The plan was simple really. Have a week’s rest after Lavaredo, take that nicely worked on fitness into ten days of training in Chamonix, then come home and have a bit of fun at Maverick Race’s event in the Chilterns. The medium route (22km) looked just right for a runnable blast around the English country side and I was fairly confident in my ability to get round it fast. Confident, that was, until I got ill in Chamonix. I spent most of the trip in my bedroom, or taking short easy walks. Everyday I saw La Jonction but didn’t get to run up it, gazed along the valley towards Croix de Fer but the day I was feeling well enough to run never came. On the last day I managed a short trot along Petit Balcon Sud, a delight as ever but far less than I’d had planned. Back home... View Article
I would say I’ve had a score to settle with Lavaredo, but that’s not strictly true: I’ve had a score to settle with myself and the Dolomitic mountains that host Lavaredo Ultra Trail were the amphitheater in which it had to happen. Last year’s race was a perfect trifecta of ill health, spiralling over training as I tried to mitigate it, and a complete inability to pace sensibly. Three glorious hours of fun followed by a very long death march. In the year since I had to stop running for a while, get medical help from a specialist sports doctor, and accept that my training had become unhealthy. I was recommended a coach with specific experience in helping people who had experienced over training syndrome and so, since January, I’ve been rebuilding for this weekend. One year on, it was time to go again. Call it recovery, call it redemption,... View Article
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
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
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
October 13, 2018,
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
