The Inaugural Muckletoon Trail Half Marathon

It was Graham Henry's idea. Or at least it was Graham's idea for Peter to run this race, and then, when I looked at the course I thought that maybe I should go along and do it as a training run. And once I'd thought that I thought Amanda might like it, as we've been getting in the habit of doing a flattish, beachy 10 miler of a Saturday - it would be something different.

It was a shame that it had to be quite so wet and windy for it! The weather continued looking ominous for today all week - and proved to be correct. The skies were uncommonly dark as we set off to pick up Amanda, Alison and dogs just before 10am and soon it began to rain.

It was varied though. A mixture of light rain, drizzle and heavy rain. It was a long way to Langholm and I'm guessing it wasn't just me that had had a long hard week as I wasn't the only one yawning in the car. We had one mild navigation fiasco because Buchanan had put the map I had given him to navigate with in the boot - and so we drove through Jedburgh only to find that we should have branched off before then. It was no real problem though as we had heaps of getting lost time factored in and it was raining so hard no-one was all that keen to get out the car at Langholm.

Beforehand it was hard to decide if the race would be more like a road half or more like a hill race. It turned out to be a riot of different surfaces. The first mile took us along the road and up the first part of Kirk Wynd - a steep road up - but then this turned into steep muddy hillside with streams flowing down the paths - eventually, out of the mist, the monument came into view. Assessing those around me in the race I figured I was in the part of the field where there are people that like an adventure but didn't have much experience of full on hill-racing and didn't have the speed of road racers. It was a nice part of the field for me to be in because I didn't feel as utterly hampered as I often do these days. I found I could pace the hill by walking and running and match pace with others who were determinedly running every step. And then when we went over the hill and started running down the other side I was more comfortable than most of the people around me. The first climb was a good 1000ft and I was mighty glad to get it over with. Then there was a long, enjoyable sweep downhill and some chemical thing must have happened in my brain as I found myself thinking "This is great, I'm really glad there's still another 11 miles to go". Hahaha. Another couple of miles on and I had grown a bit more jaded and thought maybe the 10K would have been a good option but it was too late for that. Anyway the course was keeping me busy. There were good trails, bad trails, rooty muddy forest sections, sections of road, thin muddy slippy trails with 50 feet drop offs to the river which reminded me of being in the Himalayas - if you'd have started down one of those steep banks there would have been no way to stop...

I can't remember much of the sequence - it was all pretty full on. A couple of times I knew I was near the finish  because I could hear the loudspeakers in the Rugby Club grounds but I wasn't near the end of my race. A couple of guys passed me. One, from Motherwell, was very unhappy. "I've fallen 4 times" he said "It leaves you disillusioned." I was sympathetic to start with but then he carried on, "This is not a half marathon it's a trail race!" "Clue's in the title" I thought to myself and jogged on.

I passed a guy from Newcastle who was much more upbeat. "What distance does it say on your pedometer pet?" He asked me. My Garmin blanched at the insult. "9 miles" I said. "Only 4 to go" he said and smiled "easy!". We both laughed. I was utterly fecked by this point. He was obviously doing a bit worse as he disappeared backwards behind me. A bit further along the road I came to the nightmare scenario in a trail race. Arrows in 2 different directions and no marshal. I ground to a halt and tried to use my brain. A girl in a white top came running back along the road towards me - apparently she had gone the wrong way so I followed her the right way. That was a bit of luck. In retrospect I think the yellow arrows might have been for bikes and the white arrows for runners, but no-one had said this. Quite a few people went wrong in the race apparently and I wonder if it was this point, just about 9.5 miles, which caught them out.

The next bit was a bit of a blur. A long flat section beside the river I felt tired and de-motivated and wanted it to end. Then a bit of a climb seemed to take my mind off it, and then a steep downhill, always welcome. Into the last mile, there was a bit of running on the pavement  and into the rugby club grounds again for a cruel full lap of the (wet, muddy) field before finishing. Aaaaah.

I was thinking I'm going to move on to a new system where I am issued post-op pbs. So I have a new post-op pb for a half marathon of 2 hrs 28 minutes! Yes I know but wait - it really was hard. Peter ran 1.37 for 3rd place and he'd expect to run kind of 1.20 - 1.22 at the moment so it truly was tough.

Amanda had won the lady's race. Her and Graham H. had been near each other in the last few miles of the race and Graham had pipped her. Alison had managed to have quite a good day with the two dogs and it hadn't rained all that hard for the duration of the race. All was well. I was very glad to stop.

There was a bit of a wait for prize giving so it wasn't even me who held everyone back! And I beat first local woman. No prizes for this though.

It was one of those races that leave you feeling somewhat proud of finishing so I'm glad I did it. Definitely worth thinking about for next year...

Peter has some pictures which will appear on his blog in due course.

Peaked too soon

"Real life" is encroaching on my run time. I have something to do this morning as well as this afternoon and evening. I thought that this precluded having a run. But I like my Wednesday run.

I was all set to go out yesterday evening. By "all set" I mean my Monday self had decided that's what I would be doing on a Tuesday. In actual fact, as the years go by, I hate running after work. I had a wearying kind of day at work yesterday, lots of hassles and none of it was improved by the cold wind and occasional rain storms. On my bike on the way home I thought to myself - "Nuh, I'm not doing it."

Reluctantly I formed the alternative plan that I would get up early today and get out for a run that way. Before the business of the day began. I wasn't keen but the only alternative seemed to be not running at all  and that didn't seem right either. The running has been going a wee bit better so I'm reluctant to drop that ball. Don't get excited. 9.20 min/miles are the new black, but it's better than 10 minute miles, a pace I've grown more familiar with than I ever wanted to.

So my daring plan was to get up at 7am today. Before you start about that not being early, I just want to say it's all relative. I got up at 5am for years and years to do shift work so don't get all superior on me. 7am is too early to fit in with my current life-style on a Wednesday. That is all. Anyway, something or someone had other plans. I had a short dream in which I turned into the road for Leith Academy and there in front of me was a car with the registration plate LMAO, which as users of facebook will know stands for "Laughed my arse off." - and then I awoke, at 5.42am, ready for the day.

So I got up, and instead of the 5 miler I had planned, I pushed the boat out and did 8.5 hilly miles round Arthur's Seat. I have now had a long hot shower and have the happy contented feeling that God's own people enjoy. However I'm a bit sleepy and could do with a nap. Better get on with the business of the day though...

Rad Road Reps South-West Side

(There were lots more whippets than this)

You wouldn't want to be suffering from seasonal affective disorder this year, that's for sure. Well into May and the sun's disappeared again. When I got up and saw another cold, rainy, windy, grey day I could have spat. Not enjoying the new ice age in the least.

I grumpily did some stuff I had to do on the computer. When Peter surfaced the question of what and where to run arose. We'd thought about going to the Pentlands but the thought of going out there in this unwelcoming cold didn't appeal.

I remembered seeing a girl doing reps on the easy side of the rad road a few weeks ago. First of all I thought "LOSER that's the easy side!" Then on further reflection I realised it was quite a good idea. The SW side of the rad road has a much nicer angle than the NE.

So today's plan was to run round Arthur's Seat the usual way but instead of coming home when we got round the top road we were to do 5 reps of the easy side of the rad road. Peter thought he might do 6. In the event I think he actually did 7. But I did take a bit of time out to take my long sleeved top off as things heated up.

The first one was the quickest but probably felt the worst. Within a few seconds my legs were feeling empty and I was having to blow out hard to get enough oxygen back into my lungs to keep my legs moving. I've taken to wearing my Polar HRM on my left wrist with my Garmin on the right. I got some ECG gel for the chest strap and it's giving me consistent and believable readings which I'm finding ever so reassuring. I tried putting on my Garmin HRM before coming out today as this would cut down on the need for gadgets but the numbers were flicking around all over the place. I put the Polar one on and got nice steady understandable readings. I don't know why this should be. Anyway, at last I'm seeing numbers that I can relate to. On the uphills my HR was rising to 167 which used to be about average for a park run - so I figured 5K effort is good enough and it stopped me giving myself a hard time for running slowly.

I don't really want to say this in case it turns out not to be true, but lately I've been feeling like I'm getting better. I feel more like an ordinary unfit runner than someone who has something wrong with them. Fingers crossed.

After the reps we were both in better fettle than before. It's amazing what a shot of self-induced suffering can do for your mood. We jogged back via Hunter's Bog. There was a woman there with what appeared to be a herd of whippets, all with bells on. It seemed unlikely but we both saw it so I guess it was probably real.

Blog Wars

I don't know how well it's working - having two bloggers in the same household. There is an inevitable degree of crossover which I'm finding troublesome. What in the hell is the point in both of us blogging about the same things?

So I think I should shift my attention to the in between days - the days where there are no big events and that we do not share. Today for instance.

Today I was free of commitments - well in terms of going to meet the outer world that is. I have a presentation (which I'm grandiosely calling my "speech") to prepare for uni on Wednesday. I've been studiously ignoring the whole thing for some time now but the tension has been building in the hinterland of the mind where things you are ignoring lurk. Today was the day I'd set aside to tackle it. I prepared something a few weeks ago and then shoved it away...so today I thought I'd read it over out loud to get a sense of how daft it was and how long it would take to say.

My neighbour has a pretty  steady relationship with "the drink". I think vodka is her thing. It makes me not worry too much about talking out loud and even having the odd sing-song to myself in the flat on my own. She sets off her smoke alarm from time to time. Another Fray Bentos pie blackens as she falls asleep on her bed watching day time telly. Who is there to judge? Nobody. So we each do our thing.

I thought I would just read it over once and then get out a run. I should have known better. This kind of thing always takes over. Several hours later, still in my pyjamas, several re-writes further on I found that I was starving and I would have to eat again before I went out any run.

About an hour after that I finally got out.

Yesterday's 3000 or so feet of climb and descent had really stiffened up my legs, so I was kind of dreading going out, but to my surprise when I got outside the wind had gone round and was coming from the South and it was nice and warm out there. Unexpected and enjoyable.
When I got to Arthur's Seat I was surprised to find that a lot of other people seemed to be celebrating my day off until I remembered that it is a bank holiday today. Going round Arthur's Seat wasn't all that bad. It was good to work up a sweat. It's been too cold to sweat for months now. On a whim I'd put on a heart rate monitor to go out, for the first time in months. To my surprise and pleasure it was showing some fairly normal numbers...until I started running downhill that is. Then my heart-rate shot up to the high 180s and kept climbing. I stopped just to take my pulse by hand and it wasn't anything like that. Either I have funny electrical currents or the damn thing doesn't work on me. I shouldn't have worn it because it got me thinking about heart rate again and I have now ordered a strapless hrm where you can take your pulse by putting two fingers on the watch thing and also some ECG specific gel which might create better contact between me and the chest strap...

There's a new trail race on the block - the Langholm trail race, which I am, perhaps foolishly, thinking I could use for a training run while Buchanan races his socks off. I don't know if it's a good idea. My last 2 attempts at going to races have put me in a very dark frame of mind - but given that I have no previous with this one and time is moving on and I'm adjusting to how things are for me now, maybe I could just enjoy it...

Aberlady and An Everest of Allermuirs

Yesterday's runniness was a run round Aberlady and all that. There was a very stiff westerly wind which would have been quite good for the Edinburgh to North Berwick racers. The tide was getting surprisingly far out by the time we got to the shore next to Archerfields so running on this stretch of sand seemed extra good. It's usually under the sea. Inspired by this and the wild west wind I tried to jump quite a wide stream that was coming down the beach. I had new shoes on and was trying to keep them out the sea as I think the sea-water is the reason that all my trainers for the last 3 years have ended up absolutely minging. Too much vertical height and getting blown sideways by the wind led to failure however, and one very wet foot.

Over the weekend, Ian Campbell of HBT has been doing a self-set challenge he has called "An Everest of Allermuirs". The aim was to do the same amount of ascent as the height of Everest (29,029ft) but by doing 29 reps of Allermuir Hill at the edge of the Pentlands. He'd given himself 3 days to do it in, which was just as well. Because all the focus was on the height he was climbing I never really thought about what that would mean in terms of distance, but after we'd been up and down twice today we had covered just over 5 miles. Someone with more patience than me can do the maths. If it was 30 reps then that would be 15 X 5 = 75 miles, so I guess he ran about 73 miles over the course of the weekend.

We knew he'd be finishing up today although we didn't know when would be a good time to arrive. We just arrived when we were ready and in 5 minutes Ian and an entourage arrived back down the hill at Swanston car park with just 3 more to do. In a nice overlap of worlds, Bruce Mathieson aka CoastKid, who we usually see on the beach was there on his bike supporting, because he is Ian's brother-in-law.

There was a good and changing band of runners running, people dropping in and out. Ian must have had quite a weekend. He said Friday night was particularly hard going. Today, he was in good spirits and even managed a sprint up the last steep climb on the last summit...

On arriving back at the car park, he and some of his HBT people went off to the pub to get some restorative brown beer. We headed for home (no white, yellow and blue drinks to be had) and gave Maggie Spalding a lift home as she stays on our side of town. Maggie's had a cardiac catheter ablation too so I was able to talk about all that with her. That was a treat. It's kind of a niche market, being a runner/heart patient. It can be a  lonely place.

Ian's Everest of Allermuirs was to raise money for Prostate Cancer UK because his dad died from prostate cancer last year. You can sponsor him here.

Rannoch Moor Run

Archetypal Scotsman

Since Peter and Ben were going to do the Fling, and we already had a room booked at the salubrious Premier Inn in Milngavie, I thought I could take the opportunity to get out of town. I drove us all to Milngavie on Friday night. Peter got up at 4.45am to get ready for his 6am start. My plan was to get up a lot later when I felt like it. My body clock had other ideas though and I woke up in that emphatic way you do when you know you're not going back to sleep, just before 6.30am. As it turned out that was about right though. I did pretty much everything I wanted to do and with little time to spare.

When we supported Richard Dennis to do his WHW race a few years ago now, I had really liked the look of the bit of the Way that comes out onto the road up to the Ski Centre, just before Glen Etive. My plan was to drive there and run back towards Tyndrum for 6 miles and then 6 miles back. I also thought I might go for a quick dip in the river Etive so I wouldn't be sweaty for the rest of the day, and then drive back to Tyndrum to get photos of the people starting to finish the Fling, meet Peter and Ben and then drive them home.

It was 11.30ish by the time I got to the Ski Centre (I had to stop in Tyndrum for a second breakfast of coffee and cake to give me strength for the run.)
The air was cool and the sun was coming and going as big clouds floated over the landscape. I had fondly thought of this bit of path as being "flat" and was surprised to find myself on a long ascent, followed by an even longer descent. I had to revise how far I was going to go as I realised time was getting a bit tight. The running was superb though and I found myself really enjoying it. The scenery was spectacular (sorry, no camera). There were a handful of walkers making their way west and I got a friendly greeting from everyone I passed.

I found myself wondering why no-one had ever mentioned what a nice bit of track this was and then realised that most people I knew who had run there had about 70 miles in their legs already and probably didn't appreciate its finer qualities! Also, it was quite stony in places and decidedly hilly, so they probably suffered with this too. I love when you're up in the mountains (any mountains) and it's sunny but the air is cold and pure. It was like that yesterday. The cold air was almost like a cool drink of water - really refreshing. I finished my run (which I'd trimmed to 10 miles), in a great state of mind.

I didn't have time for any dips into the Etive (shame!) but instead raced Shearings coaches back along the road to Tyndrum and got myself out on the Highland Fling course.

The winners had already won by the time I got there, in times of just over 7 hours. The first runner that I saw that I recognised was Marco Consani as I walked from the end out onto the course. Not much further back was Richie Cunningham. Then a bunch of relay runners and full Flingers that I didn't really know. I find it hard to know what to say to runners when I'm spectating - the subject of how far it is to go is a sensitive one by the end of the Fling! Whether people are looking good or not is also arguable and subjective. I settled on "Well Done". Even that is contentious. If you've just run what for you is a turkey then  you don't really want to hear "Well Done". But I couldn't say "What happened to you, you sack of shit!" either. There should be a guide book.

I found I was horribly over dressed. The ambient temperature was pretty cool when you were standing still, so I was wearing my running stuff  + tights + a big fleece and a duvet jacket. There was quite a lot of shelter on the trail though, so I when I decided to jog a bit I found myself bathed in sweat in about 30 seconds. I realised there was no point in moving too quickly out onto the course as I would then have to get back again.

I walked in about 2 miles. The course was completely different from what I had in my memory from Finishing the Fling in 2010. It showed me just how minced your brain is by the time you've come all that way. The stares on the faces of the people who were passing me were something to see as well. A few people managed to crack a smile but mostly what I saw was pain and focus. When I finally came across Peter, a little further on (from my perspective) from the Strathfillan Wigwams, I only recognised him at the last minute. He was looking exceptionally "focused". A little behind him was a ridiculously fresh looking and ebullient Andy Johns. I stayed there for a little bit longer because there was a lovely view and then headed back, figuring I would catch people (I was particularly looking out for Ben) as they overtook me,

Fast forward back to the finish, getting Ben and Peter in the car was like herding kittens. They didn't have a brain cell to share between them. I definitely felt like their carer!
Peter ran a stormer dipping just under 9 hours. Ben took a little over 9hrs 30 mins which is a triumph on his very minimal training regime. I wouldn't like to spend much of my time hanging about spectating other peoples' races, but it was a beautiful day and it was fun.

Nice to see...

...the sun again after all this time. Not that warm though. Yesterday's run was the Gullane 10 miler. Today we sat out the morning wind and rain and tracked London Marathoners on the computer. In the afternoon, when the sun had come out we went up Arthur's Seat. It was absolutely hoaching with "visitors" and this and my piss poor pace (I had to walk going up Arthur's Seat) had me in a fierce bad mood for a while. Running up the main drag to the top of  the seat was bloody awful. Running down and onto Whinny Hill was better. There were no people there, which helped, and also my legs felt like they'd woken up a bit.

In general I've talked myself into being laid back about my running and not looking for an improvement. It'll come in its own time if it's going to come at all. But sometimes the reality of how much worse I am than I was hits me.


I can't leave you on that note. Watch this. It makes me laugh.