Last year I was so miserable about the injuries that were stopping me running that I didn't get around to writing a 'end of 2018/start of year 2019' blog until May. This year things are better, but it feels an odd place to draw a line. My 2019 'racing' year ended in May, the Autumn has been a gradual build up to early 2020 and I don't yet have plans beyond February 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.

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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…

Shuffling around a small loop for 6 days is hard. It turns out writing about it is even harder. My usual race reports contain a detailed record of exactly where I was when, what I was wearing, eating, listening to and feeling, and which body parts were hurting. Spending 6 months procrastinating about writing this race report hasn't helped. But even immediately afterwards, I struggled to remember the details of the 6 days I spent plodding around a 926m track in a caravan park at Balatonfured in Hungary. There are large chunks of days where I can't remember what happened at all. And events which I can't pin down even to within 24 hours.

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)