New Shoes, coconut oil, coffee and pre-birthday splurge

Well, it's my birthday on Friday, 23rd October, so I decided to buy myself an early birthday present and got some new Kayano 22s. I used to work at an Asics outlet, so I really got to like the Kayano and the GT-2000, which is slightly less supportive and cushioned. And as well as being the right shoe for my strange feet, I really like the way they look :)

Whilst I was having a bit of a pre-birthday splurge I also picked up some coconut oil to aid in my mission to incorporate more healthy fats into my diet and medium chain triglycerides etc. I'm also trying to eat more protein and less crappy carbs. However, I feel like my eating habits have been a bit rubbish as of late. I've been doing some intensive trainee primary school teacher training, lesson planning, teaching and not a lot of sleeping, so I've been craving rubbish and haven't been entirely disciplined. But the consequence of this is that I've been feeling a bit yuck. If I write it here, I have to do it...

XNRG's The Pony Express report & ramble

“Curiouser and curiouser.” ― Lewis Carroll

Wow, that weekend absolutely flew by! But, I had such an amazing time. I don’t even know where to start... so I guess I’ll start with Friday. Although, not too much to say about Friday. I granny napped a lot, ate a lot and sweated a lot; the second coach was like a sauna/ would make good heat training...

I guess I travelled a lot & surprised myself that it went so smoothly, since, as usual I seemed to have packed everything and the kitchen sink and I have no idea why or what I had in my huge travelling rucksack, but it weighed a tonne! I made my way down south, way down south to Winchester and a train and two coaches later I arrived.

Earlier in the day, on route to Chester in the morning and on the way to the coach stop, it felt like a bit of a mission with my heavy rucksack and already, it was starting to feel like the beginnings of a warm day. So, I headed to one of the only coffee shops open *cough – Starbucks* and ate lots of food, drank some strong coffee and spread the word about ultras to some inquisitive baristas. Funnily enough, the day before in Chester, whilst in upandrunning, I also had a rather lovely, long conversation with the lady who worked in there about ultras and she actually seemed positive that she might do one in the future, yey!

I only entered XNRG’s Pony Express last Tuesday and I was really excited to do it. It’s been far too long since I’ve done a multi-day ultra and I have really missed it. I guess for those that knew me in 2010/11, during ‘mad-marathon-let’s-get-to-one-hundred’ mode, you’ll know that I used to do a lot of doubles and things, of various combinations. My weekends were never dull and I loved the adventure of seeing new places and having a big catch-up with all the usual suspects (although, my weekends haven’t been dull lately, but only because of a certain someone...) And this was mine and George’s first event together :-) and I met the parents, so lots of exciting things. Although, I was incredibly nervous about all of these exciting things, but everything went lovely *sigh of relief*.

Day 1

Route:

CP 1 - Yew Tree Heath Car park (7.9 miles)

CP 2 – Setley Cross Roads (16.1 miles)

CP 3 – End of Disused Railway (23.5 miles)

Finish – Moyles Court School (30 miles)

I got up really early and tried to organise myself. But, even though I’m not the most enthusiastic morning person in the world, I was excited for this, so I was okay. I still had lots of coffee though :-) and we had coffee in the car when we got to the start and I had my chocolate covered coffee-bean supplier with me ;-) I’m surprised I wasn’t bouncing off the walls. So, after we arrived, which was very on time and early (such a rarity for me, I have to savour it), I picked up my number and registered. I get so used to people calling me Liz, I sometimes forget my full name is Elizabeth, so it’s always amusing when they write Elizabeth on the front of my race number.

So, we were off and I was running at quite a good pace. However, I did feel pretty warm straight away. I’ve never run in the New Forest before and it’s such a novelty to see horses just roaming around everywhere. Although, I must admit that I was a bit scared of the mention of free-range cows and bulls ha-ha.

Reaching CP1, I was so thirsty and so warm. I downed lots of Ribena and filled up my bottle with Ribena. I normally take little bottles of coke with me on these things, but I didn’t this time. Ribena definitely helped though :-) And there was the usual array of haribo, pretzels and little bits of cut-up sandwiches. I also had some brazil nuts which I found really easy to eat and I had a packet of pickled onion space invaders...

When I woke up on Saturday morning it was pretty drizzly, but by this point in the day it was beginning to get quite warm and a little bit sunny.

On both days we ran on a mixture of cycling paths, a bit of road, forest tracks & more rocky and pebbly terrain. I wasn’t so keen on the wider cycling paths or the disused railway line. I really liked the more higgledy-piggledy paths. However, on Day 1, I did go flying whilst navigating my way through some trees/ uneven ground. I stumbled on the uneven rutted ground and then sort of tripped I think. I knew I was going to fall, but I couldn’t stop myself, so I just kind of sprawled my arms out. It was all good though and I only bruised and scratched my knees a little, but nothing major. And I looked like a proper mucky trail runner *roaaar*. It’s not a proper ultra-run without a bit of dirt, right?! I cleaned up my hands in a nice cold stream a little bit further on.

In the last 10 miles the terrain became a little hillier and stonier, so I just walked those and had fun running down them. I also had a close encounter with some rather big cows in the latter stages. I reached a stream and there were three massive cows stood in the middle of the path. I had a bit of a girly scaredy-cat moment and was happy that there were some blokes just ahead of me. I decided the best way past them was to go to the right of the path and jump off a little bit of raised ground into the stream. My feet got rather wet, but it was really refreshing, if not a little bit sloshy.

I wasn’t wearing my Garmin on this, because I need to send it off to get repaired, so I was just wearing my ordinary sports watch. However, I wasn’t too concerned with time and after having fallen over in the first bit, I was very conscious of not injuring myself for the GUCR which is fast approaching. 

Therefore, because I was guesstimating where I was and how far away the finish was, it was a really nice surprise to see an XNRG sign out of the blue...and even nicer that we ran past a little stream and an ice cream van up the road to the finish (this would later prove a nice recovery ice-cream)! Running into the finish, it was lovely to see super-George, who ran awesome and had finished some time ago. I managed to scrape into the finish, just under the six hour mark, which I was pretty happy with considering I wasn’t really trying, well, considering I was just trying not to get injured! In fact, I think that might be a 30mile PB for me; not fast, but nice.

Afterwards, I had a rather lovely shower, got changed and me and George wandered down to the lovely cold stream and got a 99 ice cream with a flake and I had an ice-bath paddle in the stream with a king Charles spaniel. Speaking of doggies, there was this lovely little black springer spaniel wearing blue goggles that was there all weekend with its runner owners...I think it had some sort of sensitivity to UV light, and she was such a gorgeous little dog...we nicknamed her ‘doggles’ :-)

Day 2

Route:

CP 1 – Cadman’s Pool Car Park (10.7 miles)

CP 2 – Woods Corner (16.7 miles)

CP 3 – Wilverley Plain (21.7 miles)

Finish – Brockenhurst (30 miles)

I woke up in a bit of a grumpy, sleepy mood. I know these events are notorious for snoring runner blokes, so I had brought my ear plugs with me, but nothing would drown out the snoring. And there was a particularly loud snorer sleeping near to us. I don’t know what it is about snoring. I think I can sleep pretty well in a lot of different places and it doesn’t have to be a really quiet place either. However, snoring just really grates on me. I think it has something to do with the fact that they’re blissfully asleep and dreaming away, but because of them I am not...it’s sort of mean haha. Okay, I’ll put my soapbox away now...

I was pretty hungry and off to breakfast we went. I have to say, it was a pretty amazing breakfast with lots of bacon, sausages and hash browns. However, I don’t think I left enough time to digest it properly, even though I really needed it, because my stomach was majorly rumbling. As such, I felt pretty uncomfortable and had some bad indigestion for around the first 10 miles of Day 2. This made me feel pretty sluggish and rubbish and I definitely found it hard to get going.

It was very warm on Sunday. It was proper tan line weather and I now have some awesomely silly tan lines to show for this ;-) It also struck me just how amazing the landscape was on Day 2. It was lovely on the Saturday, but on Sunday I felt like I was in Jurassic park or something (minus the dinosaur’s ha-ha). The landscape was so vast, with random horses and cows roaming about and because it was such a toasty day, with sandy, stony paths, it almost felt like I wasn’t in England at all, but it some far away land.

I felt a little isolated on Day 2. I started at 8am, a lot of people had started at 7am and all the super speedy runners (George) who eventually overtook me, all started at 9am. So, I really didn’t see many people. I overtook some of the earlier ones a couple of hours in, then the speedsters overtook and then I was pretty much on my own. At some points, it was nice to see others because even though the route instructions were absolutely spot-on, there were a couple of points on Sunday that I was unsure of. 

There was one point after CP2 where we had to cross this huge plain of grass at a certain angle in order to pick up the red and white tape and other markings, before taking one of the paths up ahead. However, there was absolutely no-one around at this point and I started to doubt that I was going the correct way. I even started speaking to myself, like the crazy mad person I am sometimes... I looked around me and I couldn’t see anyone down any of the other paths, so I kept moving forwards on the track I was on. It was actually quite funny thinking about it. By this point it was really, really hot and I could feel the back on my legs starting to burn, along with my shoulders and neck. Fortunately, I was on the right track and as I looked on the floor to my right, I saw a fluorescent green arrow and mouthed ‘yes!’ to myself! And onwards I went.

In the last 10 miles, it didn’t feel so isolated because there were so many families out and about. It was such a lovely day and there were people cycling about everywhere. This was both a good and a bad thing. It certainly kept me on my toes, but I was constantly dodging bikes and little children. Also, I was feeling a bit paranoid over how I looked, since the day before I had run past a toddler who asked her mum, rather loudly: ‘Mummy, was that a man?’ I can see the funny side :-), but I was also thinking ‘Omg, I must look like shit!’ So, every time I ran past a little child on Sunday, I kept anticipating ‘man comments’. And I’m pretty sure I looked more man-ish on Sunday, since it was so hot, I was a bit frazzled, sleepy and dehydrated.

In the last two miles, I came across another runner who funnily enough had ‘saved’ me form a big crowd on horses at the beginning of the day. This was nice, because like the confusing bit after the last CP, we had to run at a certain angle through a big plain of grass and it took me a while to pick up route markings. It wasn’t long until we picked up the final markers and just one road crossing later; we were running towards that finish line! Yey!

It was so lovely to finish, but now I wish I was out there again. I’ve definitely gotten the bug back. I love this. And George ran so amazingly well, but I’m not surprised he did – he’s a brilliant runner. Overall, he finished 4^th and 3^rd male and I’m really proud of him.

Afterwards, it was so nice to get back and have a lovely shower and de-man-ify! And then we went out and had a lovely meal, with lots of recovery Guinness of course!

Overall, I had an awesome weekend, with lovely crazy runner people. Another brilliant event from XNRG. So, now I’ve done all of their multi-stage ultras, well, apart from their new Cotswold’s Way ultra, but we’ll see, next year...

It's always darkest before the dawn... Thames Path 100 ramble

‘And all of the ghouls come out to play/ And every demon wants his pound of flesh/ But I like to keep some things to myself/ I like to keep my issues drawn/ It's always darkest before the dawn...’ (Florence and the Machine song, ‘Shake it Out’, which seemed to be stuck in my head for a lot of the hard night section...)

Actually, I can remember the song I had stuck in my head last year...at around the 70mile mark, in a cold, wet field; it was Paradise by Coldplay (ha)!  Somehow, ironic or not, my stuck-in-my-head song choices seem to fit!

“Whatever level of discomfort you reach, you reach deliberately. You’ve met the negative head-on, on your own terms. You own it, and you’ll own it forever.

And your world gets bigger. Your spectrum of experiences broadens in all directions — positive and negative. We don’t grow in a line. We grow in a sphere. If you master X, you get access to Y. That’s how it works”. – Johnny B. Truant (Taken from ‘You are dying, and your world is a lie’, this awesome writer dude who just writes really awesome blogs/ books/ has a website...check him out!)

So, wow, what a weekend the Thames Path 100 was!  Below is what I wrote at the time and then I’ve added some other stuff to the random ramblings....

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So, although I had trained a little, I haven’t run in two weeks whilst I’ve been in London. It’s all been pretty hectic. Good, but hectic. And then before I knew it, Thames Path race day was looming. I had massive unfinished business with this, and I was determined to do it.


A few days or so before Thames Path, I was doing some reading up of Thames Path/ Centurion related stuff on the website and also got a few pre-race emails, and then as the week progressed, it became apparent that weather would again interfere with my mission to run to oxford. When it was confirmed that the course would indeed be drastically altered due to flooding along the Thames Path, I felt pretty stressed out. Although, obviously, everyone must have...especially the poor organisers. So, the changes went like this: “The first 38 miles of the course are unchanged. At Cookham you will turn around and run back to Walton (aid station 1). At Walton you will turn around and head back to Cookham. At Cookham the second time you will turn around and run back only as far as Windsor where you will finish. Examine the aid station link carefully for the precise details. The course distance is as close to 100 miles as we can make it, but will run very slightly long, potentially 2 - 3 miles”.


Now, I love point-to-point courses because you’re running to somewhere/ progressing towards a destination, and I pretty much really don’t like laps and out-and-backs very much; I don’t even like them in marathons. Therefore, I was really dreading the fact that a 100mile course would now be made up of all these out-and-back sections. Also, I was a little worried that the path was going to end up pretty muddy/ trampled from all the running up and down. This did happen, but I think it was inevitable, and it had been wet leading up to the event. It’s quite funny, because in the first bit I kept thinking ‘oh, I don’t really like this concrete bit around the streets’, but afterwards, I think all that was on my mind and everyone else’s was, ‘please let this mud stop, bring back the concrete’.

This isn’t going to be a very clear race report, as such. I’ve got lots of work to do (and some sleeping) and most of the thoughts that keep coming to mind revolve around being chilly, mud & the race being quite brutal. Running wise, I like to think of myself as quite a tough cookie. However, it’s strange...you wouldn’t normally think of the flat Thames Path + running, and think ‘brutal’. Okay, so it was close to 103 miles, but still. Mentally it was very tough. I coped well with seeing front runners on their way back to the next CP near the start of the race. However, as tiredness set in and it got a bit chilly, you couldn’t help but ‘torture’ yourself with thoughts on how much further ahead they were than you. It wasn’t that you wanted to beat them, you just wanted the mud to be over as soon as possible and to be warm and to sleep.

Some runners reckoned it wasn’t as cold as it had been forecast. However, I felt freezing...I really couldn’t warm up & I kept layering up. During the night section, I felt so sleepy. I kept drinking Lucozade to pep myself up and listened to some music and my mp3 and sang a bit to myself...anything to keep myself awake. Oh, and I rambled onto Traviss a lot! Thank goodness I ended up running with him, it was so lovely to have company and someone to talk to/ steal American m&ms off of & generally keep myself sane for 80 miles.

At 3am on Sunday morning and around mile 65 or so, I felt a sharp pain, like I’d been cut, on the sole of my foot. I don’t get blisters a lot, but after peeling off my sock, I realised that I had a lot. The one that was causing me particular discomfort was between my big toe & second toe, right at the bottom. My feet were so macerated and blistered and sore. I just had to pierce the blisters and plaster up and hope for the best. I was a bit worried. Fortunately, they didn’t get any worse for some time. However, the pain and discomfort from my feet in the last 15 miles was awful. Really unbearable.


I kept ‘treating’ myself to little sit-downs on benches or leaning against a post, to take off my shoe and air my feet & itch them...they were so hot and itchy and sore. So, there I was, freezing, but my feet were steaming hot. Not that I was in any great physical state by this point, but I found that I was still running sort of okay, because walking was harder than run-shuffling, since it was putting more pressure on my feet/ longer contact with the ground....so I was able to do little sprints, walk, run, hobble etc. They really, really did hurt though. But I accept the pain. I know doing a 100 miler is going to involve some discomfort. I did have a bit of a cry in the last 20 miles though. I just felt very emotional. I was emotional about my sore feet and emotional about the prospect of finishing this one after last year. This weekend was just surreal.


There’s so much more I need to write really. And to mention that the volunteers/ aid station folk were all fantastic. I was moving about and freezing, so they must have been so cold stood there at the CPs, but had to keep going, to keep us all fed and chirpy.

Getting to that finish line was amazing, but so strange. I made it in around 28 hrs. 40ish something mins. It never quite seems real that you travelled that far without transport. Today I have hobbled a lot & my feet are quite swollen, but it’s all worth it :-)

Some after-thoughts....

I think I got my eating pretty spot-on for this. But it’s so easy to make mistakes and not eat enough/ the right stuff. I think it’s a pretty common thing that you get into a pace whilst running an ultra and just don’t feel like eating so much...I do this quite a lot. I can remember moments where I’ve had to literally ‘shoot’ food back before with water, which makes you want to be sick, but you have to do it anyway to just get something, anything into your stomach. This tends to happen to me if I leave it too long to eat, because then I really find it hard to chew and eat and swallow food and it’s a vicious circle that you have to break. If you don’t eat enough, often enough then you feel sick and don’t feel like eating. But if you feel sick and don’t feel like eating, then you can’t get in the fuel that you need. And if you can’t get in the fuel that you need, then you’re basically screwed!  So, I started nibbling on some munchies from the first five miles or so.

Food I munched (in no specific order)....

Traviss’s crazy American peanut butter & wafer m&ms; meal replacement protein shake; massive tasty soft oaty choc-chip cookie (everything seems to have a long name...); 3 packs of crisps; cheese wraps; buckets of coffee; chocolate coated strawberries at 73mile CP = amazing; Nature Valley oat bar; Coke; peanut butter sandwich; Pasta with some bolognaise sauce; Lucozade; more crazy m&ms; a blueberry muffin; more crisps & peanut nibbles at CP’s...

So basically....

I loved it. Even though I had a cry and my feet were trashed and itchy and hot and sore. I loved it even though I couldn’t seem to get warm and those last few miles seemed to go on and on forever, with the added nuisance of this amazingly freezing persistent mean wind that we all kept swearing at. I’ve really missed the adventure and I’m seriously craving some more. My overall time was 28h48m3s. Oh, and my trail shoes are still muddy & in a plastic bag. It’s just how I roll...