (in some occasionally dodgy areas) or tripping over on unfamiliar badly lit roads/pavements. So I switched to walking, mostly in long (4 or 5 hour) blocks at the weekend, which turned out to be good training for the EMU 6 day race.
Early on I'd decided that I'd start and finish every run/walk from home, mainly just because driving and parking in some random road would have felt weird. The up-shot of this was that getting to and from streets on the other side of Chesterfield was going to entail 5 or 6 miles of out and back. I also had to make some strategic decisions, about where the boundaries of Chesterfield were. To the South and West it's surrounded by countryside, so that was straight-forward. But there's a slightly thorny area in the N/NE where industrial estates lead to a continuous series of villages/smaller towns. I had to draw a slightly arbitrary line somewhere, or else I'd have ended up in Sheffield! Walking around industrial estates isn't much fun. So I decided to do the small ones which were surrounded by houses, but not the huge swathe in the North.
There were months when I got obsessed with doing as many streets as possible, and months (mainly in the build up and recovery from races) when I did none. Sometimes (when plodding around grimy estates in the rain) I wondered why on Earth I was doing it. But on the whole I enjoyed it. It was interesting to see how the town fits together. And I saw some interesting 'sights': my favourite was an ordinary road of red-brick semis, one of which had been stone-clad on the front, but not the side and another which had been 'made-over' in a mock Tudor style…
Final stats: 29 run/walks, 281 miles (but with a lot of duplication, in particular because of the out-and-backs).
Done!
End of 'year' update
2018 was all about my big fat Monarch's Way DNF, which I've banged on about at length already. The after-effects of that (in particular the slow to recover 'broken' foot) are still lingering. The race itself was 90% pure misery (I can count the hours where I felt happy on my fingers) and I've still got absolutely no desire to do it again. But I don't regret giving it a go. It taught me some useful lessons about masochism. And while the route doesn't really lend itself to a race (I'm restraining myself from more ranting about overgrown paths and crops), I really enjoyed my reces and seeing places I wouldn't otherwise go (with the exception of the canals through the Birmingham urban conurbation).
The Monarch's Way wasn't my only race in 2018. I also racked up a DFL at a Mountain marathon in late August. On a good day, when I get my route choice right, I can do OK (i.e. finish mid-field) at mountain marathons. Historically I'm prone to overly conservative route choices, but my last two had ended with zero points, thanks to a dislocated finger, followed by an over-ambitious route on tired legs. When I'd entered the mini Mountain marathon in the Peak District in late August I'd assumed that I'd be back running by then, and went for the six hour version rather than the three hour one, on the grounds that usually the longer the distance the better I do. In fact I'd only just got back to a bit of jogging, but thought it would still be a fun day out. My first mistake was to focus on clearing up all the controls in one corner of the course, in order to minimise the distance I had to cover. My navigation was bang-on, but I wasted huge amounts of time bashing through knee deep heather and peat groughs to low value controls. Four hours in I was faced with a choice of a long detour to pick up a single, potentially hard to find, low value control or heading back to base. Feeling tired I convinced myself to play it safe. There are always people who're late back and lose all their points, so if I avoided that I wouldn't be last. However on this occasion no-one was late, and only the hard core orienteers/fell runners had entered the six hour version, and I was DFL by quite some way. In fact the best run I could imagine having even when fully fit would have only pulled me up a couple of places.
To add injury to insult (and despite being really careful about increasing my milage slowly) around this time my foot 'went' again on a short run. I decided to focus on improving my walking speed rather than trying to get back to running. I joined a gym and over the course of a couple of weeks worked up to an hour on a treadmill at 4.5 mph. And also, to my surprise, discovered I quite enjoy Body Pump classes. Over the Autumn I extended my walks to 5 hours on trails at 4 mph and also, finally, got to grips with doing headstands without a wall for support.
Most years I head off on a long weekend fast packing trip the moment term ends for Christmas. This year I decided to finish off the ~50 miles of the Monarch's Way that I didn't manage to rece pre-race. This would be a much slower and more civilised trip than usual, staying in (cheap) hotels rather than camping. If all of the Monarch's Way was like this I'd be tempted to give it another go: wide, easy to walk and navigate trails over rolling hills. And the weather was pretty good too. The final 15 mile detour through Brighton was a timely reminder of the frustrating pointlessness of the route though. I also had one of the most disturbing experiences I've had on my running 'travels' in one of the posher suburbs of Hove. A man was cycling up the road towards me slowly, with a bunch of teenage boys surrounding him. At first I thought they were friends messing about. But then I realised the boys were shouting abuse and even slapping his cycling helmet. Initially I froze, not knowing what to do. I wanted to help, but didn't want to end up getting attacked myself. The man shouted to me and asked me to phone the police. Instead I shouted at the boys to stop. They stopped, but loitered. So at that point I got my phone out and shouted that if they didn't clear off I'd phone the police. I waited to check that they did and that the man was OK, before carrying on on my way thoroughly shaken up (in retrospect I wish that I'd stopped and spoken to the man properly, and given him my contact details). Heading through central Brighton just before shop closing time on the last Saturday before Christmas was predictably not fun. And I wasn't looking forward to heading along the sea-front to Shoreham on my own after what had just happened. But in fact the sea-front was surprisingly busy: an alarming number of homeless people plus some sort of nativity thing in a beach hut.
The end is in sight, but this is the Monarch's Way-there's a 15 mile loop through Brighton still to go!
In late Summer/early Autumn I entered a couple of races for 2019: the Endurance 24h indoor track race in Helsinki in February (where I had a fairly good run in 2017) and the EMU 6 day in Hungary in May. This was somewhat over-ambitious, but I was feeling pretty miserable (witnessing a suicide at Chesterfield station a couple of weeks after the Monarch's Way hadn't helped my state of mind) and I wanted something to look forward to. My initial plan was to only book travel and actually do the races if I got back running properly. However work threw a spanner in the works. In late Autumn I got invited to Helsinki for a panel meeting a couple of days before the race. The organisers were happy to book a return flight for whenever I wanted, so effectively I'd get travel to the race for free, but I had to make a decision sooner than I wanted. After a couple of days of agonising I decided to go for it. I could at least use it as an opportunity to test out my long distance walking.
By Autumn my foot wasn't painful, but it still wasn't right, so I went to a physio who specialises in feet. After lots of prodding (which made it hurt for several days) there was no concrete diagnosis, but a suggestion that it could be damage to a metatarsal tendon. I also made regular trips to another physio to try and get the pain in my leg that had been causing problems since Autumn 2017 fixed. It stopped hurting ~3 days into my longest Monarch's Way recce, and also during the race itself, but had otherwise been there constantly, varying from a mild ache to agony when sitting in cars/planes/trains. Again a diagnosis was elusive and progress slow. My mood oscillated between mild optimism ('when I get back to running, my new found walking speed is going to help me finish long races faster') and the depths of despair ('my ultra-running days are over'). I occasionally considered stuffing my running memorabilia (medals, trophies, and photo collages) in a bin bag in a cupboard.
Over Christmas/New Year things started looking up. Walking around Sofia on holiday in desert boots made my foot really hurt. But the good news was this made me realise that it liked cushioning, and I bought several pairs of (mens wide-fit) Hokas. I gradually upped my running milage and got my teeth into a 'project'. Inspired by Ricky Gates running every street in San Francisco I decided to do the same in Chesterfield, albeit much slower. It's been a much bigger undertaking than I initially realised, but it's been interesting and (mostly) fun. More about that when I'm finished, hopefully soon. At this point running at least some of the 24 hour race was looking possible. And then, possibly triggered by running on icey pavements, the leg flared up again and I was back to walking.
'Streets of Chesterfield' end of week 2
I thought I could walk 80-something miles in 24 hours. Walking a 24 hour race is hard. There were a handful of other walkers, two of whom were slower than me. Race rules said slow moving people should keep to the inside line, but I kept getting bumped, which led to me hugging the kerb tighter and hitting my inside hand on things so it ended up battered and swollen. I'd assumed the heat of the indoor track wouldn't be a problem this time, because I was walking, and didn't bring salt tablets. But it was. My hands and feet got puffy and the already too tight Hokas blistered my feet. I was moving fairly well though and left stopping to tape my feet too long. I managed to keep up 4 miles per hour through 12 hours, but after that I struggled, stopping regularly to drain my blisters and eventually cut the entire toe box out of my shoes. I was sharing a table with an elderly Finnish man, whose wife was supporting him. She didn't speak much English, but expressed concern about my feet and offered me her scissors for butchering my shoes.I usually stick to a fairly rigid run-walk strategy in flat races. Not having walk breaks to look forward to was really tough mentally and I took more 'sitting on my arse' breaks than were strictly necessary. In the end I managed 85 miles, which I was fairly happy with. Without the blisters (and/or with more mental strength) I could have got close to 90.
Butchered shoes
I dithered about committing to the 6 day until a couple of weeks before-hand, which is very unlike me-usually when I'm in, I'm all in. Getting back to running properly in time wasn't an option. But fast walking with occasional run breaks (for my head as much as my body) could allow me to rack up a respectable distance. However I hadn't realised when I entered how tricky getting to and from Balatonfured is. And taking nearly 2 weeks off work to walk around a loop for 6 days seemed a bit excessive. In the end I decided to go for it, we'll see whether or not I regret the decision.
Training wise I've spent my weekends doing long walks around the streets of Chesterfield, with short mid-week runs and in the last few weeks some hot yoga, in case the hot weather of last year repeats itself. My final big push was a fast packing trip over the Easter bank holiday weekend, along the Lon Las Cymru route from Holyhead to mid Wales. It was mostly flatish, on tarmac or cycle routes, but still I was happy to manage back-to-back 35-40 mile days carrying camping kit. The weather was hot and I struggled through the afternoons but (apart from passing through crowded Barmouth) I enjoyed myself. My foot was fine and my leg stopped aching at some point during day 2.
Breakfast, dinner and tea
With the 6 day race a couple of days away, I'm feeling strangely 'meh' about it. I'm still not convinced it's worth the time off work. But the plan is to treat it as a trial run, for a proper go in the future when I'm (hopefully…) back running properly. I've got a milage goal, but don't want to put it down 'on paper' in case it's wildly optimistic. Having food, water and a bed to hand is going to make the practicalities much easier than a usual multi-day race. But keeping going when it doesn't make the end come any sooner is hard enough in a 24 hour race. Quite how hard a 6 day race is going to be mentally is an 'interesting' question…