Saturday 27 March 2010

Ironic

Well another age has passed and i am finding it slightly ironic that in training for the longest race of my life I am doing the least most disorganised training EVER!

Oh well it cant be helped...My life now revolves around my three little angels and Strathclyde Fire and Rescues 5 Watch Duty System! Runs must be shoehorned in where they can and often I just cant arrange them to coincide with my runnin Bud Karen...I have managed the key runs...since last blogging there was a 30 miler from Home to Rowardennan along the whw route. Last week was a washout-literally, and I just finished a dayshift and did a poxy 10.5 road route.

I now have to decide whether to go ahead with the 42 miler scheduled for this weekend...but I cant do it till next Thurs/Fri...or cut the mileage to 30-34 due to the proximity of the race....comments welcome. The fling is on the 24th for anyone who doesn't know!

Anyway I'm sure it'll all come out in the wash!

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Aborted 30 and some other stuff











Life.s just been too busy to blog but I have a few pictured from the last few runs Karen and i have done in trainng for the fling. so Ill post them...we ve done a 22 and and a 26 so far. Last Saturday we planned to do 30 Drymen -Inveranan. ill expand on that one!

I had just come off my second night shift...and thanks to the new duty system was lookin forward to two day shifts (sunday and Monday) before bein back on normal shift pattern on Wednesday. This really only left Saturday for the long one. During the day on Friday I had dumped my car at the Drovers (Inveranan)

I got home filled my camel back with NUUM citrus...not quite as nice as cola but a change. And stuffed other random snacks into the remaining space...these included raisins, rice pud and chocolate. See picture of our new favourite snack....pistachios and chocolate mmmmmmm heaven!

We made it to Drymen and headed off but soon found that that nights snow fall had hit the area badly, it was passable but running conditions weren't great. We plodded on, jumping into the footsteps of some walkers who had made an early start.
In parts we had to walk and watching the time realised that we were going to struggle to get to inverannan in a reasonable time frame at the kind of pace we were making.

As we came out of the forest trails the snow got instantly deeper, and the wind chill had caused a hard icy crust to form making it harder to crunch through. we litterally ploughed on...reconciling to a run based on time on feet NOT miles.

As we approached the bottom of Conic we caught up with the walkers. The had decided to turn back...the snow was now thich deep..which means waist deep on me!!
after some discussion and reluctance we decided to abort the run...it was bitterly cold and we just werent dressed for the conditions.

We bid the walkers good bye and headed back to drymen.

A little way into the forest trails we were starting to warm up and we met Marco heading the other way. We relayed the conditions but he was set to meet deb...and thankfully went on to make the rendez-vous... (see debs blog!) As we were talkin to him another runner came up on our tail..Dave..who had travelled up from keswick kto train for the fling and ultimately the whw race.

We ran most of the way to Drymen...and following a slight navigational error (well I dont think ive ever done it backwards before!) repeated the last couple of miles a few times!! Fortunately Dave is very fit and very chatty...


In total we did 12miles in 3 hours!!!! Now Im just trying to work out how to fit in a long run next week with a night shift on saturday and sunday!

Oh well we'll see.

Pictures are from a few different runs..along the whw.