Imber Ultra 33miles 9th March 2014 - Team Bath - Bish, Bash, Bosh!

My good friend and running partner James Donald (right of shot) had a stern word with me before the race. 'You better be in it to win it' he told me.

Team Bath team prize: Guy Landon 2nd Matt Maynard 1st and James Donald 4th 

In this fantastic inaugral local race that I can highly recommend I managed to just sneak out Guy Landon (left of shot and fellow Team Bath mate) to win in 3:58. Guy pushed the pace the whole race and I tried to hang on to him thoughout despite some cramps that I tried to cover up in the last ten miles and a mild bit of hallucination of an imagined water station at the top of a very thirsty long climb.

This was the second weekend in a row that I had run side by side with Guy in a race with 'Bath Half' just the week before. We were accompanied by Martin Indge, who is a super strong and seasoned ultra runner, for 2/3rds of the way as well. I tried to make conversation when I could, without rasping for breath too much, but I don't think I had either of them fooled...

I managed to just edge Guy out in the very last 600metres on a technical steep descent which he had told me three hours earlier that 'if we are still racing at that point, it's yours, because my ankles won't have it.' I felt pleased to be able to run strongly down the rutted woodland gully after 32 miles and knew that all those long miles in the Cotswold Hills through the winter were beginning to pay off.

Guy and I relaxed and stretched out in the sun for a full half an hour before the next finisher came in. James came a few minutes after in fourth and shortly after that we had to put our cans of cider down to collect our Team Prize. It was a wonderful English scene on the Westbury cricket pitch that afternoon and it was good to be there amongst friends.

Bath Half March 2nd 2014 - 1:14:03

Great day out on home streets. Linked up with Luke (who I am hugging) and Guy (second from left) after a mile and we chainganged it for the next ten miles together, sharing water, blocking the wind and keeping one another motivated. Thanks guys!

5k Timetrial 04.02.14 Team Bath - University of Bath Campus

Just before seven on a bitter Tuesday night in February, a troubled supermarket delivery driver brings his van to a shuddering stop in Bath University’s desolate East car park.  Chin on the steering wheel, he sits there now, peering out at the windswept night. A metal barrier in the construction site flexes and concedes and is sent grinding across the tundra to play skittles with the others. The windscreen wipers quiver a little ripple of applause. The van’s panels are shuddering with a more urgent warning that the curious cargo of Value Vodka, Pringles and cucumber will soon become the most unwholesome cocktail imaginable. He checks his timesheet for the third time and despairs at the impossibility of his task.

Into this scene, sidestepping through the rain and slicing through the mist with high knees and cartwheeling arms comes our hero now. George Frost is triumphant from his latest conquest in January’s time trial and dressed only in a skimpy vest top and barely regulation length shorts, he completes his warm up ritual. Others too start to appear. Some of them more conservatively dressed but all with the same wild grin and excited look in their eyes. They know it makes no sense but it has been a whole month since New Year and they are eager to see how their resolution honed physiques will fair. Even on a night such as this.

The runners go off like firecrackers. Alex Carter is in the field and so each runner falls in behind with the sure knowledge that 2^nd place is the only prize for mortals tonight. There is a glimmer of hope right at the start though as Alex takes a wrong turn before being called back on track. After this he quickly disappears into the night, not to be seen again. South-Westerly’s provide crossfire along the northern end of campus as the other runners jostle for position in Carter’s wake. Matt Maynard leads the indomitable Allister Sheffield, closely followed by the chasing group of Ewin, Steve Curtis and Luke Sturgess-Durden. 

By the end of the first lap the rain and wind seem to relent just slightly. Despite the sodden conditions there seems to be a great fire burning in the race as runners blast past the Sports Centre in splits that leave the marshals checking their watches. Allister is in second now, Matt is trying to hang on behind and Steve and Luke have ten yards on Ewin who is running heavy with cold. The others come through in quick succession. It’s certainly going to be a fast one.

Over the next lap Alex Carter opens his lead to almost a minute. This young man sold his soul a long time ago for legs that are invulnerable to wind, or pain or incline. With these he strides out to victory while the others continue to battle it out behind. Allister Sheffield and Matt Maynard run head to head along the length of North Road. Meanwhile Ewin has put a spurt on Steve and Luke to which Steve responds and goes off with him.

Passing the Sports Centre for the last time, Allister wins the battle for second place with a surge so strong that the other runner is left feeling like he has been beaten by the wind itself. Steve Curtis returns to his excellent winning form of 2013 to set a new PB and claim fourth place, closely followed by Ewin and then Luke who also sets a new very promising PB.

As runners continued to cross the line, steeling themselves courageously against the wild racing conditions, the bedraggled delivery driver makes his unsteady way back across campus. He sees the same scantily dressed people of half an hour ago. They had previously struck him as such uncertain and purposeless figures, when stood there, huddled together, attentively in rows.  But they seem different now. And indeed for a moment he does  wonder to himself  what it would feel like to be amongst those smiling people, shaking hands, steaming away, like wild horses in the rain.

Vegetable Love

 

Holkham Woods - North Norfolk

The Christmas season of excess is here. Not much work. Lots of chance to get the sleeps in.  More opportunity to think about your diet and more time to put a bit of structure into the weekly runs.

Yes, this is the perfect opportunity now to get a bit more focused, get the shoes on and out the door as much as possible. Reeling yourself in from overdoing it should be the only concern. In such ideal conditions it should be possible that Christmas really is the season of excess for all the right reasons.

But of course it is not. The weather is bad, the in-laws are round and the hangover bites. It is far more easy to push all those good intentions back, and front load them into the New Year under the resolution banner. 

With a degree of foresight and bitter experience, I anticipated how this festive luxury of time and opportunity could be easily squandered. When my local running club meet on the 7^th of January for the inaugural 5k time trial of 2014, it is then that the mince pies will be counted. Imagining how everyone else will float away from the start line, whilst I am left feeling like I’m wading through leftover gravy has helped motivate me to stay off the turkey and get out on the trails this last week. More on this in a moment.

With regard to the turkey, it has had a complete reprieve this year. Becoming vegetarian last summer during a bike trip to Slovenia has presented a new challenge this Christmas. Maintaining a plant based diet when every animal is being wrapped, stuffed, glazed or roasted inside or around every other is a challenge when family members present them with love, and then consternation when you decline. This is the point, however, when any right on leaf munching blogger would extol the virtues of a vegetarian lifestyle and relate how they filled their self-righteous boots with nuts, and pulses and tofu at every Christmas lunch and dinner and felt all the better for it. I am committed to reducing my carbon footprint by not eating animals. But I still have a lot to learn about the variety of vegetable products that could supplement the place on my plate once occupied by meat in order to make this transition an entirely full-filling one.   

In an attempt to put this right I have been reading my Christmas present from my sister Olivia: ‘Eat and Run’ by Scott Jurek.  It is, in part, an autobiographical account of his rise to legendary status as the seven time winner of the Western States 100mile Ultra marathon. Running alongside this physical journey, however, is what Jurek presents as the equally important nutritional one.

Eating with deliberateness the food that your body wants and needs to perform in the way that you in turn desire is presented as a symbiotic relationship. I thought that the recipes at the start of each chapter would be a quirky starter to the main event. But Scott Jurek’s insistence on the role nutrition has taken at every stage of his career success is, well, food for thought. I will be adding agave, chia and spirulina to my own cooking vocabulary and cupboard in the New Year. Here’s to being a better vegetarian in 2014.

And so back to the holiday miles. The rest in the build-up to the holidays paid off. After a long but wonderful weekend with my friends Jonny and Sophie in North Wales to celebrate their marriage and a run on the Anglesey beaches with my old friend Sally Wrigley, I got in a really decent seven day effort. From my parent’s home in Orpington, Kent one day, I hotfooted it south. I wanted to run a section of the North Downs Way as a Guy Landon from Team Bath is competing in the North Downs 100 in the summer of the New Year and it is the closet long distance footpath to my childhood home. It was the day after the storm in the South East and after a few miles I skirted round the woods of Biggin Hill Airport. I looked up intermittently to see whether the great swaying boughs that had been threatened by the building weather system when I passed through this way two days ago had made it through the ensuing onlsaught. Vaulting trees that lay across the path interrupted this, but equally gave answer. OS map in hand I cherry picked the footpaths beyond which led me further south, away from towns, and through wet fields where the smells of soil and disturbed underground creatures puffed up from my passing there. Softly billowing hills and valleys neatly punctuated by rustic stiles and occasional copses made for a meandering course that eventually led out to the startlingly, almost precipitous by comparison, North Downs ridge. With the M25 burbling along a few hundred feet below, the North Downs Way makes a rather bold, almost self-conscious claim as a long distance foot path, in comparison with the remoteness and silence to be found on largely unbordered, unbridled routs such as the Penine Way. But for all its southern brashness and its droning soundtrack, I felt connected to it. For it is hometurf.

As startlingly as it begins, I peel away from the NDW after a few miles to begin my journey back towards South East London. I eat two marmalade sandwiches that I lay out on my chosen picnic table of a trig point outside Kelston village. From here I enter a churchyard and then, just as I turn north-east through a field gate, a cloud simultaneously drifts and my shadow of deep winter sun is thrown out infront of me; bobbing exploratively down the long verdant ridge that stretches out below. The pace is gentle and the return leg passes in that way that only the experience of the unfamiliar can allow, when your mind is absorbed by details of the new as I navigate through virgin woods and previously untrodden paths. I choose to follow unfamiliar tracks for as long as possible (no matter if they lead me meandering) until even the most innocuous mulch bedded trail is snuffed out and I pick up concrete for the remaining 2 or 3 miles to the front door.

I travelled to the Norfolk Broads on the Friday and finished the week off with a 23mile journey out along the Branacaster Coast to Wells by way of sanddunes and marshland and deep rich pine forests where too the recent rain still helped  leech smells of sap and salt more strongly than ever.  I totted up a P.B. 73+mile week; the majority of which had been run off road. Not bad I thought for the Christmas week of excess. Not having the stresses of work to tire me out before I even opened the door was a contributing factor. But mainly it was the newness of the routes that I ran and also the company of the people I ran some of the miles with that had made it happen. Here’s  to new trails and old running companions in 2014.

 

 

 

Zzzmas

Rest. A dirty word for some sporty types. At best it has overtones of burnout and lethargy. At worst, just down right laziness. ‘Rest is for the weak. Sleep when you are dead.’ Such sentiments can lead us guiltily into our next session.  And perhaps to the next one. And even to the one after that.  But what if you really are just tired. And what if all you really need to improve is quite the opposite of what you are giving your body? Sometimes the answer might just be simple. Rest.

I am increasingly becoming one of those people who like to keep track of things. I have begun a basic week-by-week chart in the kitchen where I plot totals of the running I have been doing. Black is for steady jogging. Red is for speedwork. Blue is for any extras such as core training or an exercise class and green is for cycling miles. At the end of each week I tot it all up with a cup of tea and see where it has all got me. If I was an intelligent chap it would now show measured but steady progress in both miles covered and elevation tackled. But because I am not, it isn’t. Instead it is a jumbled affair of decent efforts one week followed by tiredness and ‘work getting in the way another.’ This is then followed by a let’s-try-and-make-up-for-last-week’s-low-mileage- week the following one. Repeat this cycle for a few weeks and unsurprisingly the special white colour code manifests itself with a vengeance…

Right now I’m making rest, the top training priority. With the two week Christmas break just two days away and the gentle return to the good life and no alarm clocks now imminent, it would be a real shame to arrive at this point entirely depleted both in mind and body. I have been feeling off for the last two weeks and have cut short, or cut out entirely, lots of runs. Reluctantly I could have forced myself out of the door and up a hill and dialled into ‘soldier on regardless mode.’ But there’s plenty of time to get fitter and a few runs missed won’t send me spiralling down into the never get off the couch category: despite what any dispassionate training schedule might have me believe.

Quite the opposite actually. I hope to run a lot next year. Tomorrow is the first day to register for the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc series of ultra-distance trail events and I will be putting my name in the hat. I would hope to get up to 80-100mile training weeks in the build-up to this and run lots of beautiful trails and get in many gruelling sessions. But you certainly can’t embark on a week of training like this without the right levels of psyche. And getting yourself all burnt out, and fed up, and forcing yourself out the door when your body and your mind are asking you to just chill your beans and wash your socks for the evening –well, that’s not going to get you anywhere. Right now I’d much rather just run the clock down to Friday and feel rested; ready to enjoy some cool winter runs in the frost with no alarm clocks or tiredness in the legs. And so when I do finally open the front door again, it will be with daylight and excitement and rested legs stretching out well into the New Year.

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...

Five weeks with friends: From Bath to Ljubljana by bicycle

A couple of photos of England
 on the three day trip to Dover

This summer I spent five weeks cycling East from my home in Bath, accompanied most of the way by my two friends Zack and Owen. Originally I had intended to cycle to Athens but the trip developed the way any should with its own daily dimensions and final destination. I have been on bicycle trips before of longer duration and in more exotic climes, but in some respects this one was to prove the most challenging yet.

Zack and I the day we set off
 together when we met up in Orleans

The three of us united, setting off from Chamberry into the Alps

Owen is my sister’s long term boyfriend and we have spent lots of time together in familial situations but not so much by ourselves. He was taking three weeks of precious leave to be on this trip for the majority of its duration with us. This, to Zack’s amusement and my sister’s contempt left him with very little holiday for the rest of year and it was a big commitment of time for him. It was also the first time he had done something like this and I really wanted it to be a success for him. Zack is a experienced cycle tourist, 6 months into a 12 month+ world tour. He passed through my house in Bath in the early summer and his arrival time on the European continent coincided with my summer holidays and so it was agreed we would meet up. Being less pressed for time and carrying more weight it was understandable that his regimen was more leisurely and his direction more ponderous. In order that his efforts were sustainable on the bike Zack also had a desire it would be fair to say, to keep things in better check: washing regularly, bike maintenance and top notch nutrition. So by way of further contrast:  I was keen to get across the continent in good time to see a fair chunk of Eastern Europe before my return and was keen on big mile days and some roughing it along the way to add the greatest contrast to my suit and tie job that I would be soon returning to.

Travelling and living by bicycle has its own unique set of idiosyncrasies that the foot traveller does not have to contend with. 27 nights of the 31 I was away I slinked away at nightfall into woods, into fallow fields, under bridges and struck camp. Choosing these spots when you are travelling together, to illustrate a broader point about the decisions made throughout the whole day, has its contentions. Do you push on when becoming tired to find a spot where you can bathe as well as camp together? How much do you attempt to conceal yourself at the expense of having to sleep on uneven ground or rip your tent on brambles and experience difficulty in stumbling around in the dark? Who cooks? How often? And so on and so on. Of course all the answers lie in compromise. This is not the same as concession nor it is it the same as bargaining. It is distinct from them both and if it is to be done successfully it needs to be done with good will at every potential pitfall. It soon became apparent therefore that developing and maintaining the friendships that I had with Zack and Owen at the start of the trip were the most essential elements in ensuring its success. I didn’t always succeed in this as selfishness and ego didn’t always give way to the common good but learning to make the necessary concessions to live in harmony with others is most probably a lifelong project to which I am glad I committed my summer to understanding, in some small part, in a better way.

The lessons that I learnt about successful travel with others, by way of succinctness, I have compiled below.

1)      There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Pedalling by yourself into the wind, spinning your wheels in a monotonous rhythmic motion that is all your own does take you down some interesting and uninterrupted channels of thought. I have spent a lot of time in the past pursuing such ends and writing about such thoughts. With hindsight these are often however far less fruitful and insightful than you first imagine, as, once outside the wind tunnel of your own musings, no longer deaf to the contributions of others, the smooth cadence of reasoning that you had moved along it is shown to be clunky. You can be as cool and collected as the Dali Lama whilst left to your own devices, but once challenged by the divergent thoughts and feelings of others, you are all adrift.

Being constantly challenged or at least learning to concede or appease in relation to your own thoughts and feelings is difficult and is a skill that has to be constantly practised. Open debate about the best course of action gives three minds to solving a problem. Inevitably some of the ideas raised and the actions followed will not be the preferred of every individual, but being receptive and, at times conceding, are more valuable skills to bring home afterwards than the stoicism and single mindedness practised in following your own convictions from dawn to dusk.

2)      Sharing is caring.

Keeping everyone topped up from the bread
 Owen had stashed on his bike: 'The rolling buffet'

We are unusual as I understand it in England to sit down to a meal, especially with family, place the food to be shared on the table and then divide it up into discreet little islands of ownership to be consumed at the four corners of the table. I first learnt of our strangeness in the UK when in Patagonia with Kim, a Korean friend, in 2011. We ate rice and vegetables from the same bowl, every night for 25 days and never went to bed hungry or a with a harsh word spoken between us. In Orleans south of Paris on day seven of this  trip when I had just met up with Zack and a friend of a friend of his from Albuquerque, we ate a 2foot diameter plate of homecooked Senegalese chicken and Rice, all from the same platter with 5 people around the dish. We sat that night closer, and listened more attentively and laughed harder.

A week later we had reached the top of the highest pass of the trip and Owen and Zack and I were sitting to share some food at 2,400 metres beneath Mont Fukhur. There were several mouthfuls of cous cous to share each and a tube of Mayonnaise left from our joint rations. We passed the bowl along the line until it was finished, each of us taking a sparrow’s portion each time until it was gone. This was done with good grace despite the stress that I believe we all felt from having to share such meagre rations after 4 hours of steady exertion on a steep gradient to arrive here. It is easy at times on any adventure for any element, such as nutrition, to overshadow the overriding objectives and achievements when the members are fatigued. We kept on the right side of this here, and with our bellies half full, we shortly got up, took this picture and then rode down the other side on one of the most memorable descents of the trip, toasting our success.

3)      Safety in numbers.

On a daily basis Zack and Owen made the trip a safer one. I think I was the main beneficiary of this as when we climbed I would take position in the middle of the tight pack we formed with both Owen and Zack taking position at the front and rear in their reflective gear. I was really grateful for this and I definitely agreed with Zack that it made cars treat us with more respect and pass wider and more slowly. I was especially grateful to Owen who, despite not having the low gears for the snail’s pace we set, traversed every pass with us across the breath of France, Switzerland and Austria in an excruciating out-of-the-saddle death march, as he stuck with us. Arriving at the top together safely and united certainly made for a stronger sense of team cohesion.

In the evening of the same day we crossed the Fukhur pass, we were camped in Rueras in a wonderfully tucked away spot that was surrounded on two sides by a very steep ravine from where the sounds of rushing water ricocheted, insulating us from the noise of passing traffic. I recced  the descent down to the water, reported it passable and recruited Owen to accompany me. I jumped down the first bank onto an unstable sloping ledge of loose leaves and other forest compost and despite my own uncertainty tried to reassure Owen that it was still a good idea. After a few moments of further indecision, reason saw good to recklessness as Owen patiently explained why it all looked like a terrible misadventure and coaxed me out of it and helped me tentatively up onto the track. I’m not sure I would have been so bold in the first instance if I had been by myself, but in retrospect I was certainly glad to have a friend strong willed enough to call me up on what would have undoubtedly been a very misguided course of action.

4)      An army of competencies

One of the greatest joys of cycle touring is leaving all those boggy things behind that are so tedious about everyday life such as housework and ironing and, well, anything but having a jolly lovely time really. Inevitably there are still chores to be carried out and it was interesting to see how much these could be reduced again when they are shared out.

We almost always fed ourselves in the evenings by cooking on our stoves and then washed ourselves in the rivers. We didn’t share the last of these chores but it was always nice with the cooking to be able to take an evening off and read your book ever so often.

‘Zak-nav’ took the lead very competently on the route finding aided by his top gadgets.

 Owen was chief mechanic and put me straight several times with his excellent knowledge. I, in my turn, helped out as best I could, putting my hand up for shopping duties and the like.


Steeping back sometimes and letting other people do the job that you conceitedly thought you could have done better is another learnt skill: Not caring if your rice is cooked the way you have always done it, was a tough one to let go for me! 

Me and Owen looking very pleased with ourselves
 with our perfect timing at the Insbruck beer festival

But awareness of not how it is done but an appreciation of what it is that is done, is clearly where the energy should be spent. When you reciprocate the favour, you can rest assured that your attempt at kindness will be conducted in its own bumbling and inappropriate way too.

5) You can’t play chess against yourself….

At times on the trip we would occasionally talk with people in the places we passed through but this happened far less regularly than when I have travelled by myself before.  By oneself you are more approachable and in turn are more in need of human interaction. And so you give more of yourself to the man who sells you vegetables and the woman who hangs her washing in the garden by which you have stopped to eat your lunch. At times however, as Zack keenly observes in his own blog, you can be guilty of giving too much significance to these moments of interaction; believing the commonplace to be invested with some higher meaning. In the darkness of your tent at night you can read more into these situations than was ever there and through ill-conceived and prolonged reflection believe that you are getting closer to the nub of it all, when really you are moving away, or at best standing still.

With Michael, a cool guy I met on my journey back to the UK.

Jon, a teacher from the Netherlands who I rode
 with for a day. He told me about how
 he once planned a trip to Moscow with
 a friend and rather than spending money on
 hotels or excursions, they blew almost all
 of the funds for the trip
before they even got there on language
 lessons and 'invested
 all the money in knowledge.'

Fleeting experiences of the warmth of strangers are gratifying. They in no way however constitute a composite experience of friendship and kindness that is made up of spending lots of time with a few select people, through both the highs and lows this entails. Indeed it would be tiring if every conversation with your close companions was engineered to explicitly develop your friendship or dig away at the essential nature of things. Oftentimes, the seemingly irrelevant things shared whilst washing pots together are as important as the more lofty ones. Indeed this bedrock of shared experience and confidences is the building blocks by which any greater understanding of yourself and your relationship with others comes from.

We played games of chess endlessly together on this trip, often keenly observed by the third party, as we weathered thunderstorms at night time or lethargy at lunchtime. Often they were conducted through prolonged periods of silence and no grand themes beyond the intricacies of the game infront of us were played out. But when it was finally time to pack the pieces away and I returned to my own tent and closed my eyes to go to sleep, I didn’t often have any pending thoughts from the day still to be hammered out. They had already been filed away quite naturally during those long silences in the company of friends. 

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

After five weeks on the road from my house in Bath I popped out in Ljubljana, Slovenia roughly 1,700 miles later. Zack and I had traversed France, met up with Owen and then crossed the French Alps, run the length of Switzerland, diverted up through Lichtenstein

Welcome to the Magical Kingdom of Lichtenstein!

 and then crossed into Austria and via Insbruck we had turned south again to northern Italy before leaving Owen

 and concluding by arriving at the gates of Eastern Europe in Slovenia. In some ways I felt that the trip was just getting warmed up for me here as the food, the drinking culture, the cost of living, the architecture and way of life all seemed so startling different from the broadly homgonous and proper countries of western Europe that we had just travelled through. There is a lot left to explore in Europe and if I can help it I won’t be rushing off so quickly on my next trip to go any further afield than where I left of this time.

Me and Zack in Ljubljana

The Cotswold Relay

Last Saturday I ran the last 9mile leg of the Cotswold Relay from Cold Ashton back down into Bath. This event breaks the full 103miles of the Cotswold Way up into ten legs and the stretch I was to run forms the backbone of the small repertoire of training runs that I have been slowly acquiring since moving to the Cotswolds last September. I don’t know why, when asked by the team captain, I chose this one, as it would have been very nice to have gone further afield and investigated pastures new. But there I was, on Saturday afternoon, with the minutes ticking down and the air temperature ever so slightly beginning to cool as great isolated white monsters billowed in from across the Cotswold Ridge brining some much needed shade.

 

In the wake of completing the Classic Quarter 44mile ultra described below, I had completed in the intervening period of 20days, a grand total of 2 runs clocking about 18miles. This was probably no bad thing and I would certainly have been laughing on the other side of my face by now if I had tried to jump straight back in with a 60mile + weekly training load. So whilst I felt unfamiliar in my running shoes last Saturday morning, I did feel rather rested. I do some energetic jumping, more to prove this to myself, than to warm up as I prepare to make the best of my home advantage.

 

David Vaudin toes the line with me, on my right. Next to him is Holly Rush. All three of us dressed in blue: Team Bath! Both of them are quality runners. David is posting quality Senior times despite being in the V50 club and Holly is now four weeks fresh from her inspiring 7^th place showing at the Comrades Ultra.

 

And then it’s away, down Greenway Lane. The late sun presses to our backs as we turn due south, and we are going down. Down steep and with quick pattering steps on the road. A burning in the ball of my feet as the rubber smarts on the road; the descent steepens more. Runners flail by and then splashing we come through a trickling river puddle after a hard right at the valley’s floor. A meadow is infront of us and two abreast at the kissing gate, we break into it, David and I. Holly just behind. Seven or eight runners breathe out into the field infront of us , the pace relaxing as late dandelions are kicked out and tall grasses have their seed spread by churning feet.

Climbing back onto the ridge of the Cotswolds shortly, we all check our pace but I just manage to carry some momentum through and pass some runners with two still to chase. The afternoon’s air washes around our mouth like fresh sand to a cement mixer and the best I can do is signal to the marshals ‘two cups!’ with my fingers outstrecthed as we pass a water station where I fill my boots.

Beach Wood is on our right and then we are exposed on the common land of Hanging Hill. I hold my breath as I pass the front runner so as to not give away my fight and look out across the vale of Biton, the Seven Estuary and beyond to the Black Mountains. I think of the men who I was told were brought to this spot to be to be hung infront of the world in centuries past. And I breathe out.

I’m deep within my stomping ground here and on the home straight of what was my final 30mile training run in preparation for that ultra. But I have never run it hard, not like this. And I have never been first…. Not in anything actually. And it’s a funny feeling.

I play Pro and look back over my shoulder for the competition, like you overhear proper runners do. But I’m out of my depth now and wouldn’t know what to do if they did start closing in on me again. So I concentrate on running. This strategy pulls me round Little Down and sends me pattering through the high summer’s undergrowth to Prospect Stile as my breath is starting to rollout, heavy now.

‘What’ I think ‘if I go off course. Make it obvious that I wish to disqualify myself, and then jog it in gently to the finish line. It is too difficult to keep going like this. It is too much. Give up now.’

This is crazy talk of course and I push it right back where it can’t boil over. I’m running the flats with heart again as I turn Kelston Round Hill and catch my first glimpse of the City. A long finger of curving ridge extends exploratively into the suburbs now; steep sided, rock strewn and technical.  And I blunder down it slightly vertiginous from the speed of descent.  On the lower arm of Dean Hill there is a stile that leads out across the last vestige of the Cotswold ridge before it fizzles out completely in Weston Village. Like a hurdler, I check my step and try to remember my rehearsed sequence for clearing it. But it is all a jumble as I arrive with too much speed, miss my footing and then spill with violence onto the floor on the other side with a shudder.

After this, and with the steady transition from hedgerows to houses that begins here, the joy goes out of it a bit. I switch my watch off so that I’m not counting the minutes down and then stride out as best I can; more for the sake of the team, than personal victory, to keep the mystery runner on my tail at bay for as long as possible. There is no one to be seen, but the line of sight behind me is diminishing as we twist faster and faster through the suburbs now. I put Weston behind me with what feels like a big effort and when I arrive at the top of Victoria Park I have the feeling that I might just have put some time between us.

The cramps come on as I round the obelisk by Marlborough road and so it is gingerly that I try to open it up as we pass underneath the Royal Crescent; Japanese and Chinese tourists crowding the walkways. I run in the road on the approach to The Circus and a car beeps me as I swing out, recklessly perhaps, onto Gay Street and overtake a coach on the outside. It is an incongruous feeling having started an hour ago surrounded by fields and cows and open spaces. I realise that I am going to arrive first and worry myself over the last 300meters about the attention this might bring as people now begin to applaud. There is no tape thankfully at Bath Abbey and of course it is a team effort, with ours finishing a middling 35 of 70 odd teams. Shortly after crossing the line I hug Sofie who has been enjoying a much more relaxing afternoon with coffee and a good book nearby in the city centre.

It is admittedly a nice feeling to have crossed the line first and I do feel a sense of achievement. I did think to myself, however, how much more enjoyable the last few miles of the Classic Quarter Ultra had been, despite having 3x the number of miles in my legs: pain in the legs from running long distances steady it seems is much more tolerable for me than the pains in the chest from running shorter distances hard. I was pretty off the pace compared to previous years as well, and with a time of 1:05:16 for the 9.8 miles (240m ascent, 410 descent), when the record is just under the hour, I think I was a bit lucky with the runners I was drawn against for this stage.

 

I enjoyed clapping in the other runners. Nathan Smith from Gloucester Gladiators had closed in on me a bit at the end and it would have been close, had he not got lost on the final approach through the streets of Bath. He finished in 1:05:52.  Holly arrived smiling shortly after in 1:06:44 and in 5^th place overall: the next women didn’t arrive for nearly another nine minutes. David arrived with another great run a few minutes behind Holly.

 

After hobbling the short distance back to the house and a shower, we set out on the tandem together to attend the prize giving. Here I met the race organiser Luke Sturgess-Durden who is a absolutely top chap, and along with David and several other members of Bath AC who I had not met before we had a right good old chin wag  and then went on for a curry and this was the best part of the day.