Author Archives for Pete
May 27, 2019 10:37 pm
Published by Pete
There was a moment, twenty five miles into the Edinburgh Marathon on Sunday, when I passed a group of spectators and one of them shouted, “come on Peter, you’re looking good”. It’s one of the most blatant lies I’ve ever heard. Not even close to the truth. I was a mess, staggering along the road, desperately trying to ring the last drop of energy from my body. It had all started so promisingly. With wind and rain forecast for the whole race, the start was a dense sea of people dressed in home made bin bag ponchos. The first few hundred metres were slow until we hit the top of the mound and things picked up rapidly. You run down the mound, along through Princes Street Gardens and past the Scott Memorial, before heading up and onto the Royal Mile. It’s a breathtaking start to a run and I found... View Article
May 24, 2019 10:34 pm
Published by Pete
On Sunday morning, at about 9:59, I’ll take a moment to remember JFK. It’s not his birthday or the anniversary of his assassination or anything like that; it’s the start of the Edinburgh Marathon. Toe-ing the line, as close to the front of my pen as I can be, I’ll invariably think of his 1962 speech at Rice University. And no, contrary to what recent performances suggest, I’m not old enough to have heard it live. Addressing the American people, he spoke about the need to do things that test our abilities and take all our energies and skills. He spoke, essentially, about doing hard things. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge... View Article
May 6, 2019 10:31 pm
Published by Pete
Well, I thought, eyeing the other patients in accident and emergency, that escalated quickly. One day I’d been entering my first relays with the club and relieved to find I’ve not lost all my pace, the next I’d noticed a mild discolouration on my calf, and then the next I somehow end up sat in A&E wondering how I got there. Marathon training has been tough this time out. I’ve been fighting a battle to keep my calves in vaguely usable condition. They’ve been bad but not too bad, painful but not too painful: I can always push through, and I figure that learning to push through pain is going to help in those last six miles. For the past few weeks things seemed to be improving. I had went from signing up just to improve fitness to entering that hazy, golden, stage of training where you start to believe... View Article
April 30, 2019 10:27 pm
Published by Pete
I love London Marathon weekend, it’s probably the only time of the year when the nation turns its eyes to a sport I love. The last three years I’ve been running it — London was my first ever running event of any distance and it holds a special place in my heart. My biggest disappointments performance wise have came there, accompanied by some of the most wonderful feelings. I’ll never forget that first time I turned onto The Mall, in agony I’d not thought possible, and dropped my head and started to trudge. A random stranger clapped a hand on my back and, with more belief in me than I had in myself, told me I could run that last 400 yards with him. By 2017 I’d started running a lot more and I’d trained specifically for my goal of 3:30. My training runs had seemed perfect to me and... View Article
April 15, 2019 10:23 pm
Published by Pete
It seems strange to think that just three years ago I’d never taken part in a race. I was in training for the London Marathon, in a distinctly inadequate manner, and a friend asked me if I’d be interested in running in a trail race in the Lake District a couple of weeks afterwards. That first trail race was the Lakeland Trails event at Staveley and I’ve not looked back since in my love for trail running or the Lake District. These runs have a special place in my heart – there’s a great atmosphere, a variety of events and fantastic scenery. Saturday was my first time at the Hawkshead event and I’d entered the 16km challenge. I started strongly enough and tagged onto the two front runners for a quick first kilometre or so. The route leads around the edge of Hawkshead, starting to climb steeply in the second... View Article
April 6, 2019 10:21 pm
Published by Pete
I’d been driving west for about an hour and a half when it happened. The A66 swept round towards Keswick and Blencathra appeared majestically on the right, a healthy dusting of snow on the summit and the ridge lines. I’m not ashamed to say I eased off the accelerator and whooped for joy. That view is like the gateway drug to the Lake District and to see it with just the right amount of snow, on a clear day, is pure joy. It was the Coledale Horseshoe today, one of the classic Lake District fell routes. Having spent the best part of last week reading past race reports, studying the OS map, looking at elevation profiles, and hitting refresh on mountain-forecast.com and the mountain weather information service, I arrived with peak anticipation for what was ahead. The weather was sublime. It felt as though a benevolent creator had designed days... View Article
April 4, 2019 10:16 pm
Published by Pete
I would tell you how many blogs I’ve had over the course of my life but I honestly don’t know. But I could tell you how many kilometres I ran last year and (of course) how many hours, not to mention how many metres of elevation gain. You have to remember the numbers that count, right? But this year’s running has been tough. In January, after a particularly ridiculous fell race where I turned my ankles more times than I could count, I damaged my calf. It doesn’t seem to have turned out to be anything too serious but it did entail a few weeks of fairly punishing sports massages and a drop in mileage. Travelling around Australia further dropped my mileage and if I’m honest most of my recent training runs have felt very tough. So two weeks ago, when Strava told me my fitness was the lowest it... View Article
October 13, 2018 10:15 pm
Published by Pete
Today was crazy amounts of fun. It was the Helvellyn Lakeland Trails and I entered the 15km Challenge. There is a race too, but I knew that with the challenge I can run close to the front of the pack and stretch myself, and I thought I would stretch myself less if I was further down the field but in the race. The weather was crazy, it’s fairly warm, about fifteen degrees, but there’d been heavy rain yesterday and all day today. Parking was cancelled so we had to park and ride in from Penrith. I don’t like racing in waterproofs as it is so easy to over heat but the rain was absolutely pouring so I decided on my Montane 777 waterproof over a normal technical tee and a trail pack – I put 750ml in the bladder as I’ve had a bit of uvulitis and if I started... View Article
October 21, 2017 9:43 pm
Published by Pete
I think it was at about the twenty mile mark when the steward on the motorcycle pulled alongside me. I’m not great at Spanish, but it didn’t take a lot to figure out that he was asking if I was okay to carry on. I lifted my head up, tried to force a smile, picked up my pace a little and gave him the thumbs up. It seemed to satisfy him and he offered some words of encouragement before continuing on. How had I gotten myself into this mess? I’ve ran twenty miles or more plenty of times this year. Why is it that this time it had turned so horribly, horribly wrong? Why do my marathon efforts seem to always end up in me dragging my legs around the last miles at roughly the same pace as a glacier? Rewind two months and I am feeling confident. Since joining... View Article
September 10, 2016 10:19 pm
Published by Pete
It’s a strange dance that occurs before the start of a long run; the DJ tries to pump up the crowd, with a variety of motivational slogans and Avicii tunes. The runners bounce from foot to foot, trying to find the perfect equilibrium between moving to warm up the muscles and not moving so much that the heart rate goes too high, too soon. It’s over 100, don’t move quite so much, but the tunes are getting you psyched, move a little more. “Hands in the air,” demands the voice through the speakers, and thousands of pairs of hands reach for he heavens and start to clap. The clap lacks the intense and protracted rhythm of the Icelandic clap, yet makes up for in passion what it lacks in beat. With fifteen seconds to go before the gun the tunes stop entirely. A hushed silence falls across the thousands of... View Article
