Tag Archive: Sky Running
Maybe Carroll Shelby isn’t the first person most people think of while sprinting down the side of a mountain in the middle of Cumbria, but we are where we are. You see I glanced at my watch and realised my heart rate had been red lining for almost two hours. But do you know how it felt? It felt incredible. And so I remembered a treadmill session earlier in the year. It was on my lunch break and I’d been watching Ford vs Ferrari while putting in the extra miles. There’s a sequence where Matt Damon, playing Carroll Shelby, talks about the feeling of driving at 7,000 RPM. There’s a point at 7,000 RPM… where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. Just disappears. And all that’s left is a body moving through space and time. 7,000 RPM. That’s where you meet it. You feel it coming. It creeps up on... View Article
I had a startling moment of clarity as I slogged my way along Val Travenanzes: I’ve got life wrong, I thought. It’s all wrong. I’m not capable of running ultra marathons, my body can’t hold this much stress. I can never, ever, do this again. Time to quit running and spend my money on therapy. You can’t run from your problems forever. I was done. It had started gloriously. I’d came into the race off the back of a horrible training spell where nothing would come together but, as we started the ascent out of La Val early morning, that faded away. I felt like my halcyon days had returned. I was controlling my effort and still making good time. Hundreds of bodies moving in what seemed to be a single organism, first in a crowd but morphing into a long line. We were being lured into running fast through... View Article
Ultra Trail Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur – 100M race report For a good few hours on Friday night, I though it was on. I felt invincible, blinded by adrenaline, pushing myself back up through the field. It’d been a rotten start. I felt fatigued and under the weather from the get go. I decided to start near the back and take things easy, knowing I should be able to make up places later on. The first section is a short climb on a fire road followed by a trail with switchbacks to get you down into Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée, where local school children formed a scream tunnel of outstretched arms that echoed, “allez, allez, allez”. From there it’s straight into a 1400m climb up to Refuge de Rabuons. The early afternoon heat was oppressive and the climb seemed to go on for days. I took a good long stop at the aid... View Article
September 9, 2023,
by Pete
There’s probably not a large amount to be written in a race report for a race you DNF’d 2km in, but I did learn something about myself: I discovered I’m the kind of person who’ll be violently ill for six hours then try to run across the alps in a snow storm. I might not achieve my goals, but I’m relieved to know I’m still stupid enough to try. I’d been feeling pretty confident in the morning. There was a severe weather warning – snow, wind, plummeting temperatures – but I thought that could play to the advantage of British runners. As I frequently assert, I’m from the north. I was in the right head space to try something hard. It felt like this was a moment I could grasp. As I gazed up as the storm clouds drifting across the Alps, I thought of Antoine de Saint-Expury in Sand,... View Article
There was a beautiful dissatisfaction to every breath as I pushed my way up to Passo del Monte Moro, the high point of MEHT. I was breathing heavily and the air was crisp, clean and scented with pine trees – but at sea-level the air is 21% oxygen, at the pass that drops to about 14.5%. It’s not extreme altitude, but my lungs sure knew about it. I’ve been following a training plan and have had weeks of building up again following the Bob Graham effort. Less overall volume but more quality, with some cracking sessions. The plan said to try to find a race that would take six hours and be steep and technical: Monterosa Eat Himalayan Trail Sky packs a lot into it’s 38km, with 3100m of elevation gain and a mammoth ascent that’s dwarfed only by the even bigger descent. Perfect. My strategy was to keep the... View Article
November 26, 2022,
by Pete
I don’t like razor wire. It looks really sharp. I realise this is the point but still, it’s not my favourite. So when you’re squeezing through a gate at the exit from an airforce base at the highest point in the Valencia region, hands frozen and struggling to stay upright in the wind, razor wire is the last thing you want to negotiate. But that was later, of course, and we’ll get there. That must have been almost seven and a half hours after the fireworks illuminated the skies above the small town of Finestrat. A few hundred runners burst from the plaza, headtorches illuminating the streets as they headed for the hills. A tension pulls at us; not wanting to go off too fast but dreading the bottleneck if you start slow. Ultra Trail Costa Blanca had began. Moments later we’re single file, a thread of illumination weaving its... View Article
I’d never considered Poland for a mountain running break before. There’s a degree of familiarity with the famous running destinations in the Alps or Pyrenees but as soon as I saw the promotional video for Tatra Sky Marathon, I knew that it looked like something special. The evening we arrived in Koscielisko I saw the sun set paint firey hues behind the towering, cross topped, presence of Giewont and it’s neighbour Kopa Kondracka. I may not be in good shape but whatever my legs chose to do, nature had given us an incredible theatre to run in. The race started close to Zakopane and the atmosphere was electric well before the seven am start time. Runners thronged together under the starting arches and listened to the race briefing. Only two words were translated for me: snakes and bears. Right then. Let’s be having it. Four trombita’s sounded the start and... View Article
There’s a saying, often attributed to Disraeli, that there’s three types of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics. I can’t tell you if Disraeli ever said such a thing, but I can tell you it’s been true in my running. After being frustrated on my Bob Graham attempt in May, I wasted no time getting running again. I was back out within a couple of days. That next weekend I set a target to take a Strava crown on a four mile segment I’d been eyeing up and did so comfortably. The weekend after that was the Trail Pursuit half marathon, which last minute route changes had turned into a 15 mile technical fell run. Bad news for people who paid in good faith for an accessible trail, good news for gluttons for punishment like myself. All seemed to be going to plan until a frustrating outing at Blencathra Fell... View Article
November 26, 2021,
by Pete
If you’ve read many of my mountain race reports, you’ll know that nothing cheers me up like the sound of cow bell. So imagine the scene; I’m approaching the top of the longest climb of the day, the midday sun is filtering through the trees and I’m in desperate need of refreshment when I hear the sound of bells. My legs start to turn over that bit quicker, my head picks up, and my lips break into a smile. I glance around eagerly, tastebuds already sensing the coca-cola that the volunteers are somehow keeping ice cold, and realise I can’t see an aid station anywhere. I look to my right, my gaze following the sound of the bells up the slope. Goats. There’s always bloody goats. A whole herd of them, threading their way down through the trees, the largest of the group with a bell strapped to his neck.... View Article
October 10, 2021,
by Pete
I remember thinking, as I limped from my car to the Spar on Friday night, that maybe a sky race was not the best idea for the following day. Recovery had being going well. I was back to training as normal until a busy weekend and some misadventures in the north sea had plunged me back to limping, with occasional bags of frozen peas strapped to my knee as I drove. I’d come to worry it was Schrodinger’s knee – either recovering well and fine or the tendons were gradually peeling off the knee cap and I’d fall down with a ruptured quadricep. Unobserved, it was hard to decide which was true. But also, I was there. I didn’t get a ferry to Northern Ireland to watch other people compete. More than that, after a two month lay off my mind was clamouring for the clarity that only mountain racing... View Article
