An interesting choice for my first ultra, but I signed up to run it with Liz who had chosen it as a target crazy race. We both had a very disturbed year of training leading up to it with injuries getting in the way of us doing the consistent number of long runs I’d intended to build the fitness. With Liz’s runners knee flaring up, I refocused her on practising using running poles which turned out to be a very…
All the hard week over the week has been done. We’ve done endurance in the woods, speed on the track and strength on the hills. Today was purely about a beautiful, coastal run along bright red clay trail between two little seaside beach villages, Luz and Burgau. This run is super high on my list of all time favourites. The trail is technical enough to be interesting, but not a pain in the arse, long enough to be a decent…
After a 5kish recovery run last night down the hill to the Lagos Marina (and back up the hill again through the old town!), we stuffed our faces with beef bourguignon, mash, beer and red wine and then headed to bed earlyish (10pm OMG!) so we could be up and ready for today. Monday was the Woodland Trail Endurance run. This is probably my favourite run of the weekend; 1-4 laps of a 5ish mile woodland trail under the soothing…
This year I managed to sign up for the full Spring Trail Series hosted by Dark and White Events. This is three 15k-ish up and down the hills in the Peak District during the spring. I’ve run a couple of their events before, and was really looking forward do this. Last year, I ran the last event in the series at Low Bradfield and came well into the “Gold” pace bracket, setting me up for what I hoped would be…
I’ve mentioned Le Circuits Des 25 Bosses a couple of times in my blog now, so I thought it might make sense to give you all a better sense of wha it was like. When we went out and ran it on our rest day during our climbing holiday, Andy took his GoPro and took rather a lot of footage. He threw this video together with lots of interesting clips of us running it. It’s a bit long at nearly 27…
Ah the rest day. Do you remember what happened last year? Well, Martin, Andy and Liz really fancied checking out the Circuit des 25 Bosses after my stories from last time, so that become the aim for the day. Something went a bit wrong in the planning though. I’d done it before and so I was expecting it to take is 3-4 hours for the 14km. Everyone else though was just looking at the distance and thinking it would be…
Day 2, first day of climbing. We had a slow morning (like we kid ourselves any morning will be quicker) opened with fresh grapefruit, fried eggs on nice toast and lots of coffee before heading to our first climbing area of the holiday. Jim and Lolly suggested we all meet up at La Ségognole which turned out to be a few minutes up the road from our gite. I’d never been here before as it wasn’t in any of the…
Well, it’s been a long time since I’d found the brain power to write a post here. I’d started out with good intentions with my end of year/start of year, but just never found myself writing anything. I guess it happens! Liz gave me a nudge to write something while I’m here on holiday and I though, well, why not. Even if it’s just a brain dump of each day. Maybe it will get me back into the habit. So,…
Wow, what a year 2017 has been. I’ve missed a few round up posts since my Marathon in October mostly down to being extremely busy, but also because the running has got a bit erratic based on that busyness and a bit of lack of focus, but Facebook “memory” surfaced the other day which really highlighted how much of a tremendous year this has been for my running. Perhaps not for the climbing, but definitely on the running. But first,…
I needed to do a 32k long run while out on holiday in France. We’re right next to a lovely wood, but also not far away from the Trois Pignon where loads of awesome climbing areas are. While pondering what route to plot out, Andy suggested I run the “Circuit des 25 Bosses”. Checking it out, it appears to be a circuit around 25 “mounds” in the Trois Pignon, taking in a lot of the climbing areas. What a great…