Still struggling

Had a good start. Cooper test of 2.72km which is best yet. Did two 20km runs and a couple of morning sessions  by Thursday am. Then got hit by flu. Really bad sweating and lack of energy on Friday. Basically slept all day Friday and sweated so much that I was lying in pools of water.
Felt a bit better on Saturday...did a bit of gardening on Sunday.
Might be carb flu so will try to address with fat next week. I will also get an appointment at the doctors on Friday.

Struggling

Still struggling to get going. Gonna try and do a minimum of 5km a day just to get the hang of it again.

I found these two videos interesting. They both answer the same question. Where does the fat go?

A shorter jokey one

https://youtu.be/C8ialLlcdcw

A longer more scientific one

https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE

The secret is to breath guys.

False Start repeated

Got off to a good start last week.
On Monday I did a Cooper test and achieved 2.64km, my best yet.
Then Tuesday morning I did 10 minutes on the stairs and in the evening a very good 20km run with Fatih.
By Wednesday morning, however, I was feeling worn out.  Wednesday evening I only managed 5km. I have rested since then.
This bug I have that is sapping my energy is proving difficult to shift.
I feel better today, so we go again.

False start

This week has been somewhat of a waste.  I have been feeling very tired and lacking in any energy. My weight is piling making me  feel worse. Just a few very poor runs in the past seven days.

Today, Sunday, I can barely motivate myself to move. Even walking up the stairs was an effort. I spent the day in PJs and sorted and stamped my books.

No idea why I am feeling so bad. Gonna try and get started again this week.

It starts here

Seven days later and I went out on slushly trails. Three snicker bars, 30km & 2:52.12 (5:44/km) later I was done. Things were ok  up to around 20km.  Then my thighs started burning.  It was only 10km  to go so I went on to make sure the endurance was built up. The 10km splits were 57:35, 55:49 and 58:43,  so we can see that there was a definite slow down. I will do a lot of foam rolling over the next few days to ease the legs off. Next week  I am going to try for a 36km run at the same speed.

                                                    I WILL GET IT BACK!

It has been a long time

It has been a long time,  but I aim  to restart this blog on running with post once a month.

Last year end well with a Marcothon of 361km, only one DNF and my weight under control.
This year was supposed to start well with a 100km qualification at the Flitch way.

This is run by Lindley  Chambers someone I have known since my first attempt at Spartathlon in 2012. Lindley has set up some fine races and is leader in the Trail Running Association.  A fine chap in all.

He picked me up from the hotel at six am along with a couple of other runners one of whom is race director of a trans France race that goes past my sisters home in Brittany. All the runners gathered under a large awning to shelter us from the rain. Darren Stachen was there who has taken over kit design and printing for the British Spartathlon Team from me. I had to quit the role as a key element is the Facebook BST page and have closed all my social media accounts as I find the amount of anger on there far out ways its usefulness.

For food I had two gu gels and a snicker per 10km lap for the first 50km going up to three gels and snicker for the second half. I had a 500ml bottle of water with one scoop of tailwind in. I ran in a Care keep warm bottom lay, a t shirt, a warm upper layer and Montane Minus rain coat. A pair of shorts and seals kin socks with Asics gt2100 completed the clothing.

We started in the rain and dark. The course is flat, if you ignore the bridge over the A420 and the diversion around a broken bridge and  the slope up to the three km point and drop down to the turn

around at five km  before the return to the start. The more eagle eyed will notice it is only 26m total difference from lowest to highest point.

Profile

It became light just after the turn around point at around 7:30 so as we were all bunched up I had no need to use my defective hand torch.
The first 10km resulted in a time of 55mins and all the food and drink consumed.

The second loop seemed ok and by this time the rain and snow had stopped and the sun came out. A time of 57 and food all eaten was a good sign.

The third loop was when my problem started on the run up back from the turnaround point my thighs started complaining. I continued to eat and drink well and 58 mins was the result.

By the start of the  fourth loop I was really struggling with the pain. I liberally coated them with volteren. It didn't work, my time for that loop dropped to 1:04. I resolved to keep going and hoped the pain would ease off.

It didn't, it just got worse and finished the tube of volteren and resolved to complete the 50km.
By the time I was coming back my left knee was alternatively giving  way under any weight and then locking up. 1:30 and the qualifier was blown.

Finished!

I was greeted by Ian and Gill Thomas. It was really nice to see them. Until Gill started telling me to go out again. Just because Ian can run at speed with an injury doesn't to say we all can.

I really have no idea wi have lost the ability to run long distances without pain. Age might be a factor and/or the lack of long runs in my training block. I have another 100k race in May and I will add similar 50km monthly runs into the training block to build up this endurance.

Pictures from  Gill Thomas & Lindley Chambers

Post Script : Yes I know I could have battled on and finished.  I might even have got under the cut off. But as a contractor I really can not afford days off sick.  The race already cost one day's billable and finishing would have meant more than a day off. As it was my legs did not stop hurting until Thursday. 

Elitist Moi?

A little while ago I approached the Andy editor of Ultra magazine and suggested a series of columns in order spark debate and get people interested in his magazine. I would make a controversial statement and he would encourage people to comment on it. The best response would then be given an opportunity to respond. Then I would respond and so on. Arguments by magazine, perhaps not the best idea in a world of social media, but I was willing to contribute and help out. Just like I did at the very first Ultra festival, which you can see  search for on youtube

I did the first one on cut off times and posed the question where they too soft? In the article I interviewed several race directors and came to the conclusion they were not. The RDs stated that they had to pitch them at level most people could complete. They argued that there is a only niche market for really tough ultras with hard cut offs, hardly the stuff for the novice. If all ultras had hard cut off time  then participation would "die back and there would again be small number of races with just a few people finishing them."  I then go on to say "without mass participation of the easier races, that then feed people into races with more traditional cut offs these tough events might die out.  That would be  tragedy." Hardly a ringing endorsement of the idea of hard cut off. I came up with a different proposal.  I suggested that ultra runners "seek out a race with a tight off and challenge themselves to complete it" Not that controversial really and I expected responses on the lines of why people didn't want to challenge themselves.

Instead in the next magazine James created a straw man argument around me being elitist.  He argued that what I was really saying was that I wanted cut off times tightened with fewer people being able to finish them. That I also wanted to devalue the achievements of people who finish ultras. He goes on to take my argument on the time to complete races completely out of context. I generously assume that he does not understand the idea of posing a point of view in question only to knock it down. Which is what I did in the original article. I found this a very odd reading of the article and told the editor so.  I requested the right to reply. Sadly due to other priorities the editor couldn't fit this in.

Hence this blog post.

Those that know me and my history finds it bizarre​ that I have been branded an elitist. In my youth you always find me on marches  CND, Anti Apartheid, animal testing, ambulance workers, the miners, LGBTQ( although in my day it was only LGB),  you name it I was there. Heck! I knew Corbyn before he went mainstream.  You know that picture of him being arrested outside the South African Embassy, I was there.

Back to ultras and I still believe that the cheaper, more inclusive ultras, with loads of volunteers are where it is at. I don't  particularly like this trend for the big expensive ultras such  as MdS or UTMB that cost a lot to enter. My favourite ultra is Spartathlon, where you get a whole weeks board and lodgings plus a race plus two gala events for less than a tenth of the cost of MdS. The trend for buying tonnes of expensive kit and fancy watches also leaves me scratching my head in wonder. A shoe is a shoe zero, drop or not. It's not going to make you any faster. Only the correct training will do that. And that zero drop is going to be a negative one once you have done a few months of training in them. I shoe goo my trainers and get a couple of thousand Kms a out of them. My watch is covered in gaffer tape where the sealing around the buttons has decayed. 

  

What pray tell is elitist about encouraging people to try harder in races and push themselves to do better?
What is elitist about training harder and doing more for less in both time or money?

All in all a very odd response to the original article which completely missed the point of runners challenging themselves.