Start again at your beginnings…

I remember my first fell race, the Chevy Chase on the first Saturday of July 2017. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, harder than the road marathons I’d been doing around the time, and for about three days afterwards I’d have to steady myself on things while my quads twitched and groaned at random.

For the years after that progress was fairly linear, each year I chose bigger challenges and got generally fitter. Lockdown was an opportunity to push hard and while I couldn’t get into the hills, I got quicker on the flat and ran higher volumes.

At the back of my mind was a little voice that said I had to maintain my fitness and keep building until I’d ticked everything off the list; I knew how hard it was to get there, I didn’t want to face doing it again.

And that held up until last September. Well, kind of. I’ve written elsewhere about some of my struggles last year. It was a nearly year. Injuries and illness at just the wrong time saw me pull myself as far as starting the UTMB 100 miler in Nice at the end of September. I felt a chest infection coming on a day or two before but raced anyway. At the point I eventually quit, fifty miles in, it felt like I’d ran into an immovable object.

When I arrived home I returned to work barely with it. I’d roll out of bed, tidy myself up, go to the study and do my work. Then at lunchtime I’d set an alarm for an hour and sleep. I’d finish work, have a bath and go to bed. Pretty much all I did was sleep and try to breathe. Neither of those things felt very easy. For a month breathing and eating was hard. Exercise was all but impossible.

November was a little better, I started to be able to exercise again, but breathing and exercising at the same time was still a challenge. At the start of January I finally got back to what I see as my minimum base mileage, though winter storms seemed to happen every weekend when mountains might have been a possibility.

Six months on from Nice and here I am. I’ve had three mountain runs and two hilly runs in that time and, if I’m brutally honest, I have to admit that it’s gone. Three weeks ago I ran a flat ultra, my heart rate was through the roof and the time to the marathon mark was my worst since my very first.

Last weekend I ran leg one of the Bob Graham Round. In a positive sign, it was my quickest yomp up Skiddaw to date but overall I was 15 minutes slower than my Bob pace, which doesn’t sound that much until you remember that Bob pace was the pace I was aiming to maintain for 22 hours. And for three days my quads reminded me of that first fell race, all those years ago.

And that’s a good thing.

Because this week I’ve felt like I got my sense of training purpose back. It feels like March has been a bit of an audit of where I am and what I need to work on. I’ve measured myself against something I know and wasn’t where I wanted to be, but I also found familiar feelings.

I know how to get stronger again. I know how to improve my endurance and work on my aerobic base.

Ultra Trail Lavaredo is three months away. It’s going to be tough, but I believe I have enough time to get back where I need to be.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
   And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
   And never breathe a word about your loss;

-If, Rudyard Kipling

I’ve clearly broken the rule about not breathing a word about your loss, but I’m ready to start again and I’m more than willing to work hard.

So let’s do this.