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.
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