New event - the Lakeland 59!

Well I've been promising a debrief so here goes. No photos of toenails this year - they've escaped unscathed!


Friday 25th July was an absolute scorcher here in Cumbria. The sort of day where you find yourself searching for shade, or loitering in a particular spot just because there's a bit of a breeze there. A day for staying indoors, or as Marc Laithwaite put it - "ideal marshalling weather!"
Those of us who weren't marshalling lined up at John Ruskin school as 18:00 approached, kit on and nerves slightly jangling, waiting in the searing heat for the off. After a stunning aria (what better way to start an ultra-marathon?!) the hooter sounded and we were on our way.

John and I had planned to walk the start - the temptation is to run along with the crowd, and then have to wait at the various pinch-points on the early sections. We walked up to the miners bridge, loitered to filter through the narrow gap onto the fell path, and then fell into a steady climb up to Walna Scar road, at which point I'm pretty sure we were in joint last place.

Only a Landrover could call this a road, but at least it's a chance to build the pace a bit on the flats, and we were soon overhauling the tail-enders, and then stomping up the climb (2162 feet on this leg) to Walna Scar Pass. The run down the other side was straightforward, with my weekly training running down Skiddaw paying off!

At this point I was steadily drinking, water only, and knocking back the occasional mini-mars or milky way bar. I know from experience that I generally hit a wall energy-wise, 3-4 hours in, if I haven't forced myself to eat. Forced, because at reasonably high exercise intensities, the last thing you want to do is eat, especially in the heat!

We were soon in the first checkpoint at Seathwaite, and the second leg into Boot was dispatched at our planned pace. As we got to Boot it started to get dark, so torches on for the steady climb up past Burnmoor Tarn before dropping into Wasdale Head.
At this point the steadily-building queasiness in my stomach started to grow, and I mentioned to John that a tactical lightening of the load might be required......it wasn't, and we pressed on to Wasdale, with my guts still feeling rough.

After Wasdale the route turns uphill, climbing gently at first, then steeply to Black Sail Pass. On the last section of this climb I paused for a breather, and was suddenly, violently, copiously sick. I must have lost a good 2-3 litres of very watery stomach contents (and apologies to all who were behind me.....).
With the load lightened, we pressed on, with only a pause to deal with cramp on the ascent to Scarth Gap. At this point I was feeling much better, and my only concern was that I was beginning to cramp up. I stopped for 10 minutes in the checkpoint at Buttermere, insisting that John press on, and stretched my quads off a bit. I then pressed on, seeing John again in the Braithwaite checkpoint; we'd maintained the same speed over the leg. Soon after the sun started to come up, and the heat began again. I topped up with food and drink at the Blencathra Centre, and caught John soon after reaching the coach road that contours round Clough Head.
The next couple of legs - into Dockray, then into Dalemain - were gruelling - high heat, virtually no shade, with the final section on roads that doubled the effect of the heat. I kept on drinking, and after every mouthful, felt immediately thirsty again.

As we came into Dalemain I felt bipolar - my legs were strong, maintaining a good pace and feeling much better than John's ankle and foot pain, but my core felt terrible. I hadn't pee'd for 3 hours, and just couldn't get enough to drink.

As we arrived in Dalemain I decided that I'd take 20 minutes trying to hydrate, and that if I didn't feel any better in that time I'd pull out - and so it turned out.
In spite of drinking continuously at Dalemain, and in the car on the way home, I was 3.5kg lighter once on the home scales, and I eventually pee'd after more than 4 hours. At peak I must have been best part of 5kg down, which is 6.5% or so of my body weight.

John continued, and after an hour spent at Howtown - the next checkpoint to Dalemain - he continued at a steady pace to finish 163rd of 192 finishers, with 308 starters, in 38 hours 56.

Apart from a very slight blister on my left heel, and a week of slightly-depressed blood pressure/ slightly-raised pulse rate, I'm completely unscathed. No leg pain, no muscle soreness, nothing.

So where did I go wrong?

I didn't previously know that the heat can depress digestion, and I think I must have started the event too hot, and with my guts already under pressure, my stomach not emptying.

I'd assumed a digestion problem, not a heat problem, so after vomiting my main concern became cramp, which I remedied with stretching. Perhaps if I'd correctly identified the problem as heat, I would have had a proper stop, and re-hydrated thoroughly with something like dioralyte. As it was, I carried that dehydration all the way to Dalemain before succumbing to the inevitable.

Ah well, next year's entries open on 1st Sept. I'll be better prepared next time!

How to lose a stone in 2 months

(well, what worked for me!)

I started trying to lose weight in earnest the week after the Keswick to Barrow run - actually, I'd made the decision a week earlier, but reasoned that a carbo-loading week wasn't the best time to start!

The trigger was reading up on EAH via the work of Tim Noakes' Lore of Running', and reading Professor Tim's comments on his diet - almost Paleo-diet, but the key thing is to cut out carbohydrates.

So I've cut out carbohydrates pretty hard, and found it remarkably easy to lose weight, see profile below: (and bear in mind that pre-this sample, my weight had been static at ~82kg for at least a decade. Also my training profile hasn't changed since November last year, so it isn't the training (alone) that's been doing this)

 

(The outlier to the right is my target weight - 75kg)

From Tim Noakes' interview, this means eliminating:

• Sugar (Must be completely removed from your diet)
• All sugary drinks including cola drinks and sweetened fruit juices
• Bread
• Rice
• Pasta
• Potatoes
• Porridge
• Breakfast cereals
• Some high energy fruits like bananas
• All confectionery – cakes and sweets
• Desserts
• Artificial sweeteners and products containing these products (like “diet” colas)

Sounds tough - especially the 'what the hell can I eat for breakfast?' conundrum, but it's all pretty easy in practice. 

For breakfast I have a bowl of salad, with nuts/ cold ham/ poached egg/ whatever protein on top, and I've really got into it as a juicy start to the day. When I'm away from home, a full-English breakfast but without toast, fried bread, hash browns and definitely not any sort of juice. It amuses me that I can lose weight eating what most people assume is a really unhealthy breakfast.

And that's the crux really - we've been brainwashed into thinking that fat is the enemy, because fat is the reason we're all overweight, right? 

It turns out that's wrong - what's important is reducing blood sugar levels, because that's what causes an insulin response, and triggers fat-deposit rather than fat-burn.

Apart from finding it so easy to lose weight, the other surprising thing is that I've only had a healthy BMI for about 5 weeks - before that (and for the last 4 ultra-marathons I've run....) I've been technically overweight.

The next thing to check (post the 100-mile bash!) is my cholesterol, which was mildly elevated a year ago. Since the dietary recommendations to deal with high LDL is to lose weight (esp visceral fat), and to increase HDL is to lose fat and reduce sugar intake (and notably, no advice to reduce fat intake, other than trans-fats), I should be better on this score as well.

Update to follow....

Live tracker now available!

Woo hoo, the tracker is live! Link here.

Here's a preview - it's not updating, just a graphic. Click it for the live version (once I've started!)

thoughts on my running companion.....

Dare I?

Oh well, it's not as though he'll read it.....

Most of my longer-distance training since October last year have been with one particular running companion, starting with 6 then 8 miles, building to the regular weekly 15-miler we do together over High Pike and Skiddaw.

That's 220+ miles together in total, so I'm getting to know his little foibles - running style, likes/ dislikes, how he comes with distance/ weather/ diet etc. I think we generally run well together.

Pace-wise, we're close over a distance, although at the start he's much quicker than I am, and copes with this by running ahead and then back again. Later on, with a few miles under our belts, he slows a bit and keeps a steady pace with me. He's very good uphill - when I'm slowing with the effort, he hardly seems to notice. He's not keen on blowy ridges, which the Skiddaw summit usually is - he tends to stay close to me, and his enthusiasm for racing off to greet other walkers gets cut back a bit - although he's always got an eye on a rucsac being opened; the chance of someone else's food is always a temptation!

A couple of times his terrain-reading ability has let him down - there's a big pool cunningly disguised as soft turf just below Skiddaw House, and he's been through it a couple of times, the first time I thought I'd be going in after him! To be fair, I would have gone straight into it myself, had he not got there first. Then between Grey Knotts and Brandreth (10 in 10), he went straight into a real peaty bog, and came out looking like an upside-down chocolate eclair!

I'm still slightly surprised by his ability to cover the distances we do together, and above all I love seeing him racing about on the hill - he's clearly in his element! I don't suppose there are many under-2s who would take it all in their stride either - I just got lucky with my choice of running companion!

Alfie the Puggle:

The last weekly training run??!

I ran what is possibly my last weekly run on Saturday, given that I really ought to be tapering next week....although with a new pair of Sketchers shoes in the post, I should also get some miles onto those as well! (BTW, these are an identical pair to my existing best shoes, Go Run Ultras to gve them their full title. Great shoes, which I'll devote a blog entry to in due course..)

This was a fairly slow-paced run - still way faster than race-pace - at an estimated 3:45 or so, no accurate timing since the Garmin lost satellite reception at a couple of points. A nice steady run though, a biting wind on top, but nowhere near as severe as when John & I did it back in February!

<Update>
On looking at the Garmin Connect data again, it turns out that in spite of only 'counting' the time the watch thought I was moving, hence discounting the lost-satellite time, my Fenix did in fact capture the total elapsed time ie total run time - 3hrs 28.20.
Which is double-good, because it means I broke the 8:30 barrier for only the second time, and......it didn't feel like a fast pace at all. Bodes well for the event.....

Training and recce run - Coniston - Seathwaite - Boot - Seathwaite - Coniston

~28 miles, 6,400 feet of ascent

Yesterday John and I did the first two legs of the UTLD course - Coniston to Seathwaite, then Boot - and then back again.
This is probably the last long run (over ~15 miles) that I'll do before the event itself, and we had 2 objectives:

1. Nail the route, so that we know exactly what's coming, where to go, and what's coming up next
2. Crucially - what pace to take at the start. 

Later in the event, pacing is just whatever speed you're capable of, at the start it's important not to go too fast and burn yourself out. It's an ultra-marathon, not a marathon! So practicing race-speed on the terrain was really good.

The day was uneventful - see the Garmin trace for the route back below - but a couple of things stood out for me.
Firstly, the ground is really dry - and long may it continue. Especially where the route follows  Grassguards Gill beside Harter Fell, the last time we were here the whole route was absolutely bogging, I was even thinking of bringing a couple of carrier bags to put over my shoes....yesterday it was fine and a completely different animal as regards the progress we made.
Talking of progress, we made pretty good pace at 1:45 or so into Checkpoint 1 (CP1) at Seathwaite, and a bit quicker into CP2 at Boot. The fast boys & girls will be doing 1:15 and 1:05 or so....
Still that's a good pace, and it felt steady enough to keep going for the duration. Even the downhills felt fine, all that training running down Skiddaw has paid off!

Secondly I had a minor cock-up with the Garmin, which I'm glad happened yesterday and not on the event.. .
I'd set it to UltraTrac mode, which switches off the heart-rate monitor and drops the GPS position-sampling down to once a minute, although this is alterable. (This is to minimise power use, and is the only way to get the battery to last through the event. Garmin claim 50 hours run-time, which is plenty)
In the morning, having charged the watch up overnight (USB lead to the laptop), it was frozen at 01:25, so after googling around to find out how to hard-reset it (long press on the 'light' button), I got it working again.
Once we started off, it would run for 2 minutes (+/- one second, exactly) then freeze - although when I shifted screen to give time-of-day and then back to elapsed time, the elapsed time was still updating in the background. It was almost like doing an auto-lap every 2 minutes, and freezing having displayed the lap time.
This continued after a second hard-reset, and then when we got to Boot I re-started it in 'run' mode - ie no UltraTrac, and all worked fine - see trace below:

When I got home I found the problem...when I'd put it into UltraTrac, there's a screen that allows you to change the GPS sampling rate.....and I'd inadvertently set it to take a sample every 80:01:00 or 80 hrs + 1 minute.......I must have prodded the 'down button' twice,  and not noticed because a 0 and an 8 look very similar on a small screen...doh!
Whew, it's not going back to Cotswold Outdoor after all!

10 in 10 - event update

I did the 10 in 10 on saturday, on what became a blazing hot day in Borrowdale. What a great event!
It's 10 Cumbrian peaks in 10 hours, with the option of 5 peaks in 5 instead.

 
The 10 peaks are:

1. Castle Crag
2. High Spy
3. Dale Head
4. Grey Knotts
5. Brandreth
6. Green Gable
7. Seathwaite Fell
8. Allen Crags
9. Glaramara
10. Thornythwaite Fell

That's 16.2 miles and 6,841 feet of ascent (and descent, for that matter) according to the Garmin. I have to say the ascent felt harder - there are some steep 'ups' in there, including Honister pass up to Grey Knotts, and the un-pathed Seathwaite fell from Sty Head. Gruelling is the word....

Anyway, I headed off a bit after 6:30, and passed quite a few folks on the way up to Castle Crag, and then some more dithering about on the top. I headed straight on down to the Allerdale Ramble path, and found myself in front of a little group, with no-one else to follow. I and another lad headed up the gulley towards Rigghead Quarries, and I pulled out a lead, arriving on the High Spy- Dale Head ridge to see two ladies sitting by the path. They asked if I was doing the 10in10, and whe I said yes, they directed me towards High Spy - the 5in5ers were missing this peak out. I asked how many had come through, and the answer astonished me - "you're the first!".

Somehow I managed to hold the lead almost all the way to Honister, where the feed station (biscuits & tea...) hadn't even been set up yet.

I pressed on up the very steep climb to Grey Knotts, and between this summit and Brandreth a fellow in singlet and shorts breezed past me as though I was walking. He later turned out to be Stuart Booth, veteran fellrunner and champion of the Borrowdale fell race something like 10 years in a row.....

There was a right party going on on top of Green Gable, typical of the brilliantly-marshalled event. We (Alfie the Puggle and me) headed on to Seathwaite Fell, then towards Allen Crags, where my companion up the Rigghead gulley caught me up. We stayed together over the 4 false summits of Glaramara, then the drop down into Rosthwaite was a relative anti-climax. Lyn (Keswick AC) caught us on the descent, taking a far better line and with an elegance and pace that I just couldn't match.
So I breezed (ok, shuffled at pace) into Rosthwaite at 6hrs 11, in 5th place of a non-competitive event, if you don't count the dogs!

The best bit came the day after, when Liz swam in the Derwentwater open water swim; a friend saw someone else wearing a 10in10 t-shirt (very nice BTW, thanks Berghaus!) and asked about it. The guy was gobsmacked by my 6hrs finish, having taken 13hrs himself. It's the little things that make it all worthwhile...!!!!
(I have to say that 13 hours in that heat must have been heroic; far harder than what I did!)

Just to put my ultra-running efforts into context.....

Have a look at Steve Birkinshaw's attempt to beat the 27-year old record to cover all 214 Wainwrights here.

Given the distance, the terrain, the ascent/ descent - and that the record is held by none other than the great Joss Naylor, this is an astonishing attempt and one that puts my paltry efforts to shame!

Do have a look at Steve's site, and support him!

Placeholder - 10 in 10 event

I've got an entry for the 10in10 - 10 Cumbrian peaks in 10 hours, raising money for MS. It's nominally a walking event with around 300 entrants, but it's also about the same distance as my usual weekly long run, albeit with a lot more ascent & descent - so I'm regarding it as a training event for the UTLD100.

It will also be a longer duration test of my new Garmin Fenix2, which I'll use to record the event in due course.

So event writeup and Garmin stats to follow!

A new toy.....Garmin Fenix2

I just got a great new toy - Garmin's updated Fenix GPS watch, the Fenix2.

Calling it a GPS watch is a bit of an understatement, it has so much capability it's hard to know what to call it.
You could equally well call it a compass, a barometer, a training tracker, or even a smart-watch, since it can show notifications from an iOS phone - texts, who's calling on your phone, calendar notifications etc.
Needless to say I haven't scratched the surface of its capabilities, nor do I expect to. I don't care about tides, and I'm not likely to be taking up military free-fall parachuting any time soon. Both are catered for by the Fenix.

For the full details, and an object-lesson in how to a) do a product review and b) focus a blog, I can't match DCRainmaker's writeup.

However, the Fenix2 does do a couple of key things very well, and adds some coolness on top.

Key things first:

1. The battery lasts for around 50 hours when GPS is set to sample at once a minute, which is plenty sampling. This is key for an event where I'm expecting to be going for 36-40 hours.
2. Heart-rate monitoring included in the data capture, so you can analyse your training with the full range of GPS data - location, elevation, speed - and heart-rate overlaid. 
3. Very simple setup, with auto-lap available. I use this set to 1 mile, then get a beep at each mile point with a per-mile pace for that mile shown. This shows me when I'm speeding up or slowing down. 

Unexpected coolness:

1. Easy upload to PC/ iOS device, via cable or bluetooth, with all data available on Garmin Connect...
2. ....which I can then share with anyone/ everyone/ no-one using....
3. ...Twitter...
4. ....RSS feed....
5. ...and with either of the above embedded in my blog/ fundraising site

So on synching my watch to my laptop, I can publish each new training activity (or event for that matter), and anyone following my via blog or twitter can see what I'm up to.

I have no idea if anyone else will find this useful......do let me know!

Keswick to Barrow 2014

K2B

Last saturday I got a late entry to the annual Keswick to Barrow race, it's been running for 48 years and started as a challenge between the Barrow shipyard and the Royal Navy.

BAE Systems have been sponsoring it for a while, and the whole event is absolutely epic in scale.

There are 2 start-points, just outside Keswick (40 mile route) and Coniston (20 mile route), with over 2,000 people taking part. It absolutely tipped down all morning (= the first 20 miles) and then brightened a bit but with a huge headwind. Coming over Kirby Moor was quite a struggle, and I was very pleased to eventually see Barrow in the distance......

I finished in 8hrs 34, which might have been better had I not shot off at 9-minute mile pace for the first 10 miles, getting to Grasmere (10.4 miles in) in 1hr 35. I slowed a bit after that, but picked up speed later on once past Coniston.

The 26.4 mile point came up in 5hr 35, a new PB for the marathon distance.

I was really regarding it as a training run, so I was doubly pleased to do what feels like a reasonable time. The results had me at 369 out of 2157 finishers (no count given for DNFs), not too shabby for a veteran, although my team all thrashed me including three beating 6 hours!