I did this event mainly as a way to trying to get back to marathon fitness. Farndale at the beginning of the month showed me that I was definitely not marathon fit. We have had some good runs this month but I decided to do this event as the timing was right, it is very local for me and as much as I dislike laps there are some advantages - you don’t have to carry too much as you pass the aid starting every 4.36 miles. I also decided to take my car, park it just off the course and have lots of ‘just in case’ items and my food in there.
There were probably about 200 entrants - it was a seven hour event and you could run as far as you wanted. Some people were covering 5k others much further than a marathon. Quite a number were training for the Great North Run which is just two weeks away and it got very quiet after three laps.
My strategy was to start slow and try and keep that speed all the way through - 7 min/km (so an hour per lap) was the aim, but the first three laps were faster, 50 mins per lap including stops for food and drink.
Towards the end of lap 2 I was joined by Melanie who ran portions of each lap with me - she notched up 11.5 miles today. It really made a difference and definitely helped 😀
It was starting to get quite warm at the start of lap 4 and then we had the first of five downpours ! Very heavy rain, although it was still pretty warm. Melanie left me about half ways through lap 5 and headed home and I switched on my podcasts to keep me going. I soon caught up and lapped a runner who was walking and clearly had an injury. We started chatting about events and I walked with him for a mile or so. It didn’t help my time but I knew I had plenty of still to finish the distance I wanted to cover. It was fun chatting about events we had both done. It turned out he was 79 and had completed over 260 marathons/ultras, very impressive. I hope I will be able to run marathons when I get to that age (only seven years to go, which is a bit scary)
Lap 6 was a bit faster and overall I was under the 7 min/km I had set myself, so I was pleased. I could choose from whatever medals were left which were a collection from previous events and I chose one from a Hull event because I used to live there !
My new road shoes, Hoka Bondi, were great, but got very wet from all the puddles.
There were also quite a few people I knew so it was lovely chatting to them 😀
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