The Hard Miles - Gower Coastal Marathon

The roads diverging infront of us present a proposition of terrifying importance. There’s people in the office decidedly younger now and there’s people playing sport on the telly who were only just out of nappies when I was doing my GCSEs. If you are a late twenty something and you stop momentarily to scratch your head about it, you have been in the real world quite some years now…. Where has all that time gone?

These days, everyone who I thought I knew, seems to have gone to ground. I think it’s that late twenties thing. These I suggest are ‘The Hard Miles.’ This is the effort you have to put in when the end is nowhere in sight. The current is strong here and many of those who are the most successful seem to be swimming the hardest against it. The pace leaves you gasping for breath, and when you do surface, it is a rushed, garbled affair that leaves precious little time for introspection. At best it seems that you can continue upstream for the next fifty years, spawn and then shortly die; or you can get washed backwards to be lost out at sea.

Faced with such options it is no wonder that so many of us just clap on the blinkers and follow suit with whichever way the traffic around us seems to be going. I think that I fell in at some stage with the spawners because everyone I thought I knew is so terribly over achieving and seems to be fighting their way along with the best of them against the relentless current.

Running is giving me a bit of respite at the moment. Last post, I wrote about how it was helping me cleave a divide between work and my personal life; putting my fell shoes on instead of my brogues before I commute home over the Cotswolds.

I completed a marathon on the Gower a while ago and slipped into a secluded eddy for the entire weekend on the beautiful and secluded peninsula in this relatively accessible corner of the UK. Sealions, swooping seagulls, seaspray. With these in sight we ran across beaches of wet, packed sand and climbed out of them on tussocky dunes of Marran Grass. Kitchen Corner, Sweyne’s Howes, Burry Holms. On the higher ground little rivulets from an early morning shower laced their way underfoot; tracing new routes over the sodden peat. Llanmadoc Hill, Ryer’s Down, Arthur’s Stone. Ponies blocked the course at one point. They seemed wild but did not startle when we sidestepped past them. Perhaps they were caged in some way, but we hadn’t crossed a fence for miles. Then my family were on the beach, cheering and waving and smiling and stamping around in the cold salty air. Oxwich Point and ancient oak trees come down from the cliffs to dip their gnarled roots in the brackish water whilst the path runs right up through them before tumbling down down down to the sea again.  
Holy’s Wash, Port Eynon and then I’m out of the woods,
so to speak, at about mile 24.  

And then its Blackhole Gut, and the hours of indecision, agonising over the effort expended, start to finally unravel. In this overdistance ‘marathon’ a further 6miles are left to be run on flat, fast grassland bordering the sea. I take an inventory of the resources remaining and then finally turn the taps on full; emptying whatever I find left.  Red Chamber and the feeling of exhaustion and concentration and continued effort is building to a euphoria.  Ever closer to the river head, to the source, to The End. The sea is quiet at Tears Point.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

I cross the line at the end of the journey in fifth, having lost 15minutes along the way with two other runners and having run an extra mile or so as we tried to find our way back on to the course. I had been pretty honest with myself about the speed and direction I was travelling in for most of the race however and had managed to keep it mainly positive. For this reason I felt that I arrived at the end with the final stretch having looked after itself.  

Such windows into hardships and endings is why I keep heading out on journeys such as these at the moment and why I try to keep pushing on even until the closing stages once the real Hard Miles are over. In the much deeper and intimidating wilderness of the late 20 something it’s nice to see how it all might look if you keep swimming earnestly in the same direction.

 

 

 

 

 

Tapping into something new

Morning fog lifting over the Cotswolds ridge

This last week I have tapped into something a little bit new.

 

I have been commuting home on the intergalactic cycle highway that is the Route 4 route between Bristol and Bath with a big grin on my face; pedalling away through the gathering leaf mulch and transfixed by the steady bike-light that picks its way through the fog that is creeping steadily now, up from the banks of the river Avon.

It's not exactly an 'Adventure' but its near enough the closest I can reasonably get with the hours that I seem to be making my way home from school at.

A one up on this is the sneaky 16 mile round trip commute I made on foot to work and back last Monday. I had been coming home over the Cotswolds all last Spring and Summer but getting the double in whilst taking advantage of a training day really set the tone nicely for these last ten days of training that I sat down tonight to write about.

On the return leg, with night long since fallen, I first dropped down into the lower school playing fields and was immersed in an eerie, cold sea mist up to my waist. The moon hasn't been up too much recently and once again my bike light was all I had to cut through this as I made my way up onto the Cotswold Ridge via the medieval tracks cut into the hillside by ancient feet on the flanks of North Stoke Village. With but a few chinks of orange light illuminating the cobbled streets of the small hamlet on the hillside, these brief torches to the dark were set in sharp contrast once on top of the ridge itself, and beginning to cross Landsdowne, with the glinting metropolis of Bristol and the Severn Bridge beyond.

For a time it is possible here to turn off the light when crossing the racecourse if you position yourself so that you are running with the luminescent white barriers for the horses in the periphery of your vision. And it is running like this that I discover that my arms don't swing high enough that they can be seen when looking straight ahead, thus giving the impression, once running on the even flat grassy surface, that you are floating along through space, with only your breathe to hint at the effort.

After this comes a technical rabbit's warren of a traverse along the flank of a different hillside that rolls sharply away to the south, and down now to Bath Spa. Completing this, by finally crossing through Victoria Park and emerging back into streetlamps again and with night vision fading, all the unnecessary straggling pieces of my working day seem to have been relinquished, like some moribund confetti, to be pressed by heavily clodded foot into the leaf mulch and be reincarnated as something productive and reenergised: perhaps to be picked up in the passing there once again sometime hence.

With all this tooing and froing at strange hours and another good effort at the weekend with my new running partner James, I clocked a new highest weekly total of 67miles. This is by no means outrageous for anyone who has aspirations to run a few more ultra marathons, as I think I do at the moment, but I hoped that it would get me to the start line of the Endurance Life event on the Gower this weekend where I hope to run the marathon.

I think I have tapped into something a bit bit new these last ten days, alone, floating along in the dark, and I'm looking forward to finding out exactly what It is when I toe the line at Rhossili on Saturday morning...