Charlotteville Cycling Classic 100km

Pre-race prep. Its important. In fact for a multi-day desert race its everything. Prepare to fail, fail to prepare. I learnt this at the MdS a few years ago in 2006. For that race I turned up at the airport with no hydration system because there wasn't space in my undersized pack to get the camelbak in. So i bought a 750ml BLACK Adidas drinks bottle in the sports shop the other side of customs. When i needed a drink i had to ask Jimmy to pass me it out of the side pocket and then put it back in, this isn't a joke. Let me tell you also that black drinks bottles do not work well in the desert. They tend to absorb heat and cook the disgusting energy drink inside to a chicken soup. Suprise then that on Day 2 I de-hydrated so badly i ended up throwing up for 12 hours straight and couldn't eat or hold food down for almost 24 hours. I also turned up with no space left for the sleeping bag so i strapped it to the bottom of my pack with cord and it banged against my a*se for 4 days until i had eaten enough food to get it inside. I learnt on that trip don't be the one turns up an event without trying your damn pack on first EXACTLY as your going to start the race with it. Don't sit there 5 minutes before the 'gun' looking for bits of rope to tie stuff on to the outside of your pack and wondering if 750ml drinks bottle is enough to get you across each 10km/ 2 hour section in 45 degree heat. Its not. I finished that race but from the middle of stage 2 to the end of Stage 3 over 120 people dropped out that year and I still can't believe i wasn't one of them. In that space of time i ate and kept down 10 pieces of dried pineapple. Jimmy was not impressed and frankly mental fortitude was required in very large doses.

Last Sunday I got signed up in a group to take part in a cycle ride, not race, ride called the Guilford Challenge arranged by Charlotteville cc. It was a 60ish mile ride featuring some climbs and descents and the route wove in and around the North Downs, just to the South of London. Sounds easy & nice day out. It was an eye opener for sure.

I got on my bike about 6 45 am and cycled a couple of miles to get a lift. On arrival, typical at this sort of event, there were people with some seriously nice equipment, notably some pretty dangerous looking time trial efforts. I got my bike out and set it down and realised that the front skewer was still broken from the last time i rode it. Nothing i could do so I went to the mobile food truck and had a bacon sandwich. The 7 of us got ready and rode out on to the course at 8 45. I should add two things at this point: 1. I had ridden a 3 day, 200 mile tour of the Somme and Flanders in June with the same group, 4 days after running 100 miles in Virginia and frankly I found it really enjoyable and pretty easy. 2. The week leading up to this Id run London to Brighton, a 56 mile cross country race involving map reading and a lot of ascent/ descent and been training all week finishing with a 2 hour run on the night before so all in all prepared for a nice easy ride chatting and laughing in the sunshine.

We were let out of the starting gate and for some reason the pace from the other riders just went through the roof. I didn't really know what to do ie. were we gonna ride as a small group or should i go at my own speed? In the end 2 of the guys from our group chased the pack and so I went with them. We were averaging about 23 - 24 mph and to say the course was undulating would be an understatement. Every time a hill appeared the guys at the front just grinded right over the top and blew people off of the back. For 25 miles i sat there, lactic acid building in my legs and with ZERO energy from a weeks hard training with my wheel making a squeeking sound with each revolution. I bonked after an hour. I was unprepared and over trained but as usual i thought id just go with it so i stuck it as long as i could. I eventually lost the back of the pack as we hit the bigger hills of the north downs.

In the lead up to the race, one of the guys had been talking about a couple of renowned steep ascents to be wary of and he wasn't lying. We got to barhatch lane at 30 ish miles or so and the road just went vertical. I was cooked, no energy from all my training the week before, eating everything i had with me just trying to put fuel into the system and just as i chowed down on my last bit of mars bar the sign appeared on the right 21% gradient ahead. I just sat in the saddle and looked at the floor peddling in squares. The road just went up and up and up before plateauing out for about 50 yards prior to the 21% section. I was going so slowly i thought my bike was officially broken, if in doubt blame the equipment. I don't know anything about bikes but im pretty sure this problem with the front wheel wasn't helping. I was wobbling around like a drunk taking a massive breath with every turn of the pedals, i thought i was gonna just fall of sideways still clipped in to the bike. To be fair, pretty much everyone else was walking up the hill and some on some pretty nice bikes so i figured as long as i stayed on it i was a hero.

I got to the top and just spun down the other side trying to cure the cramping and lactic acid problems racking my muscles. In the end a car came past and sat between me and the riders in front whom i had no hope of catching on my own so i did what any cyclist truly out of his depth would do and sat drafting the car all the way back up the group. What a cheap way of covering some miles. Shocking. When the car turned off it felt like i was dragging something heavy behind me on a long rope. I managed to get over the hills and down to the finish with two of the other lads. 94km in the end it measured. It took me, wait for it, 3 hours and 49 minutes. I rode a similar distance in a half IM in about an hour less than this.

London to Brighton 2009 56 mile

The last two months have been a rollercoaster of ups and downs and whilst I guess I am out of the other side of this patch now I can't help but feeling all in all my training has not gone well despite being in as good a shape I think as pre-Atacama Crossing in 2008, the last time I really fully built up to an event like the Sahara Race.

At the beginning of August I started adding some hills into my training in order to build up strength for the UTMB 103 mile Ultra in the Alps. Whilst on holiday in Italy I found a particularly good training route out of the Tuscan hill town of Montalcino which involved a sharp descent over 7 miles back to to the main road & therefore a nice climb back from that point. Unfortunately before we set off I wasn't able to get hold of a new pair of road shoes and my old ones were wrecked so I opted to travel with just my inov8 heavy duty trail shoes which I used in Antarctica. The hill repeats up and down the climb felt ok, i was quick descending but had to hold back a little because I could feel the extra impact caused by the lack of cushion in the soles and turning round coming back up the hill felt heavy and was putting a lot of additional strain on my achilles. In the end I destroyed my tendon and got horrendous shin splints.

On getting home I went out for an hour and I was in a world of trouble. I ran home from work the next day and really pushed the pace, its about 6km and I was really flying as its mostly downhill on the way back and by the time I got in to Battersea Park for the last mile to the house I was hobbling along. My foot had lost all of its flex and the achilles felt swollen and my shins were screaming at me. I gave it a week off with ice and rest jogging only intermittently and it seemed to improve a little but as soon as i upped the pace again I went back to square one. In the end I went to see a physio and he stated the obvious, that I had both chronic shin splints which had been lurking in the background for some time plus achilles tendonitis and advised me not to run for 6 weeks. When I told him I was still considering racing UTMB the next weekend he looked at me as if to say 'well if you do that you aren't going to be running the Sahara' so I spoke to Frank and made the call not to run.

In the end it was the right decision. I crewed Frank & Alex around the 103 mile course which took them 42 hours and whilst I can't say I enjoyed driving round France, Italy and Switzerland non-stop for 36 hours, I got a lot out of it. It was the first time I had seen an ultra up close and personal and watched people struggling when I wasn't in it myself. I was early at the first CP and had the pleasure of seeing Killian Jornet & Scott Jurek come steaming through and later in the race to see the carnage unfolding at Champex-Lac 122km in. The scenery looked out of this world and while i was awaiting Frank and Alex's arrival at Arnuvra, took the time to run up to the top of the mountain pass coming out of that aid station and then across to another peak which was utterly deserted and had a marked trail leading up to it which defied belief. It was so steep i used hands and knees for over a quarter of an hour, dropping my handheld bottle in the meantime and watching it fall about 200 metres down a ravine. Coming back down was shocklingly hard and I slid down most of it hanging to tufts of grass in the process and thought to myself most of the way, my god if the physio had any idea I was out doing that right now he'd give up on me.

After seeing Frank and Alex through Champex I drove back to the start finish, had a few hours sleep and ended up seeing them in to the finish that morning. The afternoon I ran from the end of the race backwards up to the Tete Aux Vents, the last of the climbs and descent into town and it was breathtaking. I made it on to the course as the last 3 runners were finishing so that the markings were still out, ran backwards past the guys jogging down the mountain picking up the markers, risked it for another half an hour or so and then followed what I knew back down the hill into town picking up the marker collectors near the end. It was great to see two of the climbs and get a sense of what was involved for next year, but most importantly my foot held up.

On return I went back to the physio and reported good things but acknowledged that to have taken on 100 miles with a niggling problem would have been a guaranteed DNF and longer lasting issue. In the end I signed up for and raced a marathon the following weekend pacing a friend around trying to break 3:30. It went well for the first half which we covered in 1:42 and got a fist pump from Barry Mcguigan the Great British Boxer on the way past. Unfortunately Pete had consumed 3 litres of water before the start unbeknownst to me and therefore at Mile 17 threw up everything he had in him and had to walk to 22 in order to get going again. I walked from 17 to 20 with him and then ran the rest ahead at a good pace as I was impatient for going slowly for a good while, ending up finishing in 3 37 (the 4th time Ive run 3:37) and Pete came through a quarter of an hour later.

I started building the training back up again then on a daily basis and actually dared to pull out the training program I used for the Atacama and started following that which I knew would do me well. It was ambitious to start with and I wasn't ready for the pack yet but with a couple more physio sessions I felt like i was returning to strength. In the end I opted to run London to Brighton on the 21st September and took a decent weight pack (about 4.5 kgs) in order to get a feel for how far Id come in that 3 weeks since kicking it up again.

At 56 miles and with no course markings its not an easy race. They set a 13 hour cut off this year after the 12 hours allowed only 15% of people to finish in time in 2008 the inaugural event. I ran 11:40 last year having spent litterally hours walking around a patch of woodland called Lavender Platt in the middle of the course after I got disorientated and totally lost with another racer. Last year I recorded the distance at 62 miles and this year at 60.1 so I did better with the new track this time around.

I got a cab to the start in South East London at 4:45am, got a new race number handwritten as Id lost mine and started at a fairly relaxed pace at 6am. For the first couple of miles or so there were only about 4 people ahead of me (I think about 200 started?) and I wasn't pushing plus I had a lot of weight on compared to the most others who had only a waist packs or just bottles so I was a bit confused by that but I kept moving anyway. I went through 10 miles in 1hr22, last year I was there at 1:38 (with two toilet stops totalling ten minutes which carried on all day) so a good start. I didn't stop and went straight through onto CP2 at 19 miles which I reached at about 2:46. By this stage I was running with a couple of other lads from South Africa who'd both run 7:11 for the 90km Comrades course in May & another Brit who's marathon best was 2:42 and was planning to run from Lands End to John O Groats next year so I was out of my depth actually.

In the end we made a few wrong turnings at 30 miles or so and wasted a lot of time looking at the map so a couple of groups of 4 came past us. I ended up splitting off at this point as we were all running different paces by now but really started to struggle with the map. I was also starting to rue the amount of weight Id chosen to carry as to be honest over that distance its already hard enough without trying to add to the equation to challenge yourself even more.

The sh*t really hit the fan at 35 miles though. I went through the aid station and spilt PSP Energy drink all over my pack, arms and legs and that stuff is STICKY. Ive always felt it tastes a little like chicken if you blend a lot of powder in and at this stage the chicken smell started to come out. I arrived at a road crossing at Chailey 40 miles in and no doubt because of its attraction to the energy drink a wasp flew straight up the right leg of my shorts and stung me about a quarter of an inch from my nuts. I went crazy. By this stage Id run out of water and had another 5 to go to the next aid station, had bad chaffing anyway from the salt and sticky drink but now the wasp sting just started to rub with every step. I did wonder at that point what i was doing but just kept moving albeit on a parrallel course to the one I should have been taking.

Eventually I got the next checkpoint and got enough water to wash myself down, changed my shirt (the beauty of carrying extra stuff...) and plodded on. I ran to the bottom of the beacon, the really major climb around 50 miles in just before you drop down into Brighton & the finish, again getting lost in the process and knew that I was still in or around the top 10. Just before you come to that point there is a huge open field around a mile across at which point you can see the spectators in the distance cheering runners on to the big climb and look behind you to see the competition. As I got to the bottom of the climb I turned around and saw literally 15 people emerging out of the woods together and out on to the field. They'd obviously joined up with someone who knew the course and had used them through the tricky section. Bunch running in races like this is something i have gotten used to over the years. I climbed well and caught 2 guys but as I got onto the downs my pace went from under me. Eventually people started passing me at around 50 miles as I jogged along they flew past and none of them had any kit with them, only 1 carrying a pack. I guessed a lot of people had met others and given them excess baggage for the final section etc and some weren't bothering with anything at all.

I dropped down into Brighton and finished in around 11:01 which I think was about 35th place in the end & Id counted 22 people go past me in the last 6 miles. A little disappointing as a finish but to be expected. I felt on a good day with training and no pack I could easily have covered it in under 10 hours and if they keep the course next year I'll be better equiped to race it properly and see.

At the end I was pretty tired but not horrendously so but I had to walk a couple of miles down the seafront to where Lisa was parked which I could have done without. Nevertheless the event was a good training run and at a good point in the schedule.

Since that weekend Ive stepped back into the 2 hours a night with full weight pack regime which is tiring but worked well before. The new Raidlight stuff Ive got on has taken the skin off of the small of my back and Im getting some pretty severe pains by Thurs/ Friday but nothing that hasn't gone by the following morning. One more big week, a marathon next weekend and thats it. I'll do a 2 week taper again as it seems to work ok. Just a few 45-60 minute runs in the week and thats it. Just got to add heat to the equation now and its on!