Fed up with ordinaryExtra ordinary is where it's at

Our full dress rehearsal yesterday was, how shall I put it, interesting…

It was many things: tiring, lots of fun, hot, the most physically tough thing I’ve ever done, a good test of the amount of food we need to carry, and so on. It’s really hard to describe the full range of emotions and feelings that accompany such a mammoth event.

We had planned to do 26 miles but in reality we ended up doing 28.7 miles as we took some wrong turnings here and there. Reading this now you may think that extra 2.7 miles to be insignificant. We’ll, you would be VERY wrong!

All told we were our for about 7 and a half hours, but the last 5 miles took an hour and half, largely due to the pain I was having in my right foot. Obviously, we weren’t breaking any speed records but this wasn’t a marathon (which is primarily flat and on roads), this was a 28.7 mile fell run. We covered some really tough terrain; hills we had to walk up (and down), scrambling over rocky outcrops and plenty of woodland routes littered with badly placed tree roots.

Previously, the most I’d run was about 14 miles so I’m well chuffed with yesterdays run. Rich had run slightly less than me previously, so his effort was even greater.

The run was painful and increasingly hard to push on after about 18 miles. A couple of weeks ago I bruised my right foot by standing on a sharp rock, that injury obviously hadn’t healed fully and after about 20 miles it started to hurt a lot. The last 5 miles were really tough and any downhill took me close to agony.

I’ve got one blister just below my big toe on my right foot, probably due to that fact that I was wearing new shoes. I’d got my Vibram fivefingers KSO Trek the day before and couldn’t leave them at home! They performed really well. The only downside was running so much on roads, but we didn’t plan to do that and they aren’t designed for that so I can’t hold that against them!

Physical hardship apart, I learnt a lot about our run:

• We need more water than we can carry – the route needs to include plenty of places where we can fill up
• We need lots of food when we stop – in our rucksacks we had enough food I feel but when we stop, we need lot’s to carry us over until we can find a suitable evening meal. We finish each day around 5pm but many places don’t serve food until 7pm.
• Sun cream doesn’t work when running – I’d covered myself in factor 30 as I burn easily. When we started running, my face instantly became a horrid mix of sun cream and sweat. Not pleasant. I need to get a buff head covering instead.
• We need to know the route well – we made a couple of errors yesterday and that add extra miles that we don’t need. Also, psychologically, knowing where you are and how far you have left to go makes a huge difference.
• We need more time to do our run – we’d imagined 6 hours would be a good time for 26 miles. Assuming the terrain is similar, we’re going to need more like 7 hours.

Lots to think about really. The run has given us all a massive amount to think about. At this point though I’m not sure if I feel better or worse now I’ve done that distance. On the plus side, I know I can do it. On the minus side, it was rock hard… and we need to do that 6 times in a row!

Okay, I’ve decided, I feel worse. Much worse!