Winter 100 Race Report 2014

The plan was simple: go out hard and beat 24 hours, or collapse along the way with a smile on my face.

The Winter 100 takes runners along four out-and-back spurs, each of 12.5 miles and each dropping you back in Goring at the end. I hadn't even planned to enter the race; I threw my name on the waiting list on a whim after hearing so many positive comments about Centurion races. It fell just three weeks after my first ever 100-mile race, the hilly and difficult Cotswold Way Century, which was far from ideal. As I lined up at the start of the W100, I had no idea whether I had recovered from the Cotswolds or not. Hence the strategy: in my mind I'd already run my big race for the year, and this was just a bonus. I'd deal with it by going out hard from the start shouting Mort ou Gloire. This was either going to be the race where I cracked 24 hours or it would be the race where I cracked myself.

Looking positive at the start

And so I was off the line at Goring at a fast old pace, slipping through the thick riverside mud of the Thames Path with my heart rate going through the roof - the result of the effort and several nights of bad sleep. "I'll pay for that later," I thought, glancing at the Suunto. The 12.5-mile outward leg took about 2 hours and went by in a flash - I was at the turnaround point before I even knew it. "Ooh, wedding cake!" I grabbed a fistful of fruitcake and headed back, spewing crumbs as I greeted the runners just behind. I'd counted the runners coming the other way and seemed to be in 28th place. Excellent!

After the turnaround I ran into the face of the main body of runners behind me, exchanging encouraging words with almost all of them. There was Chris Mills looking happy, and Kat Ganley running the last Hundred needed for her 2014 Centurion Grand Slam. For some reason I don't entirely understand, each time I saw Kat that day I greeted her with a big "Heeeeyyyyy!", like I was the Fonz or something. I really hope she didn't find it too offputting.

Me, as seen from Kat Ganley's perspective

After almost exactly four hours I had completed the first of the route's four 25-mile spurs and was back at Goring. Nikki Mills greeted me in and Ashok Daniel gave me a big hug and then ran around like a star, making sure I had everything I needed. I downed some food, drained an enormous blood blister on my right foot and bandaged it up just in time to be thrown out by Nici Griffin before I got too comfortable.

As I left Goring on the second 25-mile loop, this time on the Ridgeway, I was passed by a runner called James Brouner. We chatted for a few minutes and then he pulled away as I showed a little self-restraint and stuck to what felt like the right pace. I was starting to feel some pain too: to stop my worst blister rubbing, I had to change my gait and land on the heel of my right foot. This was starting to make my hip ache and, particularly, it started my right IT band aching - a problem that had first appeared on the Cotswold Way three weeks earlier. Ah well, nothing I could do about it except get the race over with as soon as possible.

I trotted merrily through the narrow tube of leafless trees that defines the Ridgeway in this area, stepping aside to applaud the smiling race leader Marco Consani, who had just won a 30-second lead over Ed Catmur; Ed came through a moment later with his head down, deep in focus. The route through the trees was lovely as the path climbed subtly and slowly uphill - enough twists and turns to be interesting, but never overly demanding. Eventually the long stretch of footpath along Grim's Ditch came to an end; we crossed the A4130 to roller coaster up and down through a series of woods and fields to arrive at the Hallowe'en themed Swyncombe aid station. The volunteers (as at all the aid stations) provided sterling support.

It was hard getting moving again, but great to be able to encourage all the runners behind me as I passed them. ("Heeeeyyyyyy!" I Fonzied to Kat again - what was wrong with me?) Back along Grim's Ditch and through the trees the gentle downward trend of the path worked brilliantly, providing easily the best running of the day through the still air of the late afternoon. Sometimes running with a runner called Nick Balding, sometimes letting him pull ahead, I powered along the track with a huge smile on my face, skipping joyfully over tree roots all the way. I burst out of the trees by the A4074 with my arms over my head shouting "This is great!" to the marshalls.

Nick had been about 100 metres ahead of me for ages and I caught him again just after the main road. He was finding the going a bit tough, perhaps because he was struggling to eat. I told him about the magic of the gel swish technique and the two of us plodded on to the checkpoint at North Stoke, where we picked up James. Together the three of us donned our headtorches as the golden sun dipped behind the trees and made our way back to the cheering marshalls at the race HQ in Goring. We entered in under 9 hours - a remarkable time for the first half of a 100-mile race, and one that definitely set me up for the sub-24-hour finish I craved.

Still feeling good at 50 miles. That's Nick behind me on the left

Refreshed, thanks again to Ashok's wondrous care, the three of us headed out onto Spur 3 - the western part of the Ridgeway. Whilst the first half of the race had felt almost easy to me, this leg was to prove much tougher - perhaps the price I was paying for the fast start. The route from Goring drops down slightly then goes up a seemingly endless hill. As the three of us power-hiked our way up, Marco came flying down - still in great spirits and with a now-unassailable lead. We continued to plod up and up, the road feeling like a treadmill as our headtorches stabbed vainly into the darkness.

A big part of my plan for the day was not to get sucked into running anybody else's race, as I had on the earlier Cotswold Century (not that I regret a moment of that race). Accordingly, after a few ups and downs, I ended up pulling ahead of James and Nick on a long straight uphill section where they walked for a lengthy stretch and I, going through a good spell, alternated walking and running ("make hay while the sun shines" was something of a mantra that day). This dropped me alone onto the high exposed part of the Ridgeway, where the going became more demanding. The surface was scarred by linear grooves from the feet and - particularly - wheels of thousands of previous travellers. I kept hopping from one groove to another in the hope of finding slightly easier going. Later, everyone I spoke to said they had done exactly the same thing.

My energy level was really starting to drop by now, and I had little appetite for solid food. Gels went down fine, but they started a see-saw in my energy that would last the remainder of the race. On this spur I went from being so flat that I had to walk some stretches to other periods where I was running at genuinely fast paces, of better than 5 min/km. The fact that, when the energy was there I was running really well, suggests for the future that I've got the muscles right and now need to sort out my nutrition to be even more competitive.

But for now, the bigger problem was that my IT band was hurting like a bastard and I'd left my painkillers back in Goring. Rather than pretend the pain wasn't there, I started endlessly singing a song about how much it hurt, to the tune of Camptown Races:

"My IT band hurts a lot - doo dah, doo dah,
My IT band hurts a lot - doo dah doo dah day.
Going to hurt all night
Going to hurt all day
My IT band hurts a lot - doo dah doo dah day"

(Running alone in the dark on Spur 3, I must have spent about four hours hearing nothing other than my own voice singing this song over and over. And over. By the time I got back to Goring, I was thoroughly sick of myself.)

The top stretch was broken by the Bury Downs aid station, where I was well looked after by Ultrachicken Rich Cranswick and one of his colleagues who gave me a delicious Nutella, banana and peanut butter sandwich. I paraphrased Withnail by noting it was the first solid food to pass my lips in hours. It was also to be the last for quite some time. The run from Bury Downs to the Chain Hill turn-around was only about 2 miles. (In case you're not familiar with miles, 2 miles is equivalent to 46 kilometres on the way out and 79 light years on the way back.)

I briefly saw James and Nick again on my second visit to the Bury Downs checkpoint, but they immediately left me behind to several more hours of solitary Doo-dah internal monologue hell. This only varied when my hip started to get so bad that I changed the lyrics to "My right hip it hurts a lot...". I managed to snaffle some asprin from Chris Mills's pacer (thank you thank you thank you) and saw Kat again, still looking strong and - critically - cheerful. I kept deliberately praising runners coming the other way who were still smiling: "That's a great smile, keep it up". You could tell who wasn't going to drop from their grins.

Many long dark miles of energy spikes and leg pain later, Ashok was at his most helpful during my final visit to Goring. He filled my bottles, removed lids from rice puddings, and practically stroked my throat to get the food down. I hope he realises I'm going to take him on every race ever from now on. Eventually I levered myself out of the door for what would surely be the worst 25 miles of race. Through the darkness, I ran away from Goring feeling unaccountably good (I'd decided to try ignoring the IT band for a while). Again muttering "make hay while the sun shines", I determined to make the most of this energy while it lasted and clocked off a few kilometers that were almost fast*. Almost before I knew it, I was running the short detour to the Whitchurch checkpoint where I found James and Nick, whom I last saw something like three hours ago. They had been joined by Nick's pacer John. "You've done well to catch up," James said. "Do you want to finish this thing with us?" Yes, yes I did. They were lovely guys and having made such a great start on this race I felt it would be nice to do the home straight with them.

(* Fast for somebody who has run 75 miles.)

Because I was still feeling really good, we left the checkpoint as soon as I'd arrived. But almost at once my energy crashed again. This wasn't a problem, as the others were also feeling the drain of having run 80 miles. Someone suggested we power-hike for most of the last leg to reduce the pounding we were taking. (But when I say power-hike I really mean it - we were walking at up to 8 kph and John, who wasn't used to ultras, had to keep scurrying into a run to catch us up.)

As the route dropped through a housing estate and over a railway to rejoin the Thames, I entered the only spell in the run where I was mentally - instead of physically - low. It had started to rain, and the combination of the closed tunnel vision of my jacket's hood, the long night, the sleep deprivation and the pounding walk left me feeling grim for a while. I had to dig deep, reminding myself of past sufferings. It doesn't always get worse, I kept reminding myself. I counted my paces backwards from 100 over and over to keep myself focused and distracted. The pain in my leg was excruciating at times, and had been joined by a weird ball of pain in the Achilles tendon of my other leg.

"Oooh oooh oooh!" The outskirts of Reading saw us attempting to run little sections whenever we could, to ease the guilt of walking on what was meant to be a run. "Come on," one of us would say every few moments, "let's run to that next bridge/lamppost/goose" and we'd all break into a microscopically faster jog. As our stiff legs bent in terrible new ways the pains made us hoot like a pack of chimpanzees startled by a leopard: "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Oooooh!"

At the final turn-about we refuelled and then hit the riverside heading northwards, all determined by this point just to get the damn thing over with. We knew there was no reason we couldn't beat 24 hours, and this was a huge comfort. We just had to put up with spending about 4 hours to go a distance that took just 2 hours back at the start of the race.

"It must be nice to be a goose," I commented as we passed a pack of them by the river. "When you're a goose, nobody expects you to run anywhere." I explained how my friends and I had decoded the language of geese back at university (they've only got one word, and it means "shit"). I just kept jabbering about anything, keen to keep myself awake and to distract the others from what they were going through. The stretch back along the riverside seemed to go on forever, and the route through the housing estate to Mapledurham lock was attritional. "Shall we sit on the bench for two minutes when we get to the lock?" I asked. "God yes," came a voice from the darkness.

Painfully we limped to the final checkpoint. I sat on a chair feeling dreadful - every fibre of my being wanted to lie on the ground and sleep.

"Do you need anything?" asked a volunteer.

"Do you have any of those caffeine gels?"

We stepped out from the checkpoint, just four miles to go. I sipped at the gel and almost at once felt my body respond. Back down the horrible trough in the path, wincing and gasping with pain from both legs now. Back to the muddy riverside and through a series of gates. We hushed each other theatrically and tiptoed with exaggerated care past the house of the woman who complained after a previous race.

My watch told me that the Race HQ was 1.5 km away, 1.4 km, 1.3 km... The countdown seemed to last forever. The river seemed to last forever. How could this last mile take so long? I could see our pace flagging - so near and yet so far. Finally finally we reached the very last stretch of river. Nick spotted his family ahead and they started cheering. As we reached them on the final bend, Andy Jordan powered past us to overtake 100 metres from the end. We didn't even care! Good on him for having the nouse to do that at this stage in the race. Nick stopped to gather one of his children, leaving James and I to break into the zombie shuffle that, at this point, passed for a run. Shuffle shuffle shuffle - and across the line! The race was over in 22 hours and 24 minutes, giving James and I joint 24th place. James Adams handed me a finisher T-shirt and the "100 miles, one day" sub-24-hour belt buckle that had kept me motivated through the long night. One hundred miles in under 24 hours. I'd only gone and bloody done it.

This is what relief looks like - crossing the finish line

I waited around at the finish line for some time. This was partly because I wanted to see other runners in and applaud them, but also because I felt bloody awful and was in no state to get on a train. I wasn't alone. Racers came in, looking fine, and then once the adreneline wore off they collapsed. A young man in a green T-shirt chatted happily with me for a while and then a few minutes later was on the ground with medics all around him; another was sat there wired up to a heart rate monitor.

My own collapse came from the aftermath of all that sugar. A sudden wave of nausea hit me and I shuffled to the toilets only to find the solitary stall was occupied. Dick Kearn, director of the Grand Union Canal Race, happened to be stood nearby. He calmly passed me a bin liner into which I retched the ghastly few millilitres of fluid that was all I had in my stomach. Rich Cranswick gamely cleared the bag away. Both let me get on with it without making a fuss, which was perfect. Thank you guys.

And so I sat in Goring village hall for hours, alternately clapping in returning runners, clutching my buckle with tears in my eyes, and shuffling off for a vomit. Ultrarunning - how else can you experience every human emotion in a day?

Cotswold Way Century Race Report

The Cotswold Way just shouldn't be this hard. It's the Cotswolds for goodness' sake. The Cotswolds are tea and scones, sheep and honey-coloured villages - everyone knows that. These aren't the Alps or the Dolomites. But for some reason, which it seems nobody can quite pin down, the Cotswold Way is hard. I walked the route back in 2002 with a friend. It took 6 days and left me exhausted and with flayed feet. And if you'd asked me how that happened, I couldn't have told you - all I remembered afterwards was tea and sheep and honey-coloured villages. On paper, the route is strikingly similar to... let's say the South Downs Way. The Cotswold Way is 102 miles with 4,400 metres ascent and the South Downs Way is 100 miles with 4000 metres climbing. Yet the best runners crack off the South Downs race in 14 hours compared to 19 or 20 hours for the Cotswolds. How can two extra miles take five more hours? The answer is the ineffable and wholly unexpected badness of the Cotswold Way. Over one-third of the field would drop out of the race during the next 30 hours. People who have successfully run Leadville would be beaten by the Cotswolds. And this is what makes it so surprising that I got through this - my first ever race of over 50 miles, almost exactly one year to the day after I started running - without any serious trouble.

The finish line in front of Bath Abbey on the night before the race. On the way to my traditional curry and beer pre-race feast

My day started on the bus from Bath, chatting to John Sreeves (who would be the first off the starting line and the last over the finish line) and Daniel Hendrickson, whom I first met earlier this year when he beat me into third place at the Nomad 50. The worryingly long bus ride took us to the school in Chipping Campden, where Kurt Dusterhoff's race briefing memorably included a warning about the carparks of Gloucestershire being hotbeds of dogging activity at night. Half the checkpoints were to be in Gloucestershire carparks at night...

Suitably warned, we walked en masse up the road to the start line in the centre of the village, ready for the midday start. Immediately, things started to go wrong. My Suunto watch, which has performed flawlessly ever since I got it to replace my piece-of-shit Garmin Fenix, was refusing to lock onto satellites no matter how much I waved my wrist in the air. As I'd planned to use the watch to navigate as well as to monitor my progress, this threatened to throw me off my game. As a result, the first 4 or 5 kilometres were spent distracted and fiddling with the bloody thing, my heart rate getting way too high as I failed to attend to what I was doing and went too hard up the first big hill.

Eventually, Mr Suunto and I both calmed down, and I found myself running up grassy slopes to Broadway Tower, chatting with a runner called Craig and regularly leapfrogging a tall man with a ponytail. Craig and I blasted down the long slope to Broadway and I lost him as I jogged through the village, the milling tourists staring and smiling at the crowd of garishly dressed runners that had descended on their scone-shopping. The first few hours were great. The route ran up and down a lot of slopes, through woods and across fields. Never constant, and never boring, the path changes angle, camber and surface almost constantly. There were plenty of hands-on-knees power-hike uphills. I stuck to my plan of shovelling in lots of gels and Wagon Wheels (which are a superfood I discovered on the Oldham Way Ultra), and within 3 hours I was cruising past Hailes fruit farm, reflecting on how much things had changed - Hailes had been the end of a full day's walking when my friend and I hiked this route 12 years earlier! Up and down the slopes I ran, and somewhere around Cleeve Hill I found myself again near the man with the pony tail - who turned out to be called Jonathan - and another runner who was also called Ian.

Up the first big slope, just ahead of Jonathan

Jonathan, Ian and I ran together towards Checkpoint 3 at Birdlip, making a pretty good pace. At first, we hoped to get to the checkpoint before dark, but as the route disappeared under a leafy canopy we had to admit defeat and dig out our headtorches. At Birdlip we were served drinks and snacks by Rich Cranswick, a Piece of String survivor whom I know from Social Ultra runs. Rich had decided to honour Birdlip by dressing in a bright yellow chicken costume, and I was grateful he was here and not at a later checkpoint where I might have worried I was hallucinating...

Refreshed and with our water bottles refilled, we set off again into the night. The gaps between the aid stations were long - perhaps too long. The big intervals made breaking the race into manageable chunks difficult - and, of course, it's exactly this sort of technique that most runners use to handle the immensity of an ultra. Ian started to find the going a bit tough after checkpoint 3, and it was with relief that we eventually made it to Painswick Rugby Club. This was the 48-mile point, and the only indoor checkpoint. Ian and I both said we'd take a reasonable break to fully sort ourselves out - there was a nice unspoken agreement in the air that said we'd both leave this checkpoint together. I took my shoes off and immediately began to eat like a bear rising from hibernation. I ripped the tops off a family pack of rice puddings and inhaled the lot in seconds. I then opened my throat and dropped down a string of liquorice allsorts, Snickers, Eccles cakes, jelly babies and - just possibly, given that I later found its lone sibling under my chair - a stray Drymax sock.

Ian and Ian

In the hall around me, things were not looking happy. The woman in the next chair had just dropped out of the race and was disconsolately packing up her kit; Jonathan announced he was going to drop out too; Ian had been struggling to keep going for the past 10 miles; and me...? I felt fine. Better than that, I felt great. I was loving every moment of this. Even then, it seemed incredible that I could feel so good when so many others were struggling, and writing this three days later it seems all the more remarkable. But there you have it - I felt great and I was loving my first 100-mile experience. Those who doubted my pre-race curry and beer routine might like to take a good long look at themselves right about now.

Around 30 minutes after arriving, Ian and I left the club and headed down a dark field to a strand of trees. Almost immediately, as we debated which path to take, we met a cheerful copper-haired woman from Cornwall called Emily, and the three of us fell into step. We trotted along an undulating trail through a long wooded section and then down to scuttle across an eerily quiet dual carriageway, chatting happily away the whole time. Emily proved to be lively and great running company.

A few minutes later, heading up a bramble-lined slope from Kings Stanley, we ran into a group of male runners. One of them had a tinny speaker blasting Oasis tunes from his backpack pocket. Not really wanting the beautiful stillness of the evening broken like this, the three of us kept trying to fall back and let the music boys get ahead. Except they never did. They kept surging away, leaving us in silence, only to slow to a walk a few moments later, at which point we'd catch up again. This kept on happening. Surge-slow-catchup. Surge-slow-catchup. Repeat over and over until reaching the Frocester Hill checkpoint at 58.5 miles. Here, at last, we realised what was going on. As I filled up on more rice pudding (this time with a massive dollop of jam - thank you checkpoint man!) we could see that one of the music boys was collapsed in a chair, thoroughly exhausted from the effort. He hadn't been able to keep up a run for any length of time, which explained the surging and slowing. (We didn't see him again, and I'm sure he must have dropped. His companions later flew past us in a flustered panic next to the Tyndale Monument, having misunderstood a message about cut-off times.)

As we left the Frocester Hill checkpoint, Emily, Ian and I picked up a new companion. Wearing a Vegan Runners vest, this man's name was John. John was great company and it was lovely to have him with us. From hereon in were were a foursome.

Alright, I'm just going to say this and get it over with: whoever planned the Cotswold Way is an evil bastard. There - I've said it. There is no other explanation for why the route goes over Cam Long Down when there's a perfectly good footpath that takes a much straighter AND FLATTER route towards Dursley. But oh no, we can't go that way because whoever it was decided to send us up the steepest, nastiest slope of the route so far. Ouch, is all I can say. And also: bollocks. My right IT band had started giving me intermittent pain - something I've never experienced before - and pointless and unnecessary slopes were not my favourite things right then. Incidentally, as I'm not going to mention it again, the IT band pain proved to be a weirdly temperamental and unpredictable thing for the rest of the run. I'd get sudden and terrible sharp pains on descents, forcing me to shout bad words and start running crablike. And then it would instantly clear up as though it was never there. At one point I went 40 km without feeling it, only for it to reappear out of the blue and leave me yelling "Fuckity fuck fuck!" into the night. Weird.

Anyway, the awfulness of Cam Long Down behind us, we trotted through Dursley after 2 AM. Late-night drinkers asked what we were doing and wished us well as we headed up the high street and thence up a desperately steep hill towards the golf course. Near the top, there was a rustling sound and a big hairy badger burst out of the undergrowth and stared at us, its eyes green in the reflected torchlight. Deciding we were no threat, it turned its back and trotted away up the slope. John and I were thrilled - I'd never seen one in the wild before.

As we took the long, awkward and dispiriting route around the golf course, listening to the screeches and hoots of owls all around as we ground up and down little slopes, Ian started suffering again. Over the next few hours he went from being cheery and talkative to a silent presence pounding out the miles at the back of the group. The rest of us all understood this. He was finding this run to be really hard and was just dealing with it in his own way, deep in his pain cave. Good for him for ploughing on like that. The guy's got guts.

I, on the other hand, was still - somehow - feeling brilliant. I genuinely didn't understand why I felt so good when the rest of the group were all showing signs of struggling, but there you have it. Firmly believing that the pendulum would soon swing the other way, I resolved to make the most of feeling good and tried my best to keep the others going through the night. I spent a lot of time running in the lead, pushing the pace slightly. I could have gone substantially quicker during this stretch - had I been alone, I would have run, or at least walk-ran, many of the stretches that we walked that night. The rest of the group picked up on this, and a few times people said I should run ahead if I wanted to. But I really didn't want to. I was enjoying their company. Moreover, I truly believed it would soon be my turn to have a bad spell. I'd never run this far before so didn't know what was going to happen. By keeping the group moving, and trying to be cheerful and encouraging for the others when they were low, I was doing my part now in order that somebody could do the same for me if I needed it later. We were now, as far as I was concerned, a team. We had become Team Badger.

I think a big part of the challenge of the Cotswold Way might be the way it refuses ever to let you get into a rhythm. It roller-coasters up and down slopes almost constantly. "I see you're almost getting comfortable hiking up that hill - time for some quad-busting downhill, boy! Just getting used to that cowfield with its painful camber, are you? Try this rocky slope. Oh you like the rocky slope do you? Too bad, it's just about to turn into a long woodland track that's not quite runnable and which makes you duck under a series of dangling thorns before landing you at the edge of a cornfield..." It was even worse at night, because then the Cotswold Way - which is obsessed with visiting viewpoints - finds more ways to taunt you. "Yes, you can see the next village a mile away, can't you? But not so fast! I'm going to make you run an 8-mile looping detour around a bunch of topographs and memorial benches from which you can't see anything because it's dark. Bwah-ha-ha!"

A pre-dawn snack at the Wotton-under-Edge checkpoint, where I was thrilled to see a helper wearing the woolly hat they gave us after the JW Ultra two weeks earlier. Then up, on stiffening legs, over lots more hills on narrow and rocky tracks. Finally, after 12 long long hours, the sun started to dawn on what proved to be a beautiful and surprisingly warm Sunday. As the sun rose, so did Ian, emerging from about six hours of silent focus to make a totally unexpected and funny joke. Naturally, the rest of us teased him mercilessly about needing six hours to come up with a punchline.

Me and Dave Gooding at the end of the JW Ultra two weeks earlier - thrown in here to explain my excitement at seeing the checkpoint helper's JW Ultra woolly hat. And as it happens, Dave here is the person with whom I walked the Cotswold Way back in 2002

On we pressed along country lanes, over cowfields and through woodlands, our conversations taking curious turns. Ian and I both proved to be oddly knowledgeable about the history of high fructose corn syrup; Emily's "guess each other's surnames" game nicely filled a long section of running. Eventually, as the hills finally began to flatten out and be replaced by lumpy and awkward fields, we reached Old Sodbury. This was a funny landmark for me. In a sense, it felt like the start of the home stretch. I ran from Bath to Old Sodbury and back on the first Social Ultra run; more recently I ran from here to Bath on a recce. So naturally I started thinking "Ah, Old Sodbury, we're nearly home", but this was a big mistake. On both previous occasions I had run from here, it took under 4 hours. So I found it really hard to accept the awful truth, which was that at this stage of such a long race, with Ian (and, increasingly, Emily) suffering, and all our legs getting heavy, there was easily 6 hours or more of running still to go. Six hours? No, come on! It's Old Sodbury... It's four hours from here... right? Right?

Well, all I can say is that, with eighty miles or more in our legs, those last miles were tough. We did manage to rally quite impressively between Tormarton and Cold Ashton, but then soon slowed down again. We walked a lot of what we'd have run on fresh legs. And there were stretches here where I started to feel like the slow one, trailing behind the rest of the group as we trotted across uneven fields.

The race had been, for a long time, extremely stretched out. Throughout this whole stage there was no feeling of chasing a runner in front, and nor did we feel chased down. With the exception of Carl Zalek, who appeared out of the blue near Tormarton and then blasted away towards Bath looking strong, we were in a bubble battling towards the end by ourselves and fighting nothing but the clock and our own inertia. I was, increasingly, finding it physically tough. My legs were heavy. But - and this might be the important thing - at no stage did my mind feel bad. I never once felt defeated or entertained the slightest thought of stopping. I take a lot of comfort from that even as I think back on how worn my body felt by the slow sapping attrition of the Cotswold hills.

And so, slowly and painfully, we approached Bath. John had his head down and was getting on with grinding out the miles like a champ. But Ian and Emily were both in a bit of a state at this point. Ian kept sitting down and saying he'd have to drop out at the last checkpoint; Emily was overheated and just couldn't cool down enough. Both were getting punch-drunk and not thinking straight, to the point I had to remind them to eat. I had a full bottle of water left and sprayed half of it over Emily's head. As a married man, I felt guilty making another woman moan in pleasure like that.

And so, together, we ground slowly to the final checkpoint, 99.5 miles in. Here, we found the beaming bundle of positivity that is Tim Lambert, who gave us great encouragement and made us feel like champions. He was able to tell Emily that she was definitely in line for the third woman place if we kept moving. Right, that was it - we had the longest, hardest 2.5 miles to go and couldn't wait around for somebody to steal Emily's podium spot. John and I bundled Ian out of the checkpoint before he could even think about dropping out and we got on with Phase 2 of "The Cotswold Way planner is a right bastard". The route crawled up and over a series of ridiculously steep slopes around Weston, and the only saving grace was that most of them had bannisters - Emily quickly showed us how much easier it was pulling ourselves up the slopes hand-over-hand, and we all followed her lead.

Knowing Bath well, I was able to offer some reassurance as we got closer. "That's the absolute last climb now", "From here it's less than a kilometre", "Turn right at the Circus and it's all downhill from there." As the final climbs disappeared behind us, Ian came awake again, once again emerging from 4 hours of almost total silence to make a really good joke. Now it had happened twice, we had to tease him all the more for it.

Finally, as we came down Quiet Street, I was able to say "We're just a hundred metres from the finish - let's really run from here!" And we did. Down Milsom street then left into the Abbey courtyard. We ran in side by side through the tourist crowds, claiming a four-way joint finishing position at 26 hours and 11 minutes. Since the night, it had been clear that we were running as a team - one for all and all for one. There was no way that race could have finished in any way other than the four of us crossing that line together. It hadn't always been pretty, and there had been some low moments, but we'd worked together and pulled one another through the bad times. My wife Sarah was waiting for us outside the Abbey doors and I fell into her arms with an enormous smile on my face and teary eyes. Emily was handed her third place woman award. Photos, medals, laughs.

Team Badger at the finish. Photo: Nicola Dusterhoff

Afterthoughts

So there it was - my first 100 mile run! Honestly, even now, three days later, I can't believe how easy I had it. Okay, so "easy" is a monstrous lie, because there's nothing easy about running 100 miles and there never will be. Perhaps it would be better to say it was nowhere near as bad as it could have been, or as bad as I had feared it might be having experienced some deeply low moments in earlier races. I never once, even for a second, doubted I could finish this one. I felt mentally strong - hell, I was actively enjoying myself - the whole time. My body was seriously weakening in the last 20 miles or so, and I now see how true is that saying that a 100-mile race has its half-way point at 75 miles. But it really wasn't that bad. The problem is, I now don't know if this was a freak event or I just did things right. And if I did things right, which things? Perhaps if I had left the group and gone ahead when I was feeling like I wanted to go faster in the night, I'd have blown up and ended up in a mess? Who knows? Clearly the only way to find out will be to run more Hundreds. I signed up for the 2015 South Downs Way the very next day.

And what about the event? To get the negative out of the way, I do think it could do with one or two more checkpoints. At times, they felt very spaced out - 13 miles, 14 miles, 12 miles, 9 miles, 11 miles, 12 miles, 10 miles... a person could feasibly be looking at 4 hours or more of plodding through the dark on tough terrain from one checkpoint to the next. The long gaps were hard on the spirit. But, in fairness, when you got to those checkpoints the helpers were superb and couldn't do enough to get you feeling better and on your way. And putting that one issue aside, the event is pretty amazing. I think it should be on every serious runner's list. It's such a challenge. Seriously. Don't do what I did and think "Cotswolds? How hard can that be?" because I'll tell you: bloody hard. A third of the field dropped out of this race or were timed out. A third. From a field of extremely serious and experienced ultrarunners. That should tell you what you need to know. Yes, you think of the Cotswolds and you think of honey-coloured villages and scones and sheep. But I'll tell you, my friend: it's a wolf in that sheep's clothing. And that wolf wants to bite you. 

The Walker Anti-Social Parking Scale (WASPS)

Accurate measurement: it's the basis of all science. With this in mind, I present the Walker Anti-Social Parking Scale, or WASPS. How big a nobber is that person who's parked outside your house? Are the drivers of Peterborough worse than the drivers of Manchester? At last we can find out!

WASPS is designed to be simple, so it can easily be employed in the field.

The base WASPS score is one point for each wheel on the pavement or sidewalk.

This base score is then modified based on the following markers:

• Hazard lights are on +1 point
• There are yellow or zigzag no-parking lines on the road and the driver thinks parking on the pavement is a genius loophole that avoids these restrictions +1 point
• More than half the vehicle's width is on the footpath +1 point
• A no parking sign is flagrantly ignored +1 point
• The vehicle is in a cyclelane +1 point
• The driver has folded in the roadside mirror but left the pavement-side mirror sticking out +1 point
• The pavement is left too narrow for a wheelchair, mobility scooter or pushchair to get past +3 points
• There is a driveway or other parking space into which the vehicle could and should have been parked +5 points
• The vehicle belongs to the emergency services and is literally dousing a fire or otherwise saving somebody's life: -10 points

Wow - that's a WASPS score of 14 points, given there was an empty driveway at this house. Beat that 

I hope you find the scale useful - I'll be at home waiting for my Nobel Prize. One day I hope for a government with the balls to crush into a tiny cube any car found to be scoring more than, say, five points.

A handful of calibration images follow so you can practice.

Two wheels plus half-width and wheelchair modifiers - 6 points

Two wheels, cycle lane, double yellows, half-width - 5 points. If there were any justice there would be additional points for terrible taste in cars

Two wheels, double-yellow lines, perfectly legal place to park A WHOLE FUCKING METRE AWAY - 8 points

Two wheels, half-width rule - 3 points

Two wheels, half-width rule, wheelchair modifier and total disregard for no parking sign - 7 points

Swissalpine K78 Race Report

The Swissalpine K78 bills itself as the "world's biggest ultramarathon and an ultimate challenge". At 78 km and 2660 metres of climbing, the race quickly grabbed my attention when I looked around for an ultra within reach of the French town I would be staying in for my summer holiday. The event also came highly recommended by a nice chap called Richard from Leeds, with whom I ran most of the Oldham Way Ultra back in March. Richard had run the K78 four times after getting interested in ultrarunning and couldn't speak highly enough of the event. This was quite a relief, as I'd already paid the entry fee by the time I met him. Speaking of which, I'll say up front that I thought the Swissalpine wass really good value for money, particularly as the entry fee includes not only a huge number of aid stations but also a return train ticket from anywhere in Switzerland to the race start in Davos. This encouragement to use public transport both to and during the race is a great move by the organizers, and must dramatically reduce the number of car trips involved.

Early morning, at the start

The K78 was not the only event held on the day - it's actually just the longest race in a series which also included the K10 (10km), K21 (half-marathon), K30 (30km), C42 (very hilly marathon), and K42 (even more hilly marathon!), as well as a series of walks and children's races - the weekend is very inclusive and caters for all abilities. The K21, K30, C42, K42 and K78 all use the same route and just start and stop at different points. The K78, as the longest race, does a full loop out from Davos and back again; the K30 starts in the same place and stops at a town called Filisur; The C42 ends at the next town along, Bergün, which is also where the K42 begins. Again, the rail system is used really sensibly, and those starting and ending part-way round the K78 course are shuttled up and down the valleys by Rhaetian Railways, all included in the entry price.

But there was to be no shuttling for me, since I was doing the full K78 from Davos back to Davos (thereby, technically, meaning I would run at zero kph no matter how well I performed). I was joined at the start line by my friend Vince, who a few weeks earlier decided he would come along and have a go at the C42 marathon, despite never having run more than 5 miles before. He's not one to shy away from a challange is our Vince.

Vince at the start line. He'd later regret carrying those sunglasses

At the start line

After our glorious ride across Switzerland the day before, the weather had dawned wet and grey on race day, and it would go on to rain almost all day. As we stood on the starting line, the announcer told us that it was forecast to get to no more than 7 Celsius on the Sertig Pass that day. I was glad of my arm-warmers. A guy with about 15 race medals jangling round his neck bounced past us waving a South African flag.

"I'm looking for South Africans!" he shouted.

"I'm married to one," I said. "Does that count?"

"We're hard work, aren't we? Have a great race!" He bounced off again like Tigger.

View from the start line

The race began right on time, with around 1500 runners bursting out of the sports stadium and onto Davos's streets. There was plenty of room to find your own pace, and Vince and I quickly settled into 5 minute kilometres as the route took a long loop through the town, the streets lined with cheering people who were undeterred by the rain. The staff of all the local bakeries were out waving and shouting.

We ran under the railway lines and then were out into the countryside - roads then tracks across rolling green fields hemmed in by dramatic mountains. Up through villages full of clanging cowbells and people shouting "Hopp! Hopp! Hopp!" to encourage us on. I was particularly impressed with one village where they had an automated cowbell-ringing machine - perhaps the most specialised labour-saving device I've ever encountered.

Between about 10 and 20 km, the route ran up into woodland on the lower slopes of some mountains, much of the way on singletrack full of tangled tree roots that required much vigilance. I pulled slightly ahead of Vince here, and last saw him still looking strong as I switchbacked downhill off a road just after Monstein.

Through Monstein

From Monstein we dropped steeply down through the scented and dripping pine forests, the rain drumming on our heads, to the Landwasser river valley. Leaving the woodland, the next 10 km saw the route hug the valley-side on a track high above the river. I ran through dramatic dark tunnels bored through the rock, unable to see what I was stepping on.

This valley was dominated by the river and by the railway hacked into the hillsides above it, occasionally crossing from one side to another on astonishing viaducts. I kept hearing the distant mournful sound of the train whistle echoing from the rock walls. The route took us on a narrow walkway over the Wiesener Viadukt, where the runner in front of me was so stunned by the sight of the river crashing below that he just stopped and muttered "WOW!". From there we dropped down and down to pass at river-level under the towering arches of the famous Landwasser Viadukt, which graces almost every tourist poster for Davos and the surrounding area.

On Wiesener Viadukt

That's the foot of the Landwasser Viadukt behind

From the viaduct it was a short run into Filisur, where the 30k race ended. Filisur, like most of the towns, had a flock of enthusiastic Swedish supporters waving a huge national flag. The Swedish supporters were easily the most vocal of the event, and would give a massive cheer if you even looked at them. They were great for morale! Sweden seemed to have the greatest number of entrants after Switzerland, most notably Jonas Buud, who had won the K78 every year since 2007. He would go on to win again today, with an astonishing time of six and a half hours.

Although nominally the difference between the K30 and the K42 was just 12 kilometers, in reality the two events were far more different than that. The next stretch, to Bergün, dropped right down to river level before firing up a long long twisting slope that climbed nonstop about 500 metres. I couldn't help but feel for Vince, who would soon be climbing all this on his first ever marathon.

I ran this leg in increasing distress. I had tried to kickstart the old digestive system that morning with two big coffees and a can of Red Bull. None of these had been enough to get the chew-chew train moving out of the station, but as I'd run into Filisur I had felt the terrible downward force of the Bowel Express working up to full steam. "Is there a toilet here?" I'd asked a woman at the Filisur aid station. "Just keep going," she replied with a gesture down the route - cruely failing to add "for another hour and a half" to the end of her sentence. All through the pre-Bergün climb I was eyeing up bushes for suitable hiding places but just about managed to hold disaster at bay. I burst into Bergün at high velocity, clocking a marathon time of 4:31:57 - fast enough that I would have come in 30th place if I'd been doing the C42! It just shows what alimentary distress and desperation can do for a runner. (If 4.5 hours sounds slow for a marathon time, you have to remember that this is with about 1200m of climbing on trails.)

Manfully masking my distress on the final descent to Bergün

Refreshed courtesy of a portaloo and nibbling on a bread roll, I started out of Bergün on the more difficult part of the day - into the high mountains towards the Sertig Pass. The route followed a sloping track of about 10% gradient alongside a mighty glacial river that crashed down its wide rocky bed. For about 6 kilometres the road sloped unremittingly up the river, and I made good progress up the ranks using a walk-run strategy whilst almost everybody else around me walked the entire way. With the C42 people gone, the overall pace felt far less frantic until the K42 runners started to appear later on. Everyone around me here was in it for the long haul.

Eventually the route left the river and started to climb even more severely - firing up a ridiculously steep and muddy track that seemed to go on forever. I counted my paces backwards from 100 to distract myself. The chill increased as the rain strengthened, and I slipped my arm-warmers back on. My watch was reporting gradients of over 30% (later confirmed by Strava) and my pace fell as low as 18 min/km up some of these paths - and I was going at least as fast as most of the runners around me. The long climb to Bergün now seemed like a happy memory!

At some point, without quite knowing how, I realised I had emerged above the tree line and was up in the alien world of the high Alps. Knots of tiny alpine flowers scattered the sodden grasslands; the ground was filled with streams and rivers over which we had to hop on makeshift stepping stones. Wet feet were inevitable. Everywhere there was the roaring sound of glacial meltwaters crashing down towards the valley below. The altitude was over 2600 metres and I was actually starting to feel some shortness of breath from the thinning air as a final steep and rocky ascent took the race to the Ketschhütte refuge.

At the Keschhütte

The temperature was cold up here, especially with the constant rain and drizzle, and the race organizers were handing out plastic ponchos. "Are you okay?" one of the helpers asked every runner, in very serious tones as she stared into their faces. Clearly she was tasked with looking out for any signs of hypothermia. Who'd have thought that we'd be worried about this in late July?!

Two thrilling kilometres of technical descent saw us begin to climb again to the highest point of the day - the remote Sertig Pass at over 2700m. Still fording streams and hopping rocks, the slope went up, and then up even more steeply, until finally, breathless and surrounded by the clanging cowbells of tiny grey Alpine cattle, I stumbled up to an organizer at the crest of the pass and called "Es gibt kein Luft hier!". "All downhill now!" he shouted back with a big smile.

At the Sertig Pass

I had a quick cup of warming soup from the aid station and then began the challenging descent to the valley. The path was steep and rocky, at times crossing ankle-snapping boulder fields and even a couple of patches of snow. I tried to focus on "flowing like water downhill", and really found myself in the zone, shooting past more cautious runners on the occasional points where the narrow track allowed passing. This whole section was enormously exciting as runners slid, stumbled and glided down 25+% slopes in a rolling mass of bodies.

Eventually we were on lower ground, with about 12 km to go to the finish line. Although at this point I was happy to start admitting to myself that I would finish, my legs really started to feel heavy. As the route took us on long rolling singletrack along forested hillsides, I felt myself bonking and was reduced to walking some sections until I could get more fuel in - clearly I'd not been hitting the gels enough. To force myself to run more I kept reminding myself of the most fundamental rule of ultrarunning: if you're wearing more than one piece of Salomon Exo clothing you look like a prat if you're not trying hard! Luckily the sugar replacement finally started to kick in around Sertig-Dörfli, as you can see from the photo below...

Sertig-Dörfli

By the time we were 2 or 3 km from the finish I really started to feel that second wind, and actually knocked off one of the fastest splits of the day as the track sloped down through the woods above Davos, crossing ski slopes and cable car routes. A final little uphill slope through the town and there was the sports centre ahead of me! I ploughed through the entrance, the crowds cheering all around. As a victorious Vince burst from the trackside to run in with me, the announcer called my name and I crossed the line in 10:19:01, punching the air with a massive smile on my face. Today had been about having fun. And although I secretly would have liked to have got back in under 10 hours, and my failure to eat enough had scuppered that, I didn't much care. It wasn't a serious ambition, and being fast really wasn't the point of the day.

Approaching the finish line - That's Vince with his medal in the background

So overall, the K78 was a fantastic run. The organization of the race was superb. The entire route was marked with flags and tape and there was no danger of getting lost at any point. There were aid stations about every 5 km or even closer, meaning you could happily get away without carrying water if you wanted. Each had a different selection of drinks, many had snacks, and towards they end they even started stocking flat Coke (for which I'm eternally grateful).

Perhaps the only negative point of the whole day was that there was far less conversation than I'm used to. Having mostly run ultras in Britain so far, I'm used to spending long stretches chatting to my fellow runners. Here, I hardly spoke to anybody all day. I don't think this was just me either. I tried starting conversation a few times and got little more than polite single-sentence replies; I didn't hear many other runners talking along the way either. Perhaps it was a feature of the international field (there were over 60 nations represented) or just a cultural difference, but the effect was that, without the usual distraction one can find from conversation, I spent 10 hours in my own head with little to think of except running and which bits of my body ached. Thank goodness the views were so extraordinary.

But that's a minor thing, and was really the only downside to the whole day. Otherwise the race was superb and I would happily recommend a running trip to Davos to anybody next July. And to emphasize what value for money the race is, I don't need to point to the inclusive train ticket, the lovely medal or the stylish finisher shirt - I just need to tell you how, now I've checked my GPS track, I see that the 78 km route with 2660 m of climbing actually gets you 79.5 km and a full 3192 m of climbing. Honestly, those Swiss race directors are so modest about how much they provide!

NoMad 50 Ultramarathon Race Report

It is quickly becoming clear that one of the best things about ultrarunning is the people who do it. For me, the bulk of the 2014 NoMad 50 fell into two slices of time, each of which I'll remember chiefly because of the people I ran with.

It began early when, slightly anxious at the thought of my first 50-mile race, I arrived at the back of The Navigation pub to find the smell of frying bacon and a quiet start line under a grey sky. Most of the runners had opted for the 0600 start and were already gone - there were just a handful of organizers making themselves breakfast while they waited for the 0700 start. A local club runner, whom I later learned was called Eddie Mathieson, checked in just ahead of me and opted to head straight out at about 0630 rather than wait. I hung around to see if I could pick up any tips about the route from the organizers or other competitors. What I learnt was that I was going to get lost a lot. I thought about asking whether I could start a mile ahead of everyone else in recognition of the frantic extra mile I'd already run that morning after forgetting my drop bag and having to sprint back to my hotel.

A low-key sendoff at exactly 0700 saw a small pack of us set off along a flat offroad cycleway, heading fast after the runners who had already left. I found myself up near the front of the group with Janson Heath, Sal Chaffey - who was last year's First Lady - and Daniel Hendriksen. From the flinty grey eyes to the craggy features, Janson looked like Figure 1 from "The Big Book of Fellrunning Hard-Men". As we ran, he told us how he had recently completed the Bob Graham Round in some unfeasibly short time.

"You aren't carrying any food or water," Daniel said to Janson. In response, Janson gestured to two tiny pockets on his shorts. "I've got some stuff to eat in here." Presumably the pockets contained rusty nails and gravel.

Daniel himself proved to be something of a dark horse. At first glance he looked dressed more for a day at the beach than an endurance event, in baggy shorts and a loose T-shirt. I initially pegged him as an enthusiastic newcomer trying to keep up with the front-runner - an idea whose arrogant wrong-headedness became apparent when he casually mentioned his excellent performance at the Spine Challenger race back in January. Shows what I know.

The route dropped off the cyclepath and fired across crop fields towards Draycott. Past a hulking abandoned brick-built factory capped with an ornate clocktower, down a narrow alleyway and back out of town, I continued with Janson and Daniel as the route climbed onto a grassy bank and headed southeast before swinging around, over the river and down to Shardlow where we joined the canal for a few miles of easy running, the three of us men slowly easing away from Sal.

My training has been based around paying attention to my heart rate, which I find great for knowing I'm not pushing myself unsustainably when doing long distances. Unfortunately, everything was out of kilter that morning. At the start line, my watch was reporting 80 beats per minute - at least 20 higher than I'd normally expect when standing around doing nothing. I'd hoped to keep it down around 145 for most of the run, but as soon as we left the start line it went up into the 150s and seemed to want to go even higher. Clearly it was adreneline doing its thing [edit: I think it was actually the early signs of a cold, which hit me hard the next couple of days]. Along the canal my heart and I reached a compromise that, like all compromises, left neither of us happy, and I found a pace that kept things at a high but steady 155 BPM. As you can see from the screenshot below, I was able to run extremely steadily at this level of effort, going at an almost metronomic 5:08 pace. But it soon became clear from his frequent watch-checks and the almost imperceptibly widening gap between us that Janson was religiously sticking to 5 minute kilometres. As we continued to follow the canal, those few extra seconds per kilometre meant I slowly but steadily dropped back. Daniel stayed glued to Janson's heels and eventually, as I choked noisily on a hastily gobbled dried date, the two frontrunners disappeared around a bend and I didn't see them again.

A pleasant spell of running alone alongside the colourful narrowboats was disturbed when I glanced back and saw a runner in a white cap who, it quickly became apparent, was steadily reeling me in from behind. This was Matthew Ma, who soon overhauled me and trotted away up the towpath after a brief chat. Somehow I caught up with him again just before Checkpoint 1 where, remembering James Young's advice to look strong at aid stations so as to demoralise your opponents, I grabbed a handful of jelly babies, shouted something about how amazing I felt and then ran off, leaving Matthew behind. Weirdly, this tactic didn't actually stop Matthew from running faster than me. A few minutes later he caught me up and passed me as we climbed over the A50 and back to the canal.

Several more miles of narrowboats, then back over the A50 a second time, skirting Findern and over some fields of corn, I must have been closing in on Matthew as I arrived at a scruffy farm just in time to call him back from heading down a lane in the wrong direction. We ran together for a while, over fields, around the edge of a housing estate and up to Checkpoint 2 in a pub car park. Here I grabbed a handful of flapjack pieces (which sat like fatty cannonballs in my stomach for the next hour - when will I learn not to eat these?!) and was off up the road whilst Matthew was still sorting out his bag.

The route led out of town, following yellow arrows helpfully painted on the ground by the organizers. These took us up to a dead-straight stretch of cycle track, and I ran bursts of faster and slower pace to avoid my legs doing exactly the same thing over and over. I got a nice morale boost as I passed three of the 0600 starters.

Matthew was a steady 150 metres behind me along much of the cycle track, but as I left that part of the route by climbing up some steps and heading north I somehow lost him and didn't see him again for the rest of the race. The route went across a long string of difficult and slow fields here. The ground had been mangled into ankle-turning badness by those twin environmental scourges: cows and tractors. Crossing from one lumpy and pock-holed field to another was made even more difficult thanks to the local farmers fighting to win the coveted East Midlands Most Preposterously Narrow Stile Award.

Here was the lengthy stretch of running alone that separated the two parts of my day. Eventually I hit Checkpoint 3 in another pub car park and passed a big crowd of 0600 starters, including a woman whose back was being flayed horribly by her rucksack. A few hundred metres on I called to a group of 0600s who were heading in the wrong direction up a hill and then, as the poor buggers lost the altitude they'd just painfully gained, I headed off over more fields of wheat and hairy barley, feeling the first signs of fatigue start to appear as I approached the half-way point. Over a road, and the land became more rolling. Dropping down a rough grassy slope I looked back to see a woman dressed in black come flying down behind me at an astonishing pace - indeed, she was going so fast I at first assumed she must be one of the relay runners (who each run just a fifth of the route). This turned out to be Helen Pickford from Sheffield, who later explained she only ever trains on hills and so is happier firing up and down slopes than running on level ground (I challenge you to a cross-Netherlands race, Helen!). She took up a position just in front of me and soon, as the route led us along a field-edge past Kedleston Park, we were joined by a lovely chap called Justin and, shortly afterwards, the three of us caught up with Eddie, whom I had last seen at the start. I'd started later than these three, and presumably they had steadily maintained right from the beginning a pace similar to what we were all now doing; the faster speed I had held up easily for the first leg no longer felt quite so feasible, and I happily slipped into the pace of this group.

Passing through a strand of trees with Justin a few minutes later, we hit the 42.2 km point. It's relevant to note here that I only started running 9 months earlier, and ran a marathon for the first time last December. As I ducked under a branch and looked at my watch, I was delighted to see that my 42.2 km time today, for what was just the first half of a race where I was having to hold plenty in reserve, was slightly faster than had been that death-or-glory lung-shredder in Portsmouth 6 months ago. A highly satisfying sign of my progress as a runner (or perhaps just testimony to the curry-and-beer pre-race ritual I've adopted since then).

Justin and I lost Helen and Eddie for a short while just before Duffield, a town in which the race organizers went above and beyond the call of duty - or perhaps anticipated the runners' mental collapse - by providing a marshall to press the pelican-crossing button for us as we crossed the main road. Leaving the town after Checkpoint 4 ("Only a half-marathon to go!"), we climbed some steep steps and headed back out into the countryside, thrashing painfully through shoulder-high nettles and scraping our flesh through more leprechaun-sized squeeze-stiles. Rejoining Helen and Eddie, the four of us nervously clapped and shouted our way through fields of inquisitive, drooling bullocks. Somehow, despite the presence of three new potential victims, I missed this opportunity to attempt the flock of cows joke*.

(*"Look, a flock of cows!"
"Herd of cows"
"Of course I have, there's a flock of them over there")

We ran through woods on a muddy track, Helen and Eddie slightly ahead, Justin and I trotting along together as he told me about running the fearsome-sounding Ring of Fire race. At one point he sealed his place as Best Person in the World by looking over at me and saying "I'd kill for a running style like yours". Helen, Justin and Eddie were all great company and I was grateful to have them pull me along and make sure I didn't get lazy at this point, as I fear I easily could have done. We passed more fields, then a lane, a track, and a dog barking on a wall. When the dog barked we turned left, because that's what the race directions told us to do. (Reading the directions the week before, I'd thought this sounded like something out of Father Ted - "Turn left where you see a barking dog on a wall" - and yet the directions were all correct and the barking dog was indeed on the wall telling us where to turn.)

Still we ate up the miles. As we ran up a gravelled drive I quaffed a gel and then stopped to spray a nettle patch with disturbingly cola-coloured piss. But my looming dehydration was forgotten as we passed through the last checkpoint and set off on tracks that were now increasingly familiar to local boy Eddie. Through a kissing gate and up an alley, back into fields full of green wheat and swelling rapeseed pods that swished around our thighs and tried to trip us with their roots.

And so into the final stretch. We ran across the fairways of a golf course under the revolted stares of the players; at this point Eddie and Helen scented the finish line and showed their class by digging deep and pulling ahead. But that's not to say Justin and I were out of it. As we realised we could respectively break 9:30 and 8:30 finishing times, we also found the reserves to up the pace considerably for the last few kilometres. Off the road, down a narrow and overgrown footpath, and then we powered through the final few fields, my watch counting down the distance to the finish line - 800m, 600m... (Incidentally, I'd like to nominate the last field for a special award in the East Midlands Shit Stiles Contest. Not content with the traditional barriers of barbed wire or laughable narrowness, this farmer had somehow contrived to wedge a pony into the gap we were meant to pass through.)

A narrow stretch of ground by some railings and then suddenly the path opened out and there was the inflatable arch and I was finished! Eight hours and 28 minutes after starting. Janson and Daniel were already standing there, having finished in 7:41 and 8:10 respectively - thoroughly deserving gold and silver medalists. I thought that might mean I had come third, but I didn't know for sure - I had no way of knowing whether any of the 0600 starters had run a fast race.

The placing was resolved after a slightly awkard moment when the third-place medal was handed to Helen along with her Fastest Lady trophy. Helen quickly handed it over to me, and after some checking of paperwork, the organizers agreed that I had indeed started later than the other finishers who had just crossed the line and so had run the course in less time, meaning I was officially in third place. Phew!

I hung around the finish for an hour or so, cheering in some more runners (including Matthew, who had lost time by getting off-route) and Jonathan, who had kindly given me a lift that morning after deducing that the person walking up the road in shorts, calf-guards and clown shoes might be a fellow ultrarunner. I would have stayed longer but there was a brown dog scratching at the back door begging to be let out, so I had to head back up the road to do awful things to my hotel toilet.

Walking up through the outskirts of Long Eaton, the brightly coloured Buff hanging off my head, the embarrasingly tiny shorts, the weird rolling plantar fasciitis limp... things that had looked totally normal back in the ultra world I had just left were glaring oddities back in the real world. A woman walking her dogs glared suspiciously at me, clearly wishing for a small child so she could have pulled it to safety. I didn't care. I'd just put up a better performance than I could ever have hoped for in my first 50-mile race, particularly as a 40 year old who has been running for only 9 months. That would do me just fine. Balls to the suspicious dog-walkers of Derbyshire!

And the NoMad 50 itself? Well frankly it was a great event. The organizers were enthusiastic and helpful, the event was low-key, fun and surprisingly cheap. And there was even a well-stocked goody bag. It is, when all said and done, mostly around and across fields, and so isn't the place to come if stunning mountain trails are the only thing that move you, or if you're terrified of nettles and cows. But with the great organization, friendly atmosphere and lack of climbing (less than 800m in total), I would definitely recommend the 2015 event to anybody who wants a great day out and to go for a good time on a relatively flat 50.

Strava track here

Lessons Learnt

• Going out fast and then slowing down a bit was totally fine. I started doing almost 5-minute kilometres and towards the end was mostly running at between 6 and 7 minutes (partly because I started to get tired and partly because the terrain became more difficult). I'm pretty sure that if I'd held back at the beginning and gone out at 6 minutes/km then the only difference in outcome would have been that I'd have finished the race slower! Of course, the staggered start times of this event made my inevitable slowing down almost a pleasure - as I came off the gas near the half-way point I was able to fall in with a group of runners who were good company and who were going at just the right pace; if everybody had started the race at the same time then this wouldn't have happened and I would not have had company to keep me moving, particularly in the 60-70 km zone where I felt at my most sluggish.
• I could have gone faster! Yes, I had a few kilometres of feeling slightly leaden and allowing myself to be pulled along by companions, but that's always going to happen for some part of a long race. The fact is that, apart from exacerbating some plantar fasciitis that had already been developing over the past few days, the race didn't leave me feeling too bad physically, and the next day I could definitely have run if I'd wanted to (I didn't want to). I now see I could definitely have gone at it considerably harder and faster if I'd had to.
• I ate less then I thought I would. I'd told myself that I would alternate between a Mule Bar and a gel every 30 minutes, but in the end only ate about 3 bars and 4 gels, plus a handful of jelly babies and the like from aid stations (and that dried date that tried to kill me by the canal). In the end I was still carrying a lot of the food in my race vest and didn't touch the extra food I'd put into a drop bag. Interesting. Perhaps I can carry less weight on my back next time?
• Following the GPS route on my watch was superb. I had downloaded the track from the event website and spent a couple of hours cleaning it up to make sure that it stuck as closely as possible to the actual paths visible on aerial imagery. I was able to navigate the course almost without problem just by keeping the arrow on the line. There was only one point where I had to backtrack more than a few metres, and even then it was because we were just on the wrong side of a hedge.
• Calf compression: oh my god! I've only tried calf guards for the first time recently and they're amazing. My calves are usually the first part of my body to feel the strain and yet here we are, 50 miles of running and they feel totally fine. Even the next day as I write this, they feel perfect. They should be compulsory. I might never take them off again.