So with the excitement and maddess of the 10 in 10 only just beginning to fade, ankles only just starting to deflate, normal life ony just resumed we have already mentally committed to the next challenge. This time I'm going to be doing the challenge as well as Stu. Also joining us, and indeed instigating the madness, will be our friend Dave and Alix. They are doubly insane because as well as deciding they wanted to do the challenge they also decided they wanted to do it with us.
What is it? An event called Trailtrekker which is organised and raises money for Oxfam. So more fundraising will be on the cards - I'm actually quite looking forward to applying the lessons we learned with Stu's fundraising for the 10 in 10 to this... more in later blogs I'm sure!
It is a 100km (so 62 miles? 2 and a half marathons) "walk" with a time limit of 30 hours. I put the "walk" in inverted commas because we will, I'm sure, be aiming to do it as a run-walk i.e. as fast as we can (which will depend on training obviously). It's a team event, you enter as a team of 4 and you stick together the whole time - I read somewhere that you can be more than 100m apart at any point out on the trail (between checkpoint pit-stops will be interesting then! :-P). And you have a support crew meeting you at various check point en route. The route is all off-road and loops from Skipton north through the Dales and back to Skipton. And to be perfectly honest looks completely awesome.
I'm not sure why I've just agreed to an "ultra" when I can't even run 5km at the moment but something about it just really, really appealled. The route, the cause, the teamwork with people I really like, the massive challenge of it. All these thing contributed but you know when your "gut" just goes "yes - that's what you want to do"? I think it helps psychologically that it is primarily a walking event rather than an ultra-distance race, so we have the safety net of walking it in and still not being an embarassment if the run-walk thing goes tits up.
I did check if you can take dogs - and you can! I'm not 100% convinced it would be a good idea for my two this time. Oscar would end up doing 120 miles if he didn't stay on-lead and his lead walking isn't good enough to make it possible (sometimes walking 1 mile with him on-lead feels like an insurmountable challenge, so running 62? No chance.) And Hugo will possibly be a bit young to be built up to it in time. So definitely not the whole thing. Maybe, depending on who the support crew is and how un-paranoid I can be about Someone Else looking after them out on the road, they could each do a section with us or something. We'll see - it could be just too much extra to worry about and they may have to either stay with the support crew all the time or stay in kennels for the weekend. We'll cross that one at a later date.
I have got rediculously excited about it in a very short space of time, and have already read a lot of the information from this years event and can follow the route (from this year) on an OS map without referring to the route instructions... entries don't open until October for crying out loud and a lot could happen between now and then.
But I definitively want to do this event. I never thought I'd say that about a marathon, never mind anything longer!
I have got a hell of a lot of training to do. Today's run is 7 min run, 3 min walk x 3 which will probably see me covering about 2.5 miles and that won't feel stupidly easy. So yes a long, long way to go. Especially considering that my other team members are Stu, Dave and Alix.
Stu - has done the southern equivalent of this event , Trailwalker, before. Has done 20 marathons now, 10 of which were in a row a couple of weeks ago, is generally quite knarley when he puts his mind to it.
Dave - has done a Bob Graham round in less than 22 hours less than a year ago as well as having 5 marathons under his belt with a personal best of less than 3 hours...
Alix - some kind of ultra-queen. I didn't realise quite how much she'd done until I stalked her profile on a certain running website, but it's a lot and she's quick too.
Me? - I've done a sub-6 trail marathon off the back of hardly any training. I've done a 22 mile off-road event twice, once well-trained, once not at all trained but I survived. I did a mountain marathon with Stu (again I wasn't really trained for this - notice a pattern here?) where we spent 8 hours out and about on day 1 - not a great acheivement but it was time on feet (actually some of it was on arse, crying but that's another story). My general running speed isn't anywhere near as fast as the others and my previous running experience is dismal in comparison BUT I might come in handy with the nav and I'm pretty good at keeping going when I'm completely knackered (all those events on no training have taught me that!) so I'm hoping they won't kick me off the team just yet. :-P
But yes. Training. Starting with that 2.5 mile run-walk this evening and moving onwards and upwards from there.
The rest of today. Horses, dogs, tutoring, trying to keep the bee in my bonnet as calm as possible!
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