The rather strange ballot system used by the UTMB races meant I had a guaranteed place in OCC for the coming year. My qualifiers were still valid, so I was in!
As I set out plans for the year, my whole focus was preparing to be competitive in this one race. With the benefit of hindsight this was a big red flag, that, after 2012 and 2013 I should have seen as a bit of an error. I even measured up the podium times in my age group in previous years against efforts I made in 2017 over similar distances, and gave myself a shot at a 9 hour finish of the 56km / 3600m race. Silly me!
So I drew up a series of races that would build up to a climax over the year - winter trail and fell races, a long trail marathon in the spring and an alpine "prep race". And entered all of them in the autumn of 2018. Coach Natalie approved the plan.
January 2019. Oh my Obelisk - fast hilly trail and country lane half marathon starting and finishing in Dawlish, South Devon. It was a crisp winter's day, and I found myself in much better shape than expected, an MV60 win and a flying downhill second half to finish in 2:01. I even got a trophy!
February 2019. Back to Sidmouth 4 Trigs, this year on a reversed route. I had done another recce, determined not to make the navigation errors of 2018. It worked, and gave me an MV60 win and a 20 minute improvement on the previous year's time. My new Mudclaw shoes stuck to everything, where others were sliding all over the place. Sometimes the kit does matter.
March 2019. The Grizzly. This race is a huge event, and pretty much an institution in the South West. Everyone who I run with has run it, some many times over. 19 odd miles of coast path, mud, bog and hills a few miles to the East of the 4 Trigs route, starting and finishing on Seaton sea front. Again I performed pretty well on the day, although with course knowledge, came away thinking I could shave 10-15 minutes off my 3:30. I was 4th in age group but 16 minutes off the winner. Could I find those 16 minutes somewhere? I've entered the ballot again for 2020.
May 2019. PureTrail Race the Tide 46 km / 1250m trail race in the South Hams, part Coast Path and part inland trails. I definitely saw this race as a stepping stone for the alps, and somehow got slightly distracted in my thinking during the race. For the first half I somehow found myself running with a friend, who is younger, a bit fitter and has different objectives to me. This meant I probably went a bit too quickly and didn't pay much attention to a proper eating and drinking strategy. At 29 km the race crosses a river estuary and here the running mate dropped me. Nothing wrong in that, but as a tricky cliff section followed, and the day was getting warmer, I lost a bit of focus and stopped enjoying myself. My descending went to pot on the cliffs, and I lost confidence in the shoes I was wearing. It was not until the last 6 km or so that I came back to life, finishing strong and easy in 6:03, all be it for an easy MV60 win in a pretty uncompetitive field.
June 2019. And so to my first proper race in the alps. Swiss Scenic Trail K54 - 53 km with 3700m of ascent in Ticino, just north of Lugano. I travelled out with Steve of PureTrail, a friend and extremely experienced long distance marathon, trail and ultra runner. Steve has had a number of chronic injuries, and struggles to train regularly, and we pledged to run together at a slow enough pace to get round comfortably. I needed to jump on the learning curve for the ride. The atmosphere surrounding the race was terrific, and after only a few km we were hiking in single file on narrow tracks rising steeply from the race base in Tesserete. This was my first race with hiking poles, my first race at altitude, with a big pack, on technical terrain, in a southern European summer with high humidity. In truth we hiked most of it, and all the uphills. I think without Steve's influence I would have run more, for good or bad. I learned how shockingly inefficient I was at speed hiking, and also to my dismay after 6 hours, "GI distress" reared its ugly head! This meant no real fuel for over 4 of the 12 1/2 hours we were out there, and a lot of pondering over why it happened.
July 2019. The "wildcard", Eiger Ultra Trail E51, 52 km / 3000 m, Grindelwald. This was never on the long term plan but as a hugely popular "sells out in minutes" race, I managed to get an entry, and I wasn't going to waste it, despite the fact that my daughter Lisa had her first Olympic distance triathlon on the same day in Zurich. "Iconic" doesn't really do justice to the setting of this race, mainly up high facing Eiger, Schreckhorn and Wetterhorn. The fact that the high point was the 2680m Faulhorn at about halfway determined my approach - very conservative early on. Once again, this time at under 4 hours in, I started to get GI problems, and fuelled lightly after that. My climbing was pretty slow again, although once the high point was achieved, the course was much more runnable, and I coped better with descents than ever. I had far too much energy in the final 10 km or so, in truth, and finished pretty well in just over 10 hours. I felt elated, and reflected afterwards that I wasn't going to find it easy to better this, nor were the GI issues something I could take into a race like OCC. So I withdrew, saving myself loads of cash and taking the work / life / running balance out of the red zone.
August 2019. I felt I wanted to replace OCC with another long day out, and fortuitously I found this close to home. Even better, the LDWA Brendon Incline challenge event allowed me to hike and run with Cocoa across Exmoor and the Brendon Hills. Again just over 10 hours (getting to be a habit!) for 53 uncompetitive kilometres with 1900m of ascent. Lots of fun, great views, challenging terrain, sore ankles and Cocoa made it look easy.
What about September? A road half marathon in Barnstaple on a totally flat course.
10 am tomorrow morning.
Evolved to run. Born to run. Older, greyer, still running.
Follow @Nariokotomeboy
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Twenty two months of races and challenges : 2018
I keep a spreadsheet of this stuff, well most of it.
In life, I generally prefer to look forward rather than back, most of the time anyway.
But one of the reasons to have this blog, in fact probably the main reason, is to enable me to occasionally look back on my running as a "grey person" and reflect a bit on what to focus on in the future. Trackers like Strava and the spreadsheet diary I keep with my coach keeps all the data stored and from 2019 onwards we also have a "goals" sheet attached to that. Some of mine are really simple like "be competitive in age group" in races or "learn" from new challenges.
Writing now, just a couple of weeks before my 64th birthday, I can now see a new series of goals on the horizon, some of which I have looked at before and others which might a bit strange given where my running has been the past 2-3 years.
Before getting in to all that, and again mainly for myself, a quick review of the two missing "unblogged" years seems appropriate, starting in January 2018. Having failed once more to get in the ballot for UTMB / OCC, I parked Ultra Trail racing for the year and looked to experience a few different challenges whilst training regularly on Dartmoor.
February 2018 - first race of the year was Sidmouth 4 Trigs fell race, a self navigating 27 km route in the East Devon Hills and on the cliffs, East and West of Sidmouth. Despite a recce I got a bit lost once or twice and found the steep cliffs and muddy steps in the last 5 km very tough. Finished in 2:45 odd, 3rd in my age group about 11 minutes behind the winner. "Room for improvement".
April 2018 - Wye Forest 50 mile challenge. This was not a race, but an LDWA walking event that allowed runners based in the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley. I ran most of it until it got dark and then walked the rest in a group. Fantastic checkpoint food stops, great company, tricky navigation and wild boar grunting in the nighttime in the woods. 15 hours of effort, which was, and still is the longest "time on feet" I've ever done. Crumpets with jam and cheese at the final checkpoint was the real highlight.
June & July 2018 - The South West Coast Path. The UK's longest National Trail became something of a "project" in 2018. Firstly Trev White and I had two weeks hiking in stunning weather, staring in Minehead, in early June. We left a few gaps but finished off getting as far as St. Ives. In July attention turned to a crazy project hatched by Stu "Runners against Rubbish" Walker and myself to litter pick as much of the SWCP as we could in a single weekend. Aided by another 48 or so runners, we had a staggered relay on the final weekend of July and we got around 80% of it done, despite a freak storm on the Sunday. All in all a pretty life-affirming few days.
August 2018. Local fell races, two of them. It's probably a shame they were only 3 days apart. First off: my village fell race: the Sticklepath Horseshoe, on a route I run regularly in training, finishing with 2 miles straight down the 350 metre descent from Cosdon Hill. As usual we had a small group that was pretty competitive at the front end. This year featured some extremely strong headwinds on one of the main runnable sections off Belstone Tor, and I wasn't quite able to best the previous year's time, and I again conceded over 10 minutes to MV60 Dartmoor specialist, Rob Parkinson. The other was a new event: Tavy Trio of Tors, on a weekday evening, starting just below Pew Tor and looping round and over Cox Tor and Middle Staple Tor. The course was "somewhat marked", but not enough to stop a 3rd of runners going off track as the mist came down. That partly explained my MV60 first place over the sharp 9km distance despite Rob Parkinson being in the field.
October 2018. My son, James, moved to live on Lake Zurich in Switzerland in August, so I marked out October "moving him in" trip with a race, this time a road / forest track race called the Brienzerseelauf. The 34 km course comprises a full lap of Lake Brienz in the Bernese Oberland, flanked by mountains either side of the deep blue lake. It was a glorious autumn day, and despite flagging a bit in the last 5km, I acquitted myself pretty well, second in my age group in 3:03. A competitive low key race with great organisation and epic views must have inspired me to my best performance of the year by far.
November 2018. Beacons Trail Marathon. I entered this race with a group from the PureTrail gang, and the big temptation was the chance to run over Pen-y-Fan and Cribyn half way through. Unfortunately I had a pretty bad cold in the week before the race, and I never really had a clear race objective apart from finishing. That's not how I raced unfortunately and I was forcing my pace for the first half, feeling pretty strong and neglecting some of the basics like food and drink! I bonked horribly on the last steep ascent up Pen-y-Fan and saw all of my mates descending nimbly past me as I continued to climb. Once again I fuelled and recovered on the gradual descent and was passing people for most of the last 10 km, finishing in a 5:40 that should have been 20 minutes or so quicker with a better tactical appoach. There were no age category results....so I won't be going back there!!
Evolved to run. Born to run. Older, greyer, still running. Follow @Nariokotomeboy
In life, I generally prefer to look forward rather than back, most of the time anyway.
But one of the reasons to have this blog, in fact probably the main reason, is to enable me to occasionally look back on my running as a "grey person" and reflect a bit on what to focus on in the future. Trackers like Strava and the spreadsheet diary I keep with my coach keeps all the data stored and from 2019 onwards we also have a "goals" sheet attached to that. Some of mine are really simple like "be competitive in age group" in races or "learn" from new challenges.
Writing now, just a couple of weeks before my 64th birthday, I can now see a new series of goals on the horizon, some of which I have looked at before and others which might a bit strange given where my running has been the past 2-3 years.
Before getting in to all that, and again mainly for myself, a quick review of the two missing "unblogged" years seems appropriate, starting in January 2018. Having failed once more to get in the ballot for UTMB / OCC, I parked Ultra Trail racing for the year and looked to experience a few different challenges whilst training regularly on Dartmoor.
February 2018 - first race of the year was Sidmouth 4 Trigs fell race, a self navigating 27 km route in the East Devon Hills and on the cliffs, East and West of Sidmouth. Despite a recce I got a bit lost once or twice and found the steep cliffs and muddy steps in the last 5 km very tough. Finished in 2:45 odd, 3rd in my age group about 11 minutes behind the winner. "Room for improvement".
April 2018 - Wye Forest 50 mile challenge. This was not a race, but an LDWA walking event that allowed runners based in the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley. I ran most of it until it got dark and then walked the rest in a group. Fantastic checkpoint food stops, great company, tricky navigation and wild boar grunting in the nighttime in the woods. 15 hours of effort, which was, and still is the longest "time on feet" I've ever done. Crumpets with jam and cheese at the final checkpoint was the real highlight.
June & July 2018 - The South West Coast Path. The UK's longest National Trail became something of a "project" in 2018. Firstly Trev White and I had two weeks hiking in stunning weather, staring in Minehead, in early June. We left a few gaps but finished off getting as far as St. Ives. In July attention turned to a crazy project hatched by Stu "Runners against Rubbish" Walker and myself to litter pick as much of the SWCP as we could in a single weekend. Aided by another 48 or so runners, we had a staggered relay on the final weekend of July and we got around 80% of it done, despite a freak storm on the Sunday. All in all a pretty life-affirming few days.
August 2018. Local fell races, two of them. It's probably a shame they were only 3 days apart. First off: my village fell race: the Sticklepath Horseshoe, on a route I run regularly in training, finishing with 2 miles straight down the 350 metre descent from Cosdon Hill. As usual we had a small group that was pretty competitive at the front end. This year featured some extremely strong headwinds on one of the main runnable sections off Belstone Tor, and I wasn't quite able to best the previous year's time, and I again conceded over 10 minutes to MV60 Dartmoor specialist, Rob Parkinson. The other was a new event: Tavy Trio of Tors, on a weekday evening, starting just below Pew Tor and looping round and over Cox Tor and Middle Staple Tor. The course was "somewhat marked", but not enough to stop a 3rd of runners going off track as the mist came down. That partly explained my MV60 first place over the sharp 9km distance despite Rob Parkinson being in the field.
October 2018. My son, James, moved to live on Lake Zurich in Switzerland in August, so I marked out October "moving him in" trip with a race, this time a road / forest track race called the Brienzerseelauf. The 34 km course comprises a full lap of Lake Brienz in the Bernese Oberland, flanked by mountains either side of the deep blue lake. It was a glorious autumn day, and despite flagging a bit in the last 5km, I acquitted myself pretty well, second in my age group in 3:03. A competitive low key race with great organisation and epic views must have inspired me to my best performance of the year by far.
November 2018. Beacons Trail Marathon. I entered this race with a group from the PureTrail gang, and the big temptation was the chance to run over Pen-y-Fan and Cribyn half way through. Unfortunately I had a pretty bad cold in the week before the race, and I never really had a clear race objective apart from finishing. That's not how I raced unfortunately and I was forcing my pace for the first half, feeling pretty strong and neglecting some of the basics like food and drink! I bonked horribly on the last steep ascent up Pen-y-Fan and saw all of my mates descending nimbly past me as I continued to climb. Once again I fuelled and recovered on the gradual descent and was passing people for most of the last 10 km, finishing in a 5:40 that should have been 20 minutes or so quicker with a better tactical appoach. There were no age category results....so I won't be going back there!!
Evolved to run. Born to run. Older, greyer, still running. Follow @Nariokotomeboy
Friday, September 27, 2019
Twenty two months of running (not blogging!)
December 2017 was the last post, thankfully not The Last Post.
I'm still going.
I'm not even going to attempt to cover 22 months of running fun in a blog post, but I'm still having some pretty amazing adventures challnging myself at the running lark as my 64th birthday approaches.
My running coach, @natsmountain is still keeping me fairly sensible week by week, and in particular this year has helped me to negotiate two epic trail races in the Swiss Alps.
My Devon running mates all know that I'm not really getting any faster, and my ability to negotiate technical terrain, particularly downhills is almost embarassing at times. However I've realised walking is no shame, and Cocoa doesn't seem to mind the slower pace.
As i post this I'm 48 hours away from a "return to the roads" in the Barnstaple Half Marathon on this coming Sunday. Crazy as it may sound I'm thinking of trying to qualify for the 2021 Boston Marathon next year as a MV65 runner, and Sunday will hopefully show me if there is any realistic hope!
Evolved to run. Born to run. Older, greyer, still running. Follow @Nariokotomeboy
I'm still going.
I'm not even going to attempt to cover 22 months of running fun in a blog post, but I'm still having some pretty amazing adventures challnging myself at the running lark as my 64th birthday approaches.
My running coach, @natsmountain is still keeping me fairly sensible week by week, and in particular this year has helped me to negotiate two epic trail races in the Swiss Alps.
My Devon running mates all know that I'm not really getting any faster, and my ability to negotiate technical terrain, particularly downhills is almost embarassing at times. However I've realised walking is no shame, and Cocoa doesn't seem to mind the slower pace.
As i post this I'm 48 hours away from a "return to the roads" in the Barnstaple Half Marathon on this coming Sunday. Crazy as it may sound I'm thinking of trying to qualify for the 2021 Boston Marathon next year as a MV65 runner, and Sunday will hopefully show me if there is any realistic hope!
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| Dec 2017. First snows on Cosdon Beacon. Cocoa in a rush |
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| January 2018. The South West Coast Path, near Porthallow (the mid point) |
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| February 2018. On a recce of Sidmouth 4 Trigs Fell Race. At High Peak above Sidmouth. |
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| March 2018. Return of snow on Cosdon, and we weren't the first ones there. |
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| April 2018. Start of the LDWA Wye Forest 50 mile run / hike |
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| May 2018. Adding to my SWCP "collection" |
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| June 2018. Trev and I celebrate reaching Hartland Quay on our 2 weeks of SWCP hiking |
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| July 2018. Team shot at the finish of our epic 'Pick the Path' litter pick of the SWCP |
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| August 2018. Trying to look speedy descending Pew Tor out of the mist on the Tavy Trio of Tors Fell race. |
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| September 2018. Up in the Langdale Pikes, after the FRA Navigation course. |
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| October 2018. Pit stop on the Albishorn high above Lake Zurich. |
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| November 2018. Running down the gap road after Pen-y-Fan and Cribyn on the Beacons Trail Marathon |
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| December 2018. Windswept Cocoa on Belstone Tors. |
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| January 2019. On an Arc of Attrition support recce at Zennor Head |
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| February 2019. On Arc support duties for Karen and Iain at Lizard RNLI station |
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| March 2019. Supporting the budding triathlete, Lisa, at a swim run event in Sidmouth. |
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| April 2019. A sudden return of winter in the Sihlwald, above Horgen CH |
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| May 2019. The SWCP crew at it again in West Cornwall |
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| June 2019. "The boss", Steve, and I high up on Gazzirola in Swiss Scenic Trail 54k. |
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| July 2019. Posing in front of the backdrop at Eiger Ultra Trail 51k |
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| August 2019. Supporting the awesome Stuart Walker on his 51 hour double Bob Graham round. |
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| September 2019. Nare Head - it's the SWCP again |
Evolved to run. Born to run. Older, greyer, still running. Follow @Nariokotomeboy
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