Tuesday 18 October 2011

Spires and Steeples Challenge (or Lincoln to Sleaford Marathon)

Another weekend and another marathon completed.  This time it was the Spires and Steeples Heritage Trail Challenge. This was another low key event that was also advertised as a long distance walk as well as a running event.  The organisers were very keen to point out that it wasn’t a race, and there was no timing involved and no published results.
A cold autumnal morning outside Lincoln Castle
The marathon started from inside Lincoln Castle, just outside the very impressive law courts, and finished outside The Hub in Sleaford, which is the National Centre for Craft and Design.  The race (sorry, challenge) started at 9.30am for runners and 8.30am for walkers.  We runners got ourselves ready, stripping off outer warm layers and pinning numbers to vests on what was a cold, autumnal morning, with clear blue skies and a very low sun in the sky.  Everyone seemed to be in good spirits, and there was a lot of chit chat amongst complete strangers.  I talked to several runners, but only found one person who had done the event before.  Some people were concerned as to how clearly marked the trail would be.  The race instructions said the trail would be marked, but recommended that we also carried the two page description of the route, just in case we got lost.  It turned out that this was unnecessary.
Runners getting ready in front of the law courts in the grounds of the Castle
Probably the hardest part of the run was the very start.  We all set off from inside the castle.  Once through the gate the course made a right turn to run down a steep cobbled street towards the river.  This was one descent where I didn’t feel that it would be sensible to let gravity do its work.  The cobbles felt quite slippery underfoot, and were also really uncomfortable to land on at full pelt, even with almost new running shoes.  At the very bottom of the hill we had to cross a river bridge and then a pedestrian bridge over a dual carriageway.  After this the route of the challenge was mostly along footpaths and bridleways through Fen like countryside and passing through several nice villages.

There were probably only about 100 runners attempting the full marathon distance.  After a mile the line of runners had already become quite dispersed.  I found myself running alongside a young male runner who looked like a novice.  I tried to strike up a conversation only to discover he was French.  Now, I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but my immediate reaction was a desire to trip him up, due to France’s win over both England and Wales in the rugby world cup.  I have to admit that England deserved to lose to France, but I’m sure that almost every rugby fan in Britain felt that Wales should have come away with the victory over France and that if it wasn’t for a poor referee decision they would have won.  Of course, moments later I realised that the young French runner alongside me could not be blamed for the outcome of a rugby match.  I kept pace with him for a short while and I wished him luck as I sped up, leaving him to eat the dust kicked up by my shoes.

After about five miles I could only see about four runners ahead of me.  They didn’t seem that far off, and we all seemed to be running at about the same pace.  At one point I looked over my shoulder and I couldn’t see any other runners behind me.  It seemed that we were leaving the rest of the field a long way behind.  Just before reaching the first checkpoint we started over taking a steady stream of walkers, who were all very obliging by stepping to one side to allow the runners to pass.  I continued to overtake a steady stream of walkers all the way to about the third checkpoint.  Walkers also had the option of only doing half the course and starting a little later in the day from the third control.  This also meant that we runners had even more walkers to pass on the second half of our run.

There were five checkpoints on the course, and at each one we had to hand in a wristband with our competitor number.  This was so the organisers could keep track of everyone and make sure no one was lost.  Bottles of water were also available at all five checkpoints, and chocolate bars were also being handed out at the third.  It almost seemed that each village was asked to round up volunteers to man each of the checkpoints.  Some just had a few adults, whilst one in particular seemed to have a whole infant school of children handing out water bottles and doing a very good job of cheering each runner on as they came in to view.

As I approached each of the checkpoints I seemed to almost catch two of the runners ahead of me, but I seemed to take longer than them over stopping for a drink and chewing doing an energy gel, so they managed to put some space between me and them again.  I was caught by another runner as I was finishing off my drink at the third control and the two of us then ran together, chatting all the way to the next feed station.  I stopped to take on some water, whilst the other runner didn’t even reach for a bottle.  The truth is that I also felt that his pace was a little too fast for me and I was happy for him to carry on without me.

Just before the final checkpoint I finally caught up with the two runners who had been just ahead of me the whole way.  I was starting to feel in a lot of pain by this stage, but the two of them seemed to be fairing a lot worse.  We ran as a group of three very briefly, but I was eager to get the last few miles over and done with and was clearly able to maintain a faster pace than the other two.  So I turned my back on them and ran on alone, even though I was very aware that I was only slowly edging away from them.  The last few miles were horrible.  The ground was flat, and mostly on a flood bank alongside a river, very much like running alongside the River Cam to Ely, but the surface was as rutted as anything and baked hard.  If you can imagine what mud would be like after horses had walked through it and then baked by the sun you’ll have a good idea of the ground conditions.  My legs seemed to almost buckle with every stride.  I overtook one final runner at this stage, who had been in sight for a while.  I didn’t think I was going to catch him, and certainly hadn’t made it an aim, but he was doing a mixture of jogging, hobbling and walking, and going through that cycle every 20 to 30 seconds.  As I passed him I asked if he was ok.  He grunted some response, which I didn’t make out.  I then just responded by saying the last few miles were horrible, to which he agreed.  I then left him behind to hobble towards the finish.

With about half a mile to go I spotted Ruth waving at me.  I was actually surprised to see her, as she has only seen me run in three marathons so far this year.  I was glad to hear her confirm that I didn’t have far to go.  Sure enough, soon after passing Ruth I reached the edge of Sleaford and was running on smooth tarmac once more, which instantly made my legs feel better.   The finish was as low key as the event itself.  We turned to run over a bridge, and then made one other turn to suddenly find that we were in a finishing funnel edged with plastic tape and directed towards a table with three event organisers.  One took our final wrist band, one handed out a medal and the other gave all the finishers a certificate.  We were then told to help ourselves to a bottle of sports drink.  And with that another marathon was completed.
Final river crossing
As I waited for Ruth to make her way to the finish, I congratulated a few other runners and waited for the three guys I’d overtaken in the last few miles to finish.  Once Ruth got to the finish line it was time to take a few photos, including a staged photo of me running across the last bridge to send to my charity.  Apparently I’m going to be the cover star in their next biannual publication. 

12 marathons completed and original target achieved, but I still aim to do 4 more
Ruth and I then had a quick meal in a greasy spoon cafĂ© before the drive back to Cambridge.  I wasn’t sure if I could face a full meal, but once I had a plate of pasty, chips and peas in front of me I seemed to have no trouble polishing it off.  I now have two weekends off before my next marathon on November 6th.  Ruth and I will be having a short walking holiday in the interim.

Saturday 8 October 2011

Loch Ness Marathon - Full Report

On the last day of September I found myself flying to Inverness by myself.  Ruth was supposed to have gone with me, but with Cambridge forecast to be blisteringly hot, compared to a weekend of rain in Scotland, I was told that I’d be going on my own.  Ruth had no intention of standing at the finish line of a marathon in the wet waiting to see her dearly beloved cross the line when she could have been sunning herself at home.  I was, obviously, a little disappointed by her lack of commitment, but also realised that I didn’t have a hope in hell of persuading her to change her mind and come with me, even though I’d already paid for her flights, a double hotel room and pre-race pasta party meal for two.

As there is only one flight a day from Luton to Inverness, I was expecting to see several marathon runners on my flight.  However, I only managed to spot maybe 3 or 4 likely contenders, none of whom I was sufficiently confident were runners for me to approach and ask.  So I kept my nose buried in my book whilst waiting in the departure lounge and for the duration of the flight.  An ex-client bought me a copy of “The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner” as a goodbye present a few months back and I’ve finally got round to starting it.  I would have thought that this would have made me stand out as a runner to any observers.

Once at Inverness Airport I made my way to the city centre by bus, from where I only had a short walk to the Aberfeldy Lodge Hotel, which I’d booked months ago.  I presented my hotel accommodation voucher to the hotel owner, who studied it thoroughly before telling me that the voucher didn’t mean anything to her.  She went off to make a phone call, and when she came back she informed me that I’d been the victim of an internet scam.  I’d handed over just over £170 to someone who had set up a bogus internet site pretending to be a hotel bookings agent.  I was absolutely gutted, to say the least, and realised that the weekend was going to end up costing a lot more than I’d bargained for.  The owner was very helpful.  She didn’t have a spare room herself, but managed to find me a room in a nearby B&B which proved to be excellent.

I ended up staying with Sergio in the Averon House B&B (Tel: 01463 232469, www.averon-house.co.uk).  If you ever find yourself needing somewhere to stay in Inverness then I would highly recommend it.  Sergio is a perfect host and went out of his way to ensure I was comfortable and had everything I needed.  The breakfast was fantastic, if anything there was way too much of everything, which can’t be a bad thing, unless you’re on a diet.  I did have to insist that I only wanted porridge on the Sunday morning before the marathon, and I think Sergio felt he had to make amends for only giving me a measly breakfast by offering to make me sandwiches and to cook me pasta the night before the marathon.  I refused, even though the offer was genuine.  The B&B itself is located just behind Inverness Castle and is just a 5 minute walk from the centre of town and about a 15 minute walk to the marathon event village.


Inverness Castle and the River Ness

The Marathon Event Village - open for registration.
The event village is where I had to go on the Saturday before the marathon to collect my race number and to attend the pasta party.  I always have high expectations of so called pasta parties, which are never realised.  What should have been a fun gathering of like minded people sharing anecdotes of previous marathons, training disasters and narrow escapes from the jaws of menacing dogs, turned out to be a massive marquee that was less than a quarter full, a band playing folk music on a small stage at one end, small pockets of runners dotted here and there and a less than generous serving of pasta for which I’d paid £10 in advance.  I managed to find myself sitting close enough to solitary female runner that I was able to start a conversation.  I think my opening line was built around a moan about the size of the portion of pasta, to which she agreed.  From this we got into a conversation about all the usual sorts of things runners talk about; how many marathons have you run before, what’s your best time, what are you aiming for this time, etc.  Then we exchanged names and asked where we’d travelled from.  Coincidently, it turned out that Jenny lives just up the road from me in Huntingdon.  I considered asking her if she wanted to hang out together for the rest of the day, given that we were both on our own.  I thought that maybe we could catch a movie and go out for pasta together in the evening, but I decided that it might sound too much like a chat up.  Instead we finished our meals, wished each other good luck for the marathon and went our separate ways.

Given that I had pretty much fully explored Inverness on Friday, I did decide that I’d kill my afternoon with a trip to the cinema.  I went to see The Debt, which I really enjoyed.  It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs but it kept me off my feet the day before the marathon.

The previous evening I’d had no problem finding somewhere to eat in Inverness.  The night before the marathon was a different story.  I headed to a well known pasta chain for 6.30pm, thinking I’d beat the rush, to discover a queue of runners outside the door.  I joined the back of the queue to patiently wait for a table.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long, mainly due to being a little brash.  I spotted a single male at the front of the queue being shown to a table for two.  I asked the people ahead of me if they had any objections to me jumping the queue to see if I could join who I assumed was a single runner, just like me.  They didn’t, so I barged on in, tapped the guy on the shoulder, asked if he was running in the marathon (he was), told him I was doing the same and asked if it would be ok for me to share his table.  I was very grateful that I was able to drastically reduce my wait time, even though my dining companion, Andy, wasn’t the most talkative chap in the world, and when he did talk in his broad Glaswegian accent I had to ask him to repeat himself.  I found myself wishing I had asked Jenny out.  Once we were both full of pasta and garlic bread, we wished each other luck (I think that’s what he said), and went our separate ways.

It had rained in Inverness pretty much all day on Saturday, whilst the whole of England basked in sunshine.  However, the weather forecast promised dry weather with sunny spells for race day.  When I awoke and looked out the window I saw the same old dreary drizzle that I’d seen all the previous day.  At breakfast I discovered another marathon runner had checked in the previous afternoon.  Matt was running in his first marathon.  The two of us ate our porridge and then walked to the marathon village together.  We were instructed to be at the village by 7.30am to get on a bus that would then drive us to the start of the marathon 26 miles south west of Inverness.  The marathon was due to start at 10am and we both couldn’t work out why the buses needed to depart so early.  Surely it doesn’t take that long for a bus to travel 26 miles! 

At 7.45am a long convoy of assorted buses, from luxury coaches to Stagecoach double deckers, left Inverness with some 3000 runners onboard.  It was quite a strange sight to see so many buses travelling in convoy, with police escort.  Whenever the buses needed to turn right, the police would set up a road block so we could carry on unimpeded.  This must surely get full marks for organisation.  Just over an hour after leaving Inverness we were still on the buses, driving slowly along winding country lanes, with lots of well hydrated runners writhing in their seats with tightly crossed legs.  Someone on our bus begged the driver to stop so we could jump off and then jump behind a bush.  The driver refused, but a few minutes later it become apparent that someone on the lead bus was in a similar predicament and the whole convoy came to a halt.  One by one we witnessed bus doors ahead of us opening up and streams of runners jumping off to relieve themselves in the wide open Scottish air.  Our driver grudgingly opened the door, but shouted at us that she’d leave us behind if the convoy moved on before we were back on the bus.  We eventually reached the start at 9.40.  We were all at a loss as to how it took so long to get to the start of the race.  We must have taken a massive long detour.

Baggage trucks at the start
At the start it was very cold and damp.  This made it difficult to decide what to wear for the run.  I opted to wear a T-shirt over my running vest with the intention of discarding it somewhere on route.  There wasn’t much at the start other than a few portaloos and baggage trucks.  Starting zones were marked according to predicted finish times on boards along the side of the road.  Once everyone was in position a troupe of pipers made their way through the entire field from the back to the head of the line of competitors, which made for a very atmospheric start.  Once the pipers were at the front of the field there was a lot of cheering, clapping and hand shaking amongst the crowd of runners.  A few seconds later we were off.

Pipers at the start of the marathon
Loch Ness is probably one of the easiest marathons I’ve run.  The first 10 miles is predominantly downhill.  To some extent this makes it hard to judge how fast you should be running.  Clearly you can go faster than on the flat, but how hard should you push it?  I was running at about 7 minutes per mile for the first 5 miles, and wondered if I was going too fast.  I was aiming to finish in around 3 hours 30 minutes.  I feared that any faster would be too much given that I’d only just run a marathon the week before.

At times we’d come to short sections of quite steep descents.  I employed the just let go and let gravity take you technique, which requires turning the legs over very quickly and almost leaping large distances.  Most runners around me were using way too much energy breaking themselves and fighting against gravity.  Running fast downhill is a skill worth learning.

Last view of the Loch before the hill at mile 18
Miles 10 to 18 are then mostly pancake flat and right alongside the shore of the Loch.  I reached the halfway point in 1 hour 35 minutes, 10 minutes faster than I’d planned.  Still, I was feeling pretty good and wasn’t too concerned with being ahead of schedule.  At mile 18 the course starts to go upwards.  Many runners at the start were talking about the ‘big’ hill at mile 18.  When I got to it, it was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.  It did go up for the best part of two miles, but the gradient wasn’t severe.  It was possible to maintain a comfortable pace all the way to the top.  There was then one other smaller and slightly steeper hill at about mile 22, but once over this it was mostly down or flat all the way to the finish.  I was amazed at how good my legs were feeling.  I decided to increase my pace, and each mile got progressively faster over the last 3 miles.  I passed dozens of runners, and I felt as if I was having the best run of my life.  There were a reasonable number of spectators lining the course over the last two miles.  I got several shout outs which helped spur me on to catch the next runner ahead of me.  When I got to the last 100m I even had enough left in the tank for a sprint finish, a definite first for me.


I hung around at the finish to greet a number of runners that I’d chatted to on the course.  This was then how I managed to orchestrate my customary finishing photo, by roping in Ross, who finished his first marathon in an incredible 3 hours 17 minutes.  I mentioned in my previous post that I finished in 3 hours 14 minutes, a time that I’m very happy with, and one that deserves a second mention.

Tired runners in the finishing funnel collecting medals, goody bags and drinks
Nessie keeping an eye on the finish
Once I’d collected my medal and excellent quality race T-shirt, I headed to the baggage trucks, got my stuff and had a quick bite to eat.  I then started to slowly walk back to the B&B, periodically stopping to stand and cheer those who were still running. 

The following morning I opted to wear my race T-shirt for the journey home.  I wanted as many people as possible to know what I’d just done.  After breakfast I said goodbye to Sergio and made my way to the airport by bus.  Inverness airport was a very funny sight.  It was clear who had run the marathon.  Bizarrely, the vast majority had opted to proudly wear their race T-shirt, just like me, but many were also limping around as if they’d been wounded in a hideous accident.  I’d say a third of the people at the airport had run in the marathon.  This time I wouldn’t have my head buried in my book in the departure lounge.  I found myself sitting next to a couple of runners who were only to happy to exchange stories.  Everyone seemed to agree that it had been a fantastic event.  I’d rate it in my top 4, which I’d say are London, Snowdonia, South Downs & Loch Ness, but in no particular order.

Despite the distance from Cambridge and the fact that there isn’t a whole lot going on in Inverness, I would definitely run this marathon again.

I’ll be writing more either later today or tomorrow with other news from the past week.

Tuesday 4 October 2011

Loch Ness Marathon - Brief Report

I will have to write up a full report from Loch Ness at the weekend.  For the time being here is a brief update on what proved to be one of my best and favourite marathons of the year.

Surprisingly, the marathon has real PB potential, due to the fact that the first 10 miles (yes, 10) are practically downhill.  It's then flat for 8 miles, then goes up for 2 miles up to mile 20, but not at a significant gradient. There's then another shortish hill at mile 23, but after that it's either down or flat to the finish.

I ran my strongest finish ever, and my legs were feeling great, even though I'd only run New Forest Marathon the week before.  I finished in a time of 3hrs 14mins with the feeling that I still had a few miles left in me.  It was a great feeling to have at the end of a marathon.  I can honestly say I've never enjoyed running 26.2 miles as much as I did on Sunday.  I'd definitely recommend this run.  To cap it off you get a great medal and a great T-shirt that you'd actually want to wear.