Time To Get Busy

The Sussex Coastal Ultra seems a very long time ago, and I have had marathon/ultra withdrawal over the last few weeks.  I really feel as if I should have run at least one marathon in the last 4 weeks.  I had pencilled in the Bungay Black Dog Marathon on 6 April, but this was cancelled so I could go and visit my mum instead.

The weekend after the Sussex Ultra (29 March) I did a 16 mile training run with my mate, Tony, to keep him company on his first taper run towards London Marathon. The following weekend I was with my mum and had no opportunity to get out for a long run. All I managed was a Saturday morning run at the Winchester parkrun, which was fun, but I have to say the Cambridge parkrun is much nicer. The Winchester course is 3 laps of a recreation ground close to the city centre. It's as flat as a pancake, pretty much all on grass, with a few tight bends and a couple of bridges to cross on each lap. I managed to finish in 4th place out of 130 runners.

The following weekend Ruth and I drove up to the Lake District for a week long walking holiday. The walks were slightly running related, although no running was done. I picked four walks that covered parts of the Bob Graham Round, which is a circular walk/run through the Lake District covering a total of 62 miles, and going over 42 peaks, with a total climb of 7600m. The challenge is to complete it in less than 24 hours. It is something that is on my wish list, but before I attempt it I want to walk the route as much as possible so that I can really learn the route without having to do too much map reading. Over 4 days of walking we managed to cover a little over 20 miles, mainly because we were always doing there and back walks. If I continue like this I will need to spend many more weeks walking in the Lakes.

We generally had very good weather for April in the Lakes, although it was very windy and cold on some of the peaks. I tried to photo the route as much as possible, but on one walk my hands were so cold in my gloves that I didn't dare take my gloves off to take a photo. All I could think of was back tracking to get downhill as quickly as possible. Thankfully, it warmed up after that, but there were still times when we didn't want to linger too much on the peaks.

Day 1 - walking up Dollywaggon Pike and then on to Helvellyn - the coldest day.

Day 2 - on Steel Fell heading to Calf Crag and High Raise.

Day 2 - summit of High Raise, the dead centre of the Lake District.

Day 3 - approaching Brandreth from Grey Knotts.

Day 3 - on Great Gable with Kirk Fell behind and Pillar in the distance,
the destination of the day's walk.

Day 4 - the weather was bad earlier in the day and cleared late in the afternoon.
I made a solo sunset dash up Dale Head.

Day 4 - summit of Dale Head.

After our 5 days in the Lakes, with one rest day to visit a friend in Cartmel, we then drove to Nottingham on Good Friday to spend Easter with Ruth's family. Ruth's brother and sister in-law were also there. On Saturday morning Brian and I headed off to be parkrun tourists at the Colwick parkrun on the outskirts of Nottingham. The Nottingham crew were a particularly friendly bunch and the course is one of the nicest and potentially fastest that I've run. It's practically a single lap around two lakes, with just a 1km overlap towards the end. My watch measured it as a little over 5k (by about 250m!). I know GPS watches aren't 100% accurate, but 250m seems a big error over 5k. I managed to finish in 3rd place out of 207 runners, and my time was just 2 seconds quicker than in Winchester, but I felt I had put in way more effort than that and was nearly dead at the end.

We got back to Cambridge on Sunday afternoon and I had planned to do a 20 mile training run on the bank holiday Monday. My next marathon is next Sunday in Stratford-upon-Avon. It's not ideal to do a 20 mile run the week before a marathon, but to do less didn't seem an option. The first 15 miles of my run felt fine, and I was really enjoying being out in the Cambridgeshire Countryside once again. However, the last 5 miles felt like a real struggle. I was suddenly filled with self doubt. I have a very busy period of marathons and ultras coming up, the equivalent of 8 long runs over 9 weekends, only 2 of which are marathons, the rest being ultras of various distances. I could live with the run being a struggle, but since completing the run I've had a pain in my right knee, which is unlike me. Hopefully a lot of foam rolling and a massage before Sunday will fix it and I can keep myself in good shape so I can make it to the end of June in one piece.