Having learned no lessons from my unpreparedness last race I continued in my normal hapless fashion. In my defence it was a manic week. Less defensible is that I could have seen, if I had looked, that I had limited prep time and I should use that time wisely. I did not look. On Thursday it dawned on me that I was working a late shift on Friday and was on call till 8.30am on Saturday morning. Unfortunately the race started at 8.30am and it was 2hrs away. Fortunately the vet working Saturday kindly agreed to cover those last 2hrs. Having sorted that problem you would have thought that I would have got myself properly organised on the Thursday. Thursday started badly with confusion at the optician when my appointment was 8.30am and the optician didn’t open till 9am. It turned out I had booked the wrong optician. Luckily the optician I had booked at was very close and I made it on time. I then was getting through the jobs that we all have to do on days off and my daughter casually asked what film I was going to see that evening. I had no idea I was seeing a film but my husband had put it on the group online calendar so I should have been aware. This was lovely but meant I had significantly less time to get myself organised. Net result- I didn’t get myself organised. I think the film was good although sleeping through a chunk of the middle of a murder mystery does make the whole thing slightly more confusing. I then managed not to lock the door when going to the loo afterwards and had to kick it closed as someone was trying to get in.
Friday arrived and as I didn’t start work till 10.30am I had a bit of time in the morning to generally get nothing done. Although work is only 20mins away I always try to leave an hour before my shift. This is because I often have to leave the house 3 or 4 times coming back for things I have forgotten and I can lose track of time so I like to have a buffer built in so I am not late for work. This means that a 10.30 start does not give me as much time as you would think to get things done before work.
Work is pretty full on at the moment and although my official finish time is 7pm a dog requiring emergency surgery came in at 6.30pm (the surgery was successful and she went home the next day). Because of this and some more minor emergencies I finally got home at 10.30pm. I had no inclination to finish organising myself but just warmed up tea (made earlier by my husband) and went to bed. I was confident that I could sort the last few things in the morning.
The morning of the race my alarm was set for 5.30am with a plan to leave at 6.10am as advised by Google maps. I woke up at 5.30am and promptly fell back asleep. I woke again at 6am, looked at my watch and entered panic mode. I promptly threw on my clothes grabbed what I had packed plus a Pepsi Max and a bag of crisps and set off for the start.
The drive was clear and I got to the event with 15 mins to spare. The XNRG events are smaller than average with a lovely family feel but also professionally run. I had by some miracle remembered my race number and looked very organised by having lots of spare safety pins that I shared with a couple other runners who had not brought theirs. I did find it quite amusing that I looked so on top of things. I got my timing chip, had a wee, filled my bottles and got to the start line for 8.30am. XNRG races are very inclusive with no cut offs and walkers are welcome although they do attract some pretty awesomely fast runners too. Because the events are not too big a unique touch is that they have 3 waves with the walkers going first and the elite runners going last. This means you see more people along the route which can be encouraging and pretty inspiring as you watch the elites zoom past. The size of the event means that overcrowding is rarely an issue and it makes for a great atmosphere.
The first part of the run was along a canal. It was very picturesque and also nice and flat. I was keen to get to the first aid station 12k in as I was quite hungry, it seems that a pack of crisps and a Pepsi Max is not quite the ideal fuelling for a 50k ultra. Having grabbed some fruit, mini oreos and a couple flapjack squares things were looking up. The only issue at this point was my right foot. It has been painful for a while (since before my last ultra) and had been pretty uncomfortable on the Friday at work. It was pretty sore but was manageable. I told myself that I really did have to make a physio appointment and every other step drove that point home.
I spent a while running alongside a Scottish lady who was easy to talk to. It was her first Ultra so she may have been fooled into thinking I knew what I was talking about. As I have said before I find it easier to talk to people when there is no pressure to look at them and when there is common ground to discuss. Being able to leave the conversation at any point without looking rude is also a bonus. We discussed running but also got onto our respective experiences of mastectomies and fear of having a problem that would stop us being able to run. It is easy to get caught up in the what ifs of life but I try to remind myself that I can run today and that’s all that I can know. We can’t kid ourselves we know what is coming round the corner so being in the moment, especially when running a lovely route in perfect conditions, is the only sensible option. Hopefully I did not overshare, bore or irritate this lady. She met her incredibly cute little boy along the way at which point I ran on and for the time being we parted ways.
I normally put tape on areas that I know are likely to rub during a race. One particularly vulnerable place is on my back where my poles are attached to my hydration poles. Because of my mad dash at the start of the race I had put no tape on so these started rubbing and by half way through the race it was really sore. If I had actually looked properly at the course I would have also realised that I wouldn’t need the poles anyway which added to the frustration of the situation.
The terrain was now more rolling but nothing like the hills of many recent races which meant despite my painful foot I was making better time than usual. I had been organised enough this time to download the route on my watch. I was on the screen that shows how far there is to go and also give a wildly optimistic prediction of your estimated arrival time. It is a bit dispiriting to see this time get later and later but at least I know from experience this is going to happen and so it doesn’t affect me so much. I don’t know if this is an autistic thing, a runner thing or a just me thing but I love making calculations when I am running of what time I would finish if I ran at my most pessimistic predicted pace and my target predicted pace. I like to recalculate this as I run along and it is encouraging to see the time improve from my pessimistic prediction as I run along. This only works if I am doing better than my pessimistic prediction. Fortunately due to the relatively easy terrain and the perfect weather I was doing better than expected and although I was losing time on my watch’s fantastical predictions my internal predictions were getting better and better.
I had, at this point made only two minor navigational mistakes. One near the start which I noticed pretty quickly and another when running past this colossal structure which was very distracting to the point I missed the glaring obvious arrow. My watch saved me on this occasion beeping at me that I had gone off course.
Things were going too well. Something had to happen. Between the third and fourth aid station I saw the Scottish lady and another lady with her up ahead. Following on from them I got an alert on my watch saying I was off route. I “helpfully” called them back, showed them the route on my watch and led them down the “correct” path. After a little while one of them noted that this was incorrect too and the correct path was between the two we had run down. We retraced our steps and went according to the gpx file on our watches. This lead to a dead end. We then went back to the original route the others had been running along and saw the official route marking. They seemed to take it in good humour that I had dragged them on a scenic detour but unfathomably ran on ahead. I got further confused later on with official route markings not matching the downloaded route and a couple places I could not work out where to go. This could have been lack of markings, the markings being blown away or tampered with or possibly even me missing one (although with my spectacular navigational and observational skills this seems unlikely).
I had lost quite a bit of time but still looking like I would do better than I had expected. By now my whole right leg and both hips were pretty sore which was a distraction from my foot. The last few miles went past pretty quickly and before I knew it I was “sprinting” across the finish line. There was huge applause and cheering which was equally lovely and awful. The Scottish lady was at the end and gave me a big high five so it looks like there were no hard feelings. Unusually for an ultra there were showering facilities at the end but that just seemed too much effort so I changed into clean clothes without showering and noticed that I had forgotten a change of shoes so drove home smelly but happy.
I enjoyed this race more than any for a while and that is down to the hard work of the event organisers, staff and volunteers (and the weather). It was also done as a fundraiser for Humanity Direct a charity that XNRG has supported for years. It funds operations for children in Uganda, Tanzania and Swaziland using the infrastructure already set up allowing doctors in the area help their patients when the parents cannot afford it. If anyone wanted to donate towards this cause here is a link to the site https://www.humanitydirect.org/
It was great to get back into a race I got genuine pleasure from from start to finish and a nice change from some of the more gruelling events of late. Although I had my earphones in I did not need any music or podcast to keep me going apart from my own melodious singing of the chorus of “Hit the road Jack” on repeat. I need to learn to hang onto that feeling of being alone in the open countryside, surrounded by beauty just plodding along towards my destination.
A Good Plodder On-er 
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