A Reason for Trying

This isn't a race report or anything technically interesting. It's just a bit of musing. Mainly articulated for me I suppose but writing things down is sometimes necessary to understand one's feelings a bit better. And I needed to do it  with a clear head but soon enough after the events that prompted them for the thoughts to be still real in my mind and not just one of a collection of favourably massaged memories.

Early yesterday morning I pulled out of the Hardmoors 110 race at the Clay Bank checkpoint, which comes after about 80 miles. It wasn't a decision, it was an inevitability by that stage. After a good 53 mile run up the coast from Filey to Saltburn I was right on my planned schedule. I had created a 2 hour buffer over the cut-off time and was good to go on the section of the course I knew best, the remaining half to Helmsley. Yet over the next 15 miles things went wrong. I got progressively more tired and found the final uphill of the the stage to Captain Cook's monument, absolutely draining. Worse, I had slowed so badly that I got to Kildale , the only place on the last 90 miles of the course where you can get inside and regroup a bit, an hour and a half late. I had planned that if I arrived at this point needing some R&R then there would be plenty of time for a good recovery, but I had barely half an hour. I slept for maybe 15 minutes, had some pizza and a few cups of tea, then got out on the course again. On the long but fairly gentle climb back up onto the moors I was continually falling asleep though by now it was daylight. In spite of eating a steady stream of haribos and ginger biscuits I couldn't get going at anything better than a slow walk. Runners caught and passed me at regular intervals. By the time I got to Bloworth Crossing, a lonely but strangely captivating spot and a real landmark on this particular course, the writing was on the wall. At this pace I wasn't going to reach the next cut-off point in time and I couldn't find any way to speed up. I shambled the remaining miles down to civilisation at Clay Bank and called it a day. The remaining runner on the course and the sweeper arrived soon afterwards.

My initial reaction was that this event was now too big for me. I should stay away from 100-milers these days and stick to the 50's that I know I can finish. Time and tide, and all that. But I thought back to a reflective post by a friend, Ian, a few weeks ago, and I hope he'll forgive me for quoting a passage of it here. 

" I’m left a bit frustrated that my performances overall are getting worse and I’m finding it harder to do these events. I trained well for this one but found it a tough slog at many points, especially hiking up the big hills which took me a bit by surprise. Biological and running age is definitely catching up with me, and I can’t do the times or performances I used to be able to do. That I suppose is inevitable, but still frustrating. I’m 53 now, and have been doing a lot of endurance running for almost 30 years. Of course I am going to be slower, my head tells me. My heart doesn’t though, and still expects me to go out there and perform the way I did 20 years ago."

For me the numbers are different but the sentiments are exactly the same. My overwhelming reaction to my recent Hardmoors experience was frustration at an event which 10 or even 5 years ago I could have completed without question.

We have to re-adjust our sights. But how far?

Ian went on to explore this a bit but I think has not yet come to a conclusion. If we lower the bar far enough so that we can always succeed, is there any satisfaction in that beyond a few nice days out in the country. On the other side, if failures to complete our chosen project become too frequent does the frustration of what might have been a few years ago become just too much to make the activity worthwhile? 

Why anyway do we choose to indulge in such a time consuming, frequently painful and occasionally disappointing game as long distance running? Well let's leave aside for now the health benefits of physical exercise and the social and aesthetic rewards of travelling through the countryside with like-minded people, and we are left with what you get out of participating in organised events. Would any of us carry on if there were no races? Well maybe, but then it would be an entirely different activity. So what do we get out of competing? 

Sometimes I will go to an event, run as well as I can without getting too stressed, finish somewhere in the middle of the pack and go home feeling that I've had a great day out. It's fun and rewarding but somehow not memorable, a bit like skiing on the piste or mountain biking a prepared trail.  It's good for the bread and butter, but sometimes you need more to provide the jam. At whatever level we take it, for most people this is a sport, and that means we need to be seriously challenged, by others, by ourselves, or by the course.

We can compete against others, to win the race, to be on the podium, to win our age group. We can try produce our best possible time, maybe do better than we did on the same course last year, to get the satisfaction of improvement and the approval of our friends. And for many ultra runners, this defines their game. It's a conventional athletic activity albeit in maybe an unusual overall environment. But I wrote a piece on my former blog "Running Late" back in March 2012 entitled "The Toughest Race in the World" in which I tried to tease out exactly what makes a race "tough". I came to the conclusion that while one course may be intrinsically more difficult than another in terms of length, height gain, ground underfoot, navigational requirements and so on, the factor that eventually defines just how hard an event is to complete is the time that its Race Director sets as the maximum allowable. To take an obvious example, the Tour du Mont Blanc trail is completed by thousands of "ordinary" people every year; most of them take between 10 and 14 days for the circuit. Now run a race round the same course with a maximum time allowance of 46 hours and half of the trained ultra-runners who set out won't make the finish.

And here I think, for those of us with modest and/or declining abilities, is the key.  We can enjoy events which we know we can finish, but we will get our best rewards from those which we know at the outset are near our limit, and for which the outcome is in doubt.

I thought again about my Hardmoors 110 experience. Was failure inevitable from the start, which was my initial reaction after pulling out, or could I have done things differently to tip the odds a bit more my way?  If I had slowed down closer to the cut-offs over the first half would I maybe not have been hit by the overwhelming tiredness later ? If I had chosen to go with a support crew, would the extra flexibility with food, gear, the ability to sit in a warm car for a few minutes occasionally and to have carried a significantly lighter pack for most of the way have made a difference? I don't know, but there's enough doubt there to suggest to me that this year, this event was not unarguably beyond me but in the balance, and that's a tantalising thought. A challenge right on the limit.

But although the satisfaction of a successful finish is huge when attempting something you know is at your boundaries, there will inevitably be more DNF's.  I can live with that. I grew up in the West Midlands Engineering culture of "the bloke who never made a mistake never made anything". I would never criticize the runners who proudly claim that they've never had a DNF, but can't help feeling that they might be missing out somewhere along the line.  

My next two events are the GB Ultras "Pennine Barrier" 50 in four weeks time, then the Lakeland 100 five weeks after that. The former is a race I have never run in an interesting area that I only really half know. Barring accidents I'm expecting to complete and thoroughly enjoy it, unspectacularly but within the time allowed. The Lakeland however is an event that I have started six times and finished three. The last completion was three years ago and I'm becoming increasingly aware that a week off 71 is significantly different from a week off 68. So is the outcome in doubt? Absolutely. Will this prevent my starting and giving it my best? Not a chance.

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Highland Fling Reflections

I first ran the Highland Fling in 2007. It was my very first ultra race, and as a fairly late starter (I was approaching 59 at the time) I just couldn't have foreseen where it would lead to. Now, with over 80 ultras completed including 9 "Flings" (plus a handful of DNF's I have to admit), I thought it might be interesting to reflect a bit on more than a decade's involvement in this great event.

I have a few memories of that first one back in 2007, my first acquaintance with the West Highland Way trail. The actual ground was quite a bit different from now of course, I'm sure many others will remember. The Garadbhan Forest was completely tree covered and quite gloomy, the track up and over Conic Hill was far rockier and more gnarly than it is now. In fact the ground underfoot almost all the way along the course has improved fairly dramatically over ten years - even the old railway track used to have many deep holes which became ankle-deep puddles as soon as it rained. But the weather on that first trip was fine and dry the whole way for us. I remember sitting in the sunshine at Rowardennan talking to the West Highland Way Race Director Dario Melaragni; I had entered the WHW race later that year and he was saying that we would want it a bit cooler then or everyone would suffer quite a lot.

I didn't really know what to expect. The furthest I had run before was just over thirty miles on my local path "The Sandstone Trail" in Cheshire so over fifty in one go was really into the unknown. I remember enjoying the lochside sections but the steady climb out of Bein Glas was hard (nothing changed there then!). The checkpoint was at Derrydarroch Farm in those days, and I arrived to find Rob Reid taking a dip in the river before going on to claim the "over 60's" prize for the day  -  things were a bit more relaxed in those days. I remember the final section along the river into Tyndrum; I thought I was still running but there was a family ahead out for an afternoon troll  - and I wasn't catching them. I finished in 11:43 and was pleased enough to complete my first ultra, managing 34th place out of 70 starters. The race was won by Jez Bragg in 7:26. Jez got his personal record for the trip down to 7:19 two years later, by then having won three in a row. These were pretty good times from Jez a decade ago; although the record has now been lowered to 6:41 by Rob Sinclair in 2017, that was an exceptional run and the winner this year was home in 7:30.

Looking back at the start list of that 2007 race, I am now surprised to see just how many of those runners stayed in the game and who I got to know better over the years - as well as Jez, there was John Kynaston, Ian Beattie, Ian Rae, Neil MacRitchie, Rob Reid, Mark Barnes, Keith Hughes, Shirley Colquhoun (now Steel) and also Tony Thistlethwaite who was sadly taken from us just recently. Ultra running was a fairly small community in those days.

I assumed when I had completed the West Highland Way in 2007 that I would have had my fill of ultra running, but I sort of got hooked so was back at the Fling in 2008. The field had doubled since the previous year but apart from the front runners it wasn't a particularly high standard. This enabled me to get my first ever prize in a race by coming second in the over 50's category with a time of 10:54. seven minutes behind category winner Tim Downie. (In 2019 this category was won in a time of 8:40!)

I was back in 2009 for my first tilt at the over 60's category. I was still improving and fairly confident I could get ahead of Rob, who was several years my senior. I managed a time of 10:23 but that was nowhere near good enough to beat the eventual category winner Adrian Dixon from Teeside who finished in 9:54. I subsequently got to know Adrian through the Hardmoors races  -  but I never got to beat him! The other thing I remember about 2009 was that I caught a runner near the finish who was running with a small dog, and we crossed the finish line together  - "two tired auld men and a dog". It was Graeme Morrison and his dog Penny, with whom I was to cover many miles on West Highland Way races in the following few years.

The management style of the original race organiser Murdo MacDonald was efficient but laid back in the extreme. His race briefing at the start was always the same and became well-known  - "Welcome to the Fling, there are no rules, just let us know if you drop out, see you In Tyndrum!" The other feature of the start in those days was that the ladies and over 60's men  - "the auld men and the lassies" - were started at 6am, an hour before the rest of the field, so we had the challenge of trying to get as far up the course as we could before we started getting overtaken by the faster runners.

With Adrian Dixon's example I was sure I could get under 10 hours for the race and spent the next few years trying. I recorded finishes of 10:10, 10:18 and 10:09, winning the over 60's each time but still not getting under the magic number.

Before the 2011 Fling (L to R) Murdo McEwan, Jon Steel Shirley Steele,
Steve Walker, Pat (), Mark Barnes, Andy Cole

Approaching Rowardennan in the 2012 Fling

Looking at my splits I felt that I was always doing pretty well over the second half of the course but needed to do the first half faster. This was against my natural inclination to hold a fair bit in reserve until the end was metaphorically in sight, but I was encouraged by the very good Kiwi runner Stu Mills who was active at the time, and whose race philosophy was to "run as fast as you can for as far as you can, because you're going to slow down anyway". On the day (the 2013 race) I gave it my best shot, I remember the section from Bein Glas to the finish hurting all the way but I persisted and got to the end in 9:57.  Stu was running himself that year and I talked to him at the finish  -  "Tried it your way, it hurts too much, I won't do that again". He grinned, "Ah, but it got you your time though, didn't it?"

I think this was also the first year that the finish was moved from opposite Brodie's shop to the present location by the Lower Station, so I guess it's not relevant to compare times before and after this nowadays. I think by now John Duncan had taken over from Murdo, and also introduced the brilliant idea of having registration the night before the race in a pub, rather than in the cold half light of the station yard at 5am.

I had run seven consecutive Flings from 2007 to 2013, but continuing in 2014 wasn't an option as I had some surgery on a long-standing knee problem in April 2014. It gave a temporary improvement but my knees have continued to deteriorate since, so I have to look back on 2013 as the last year I could really call myself a runner. The problem now is that my knees won't take the stress of substantial speed training (it always takes me two or three days to recover from a parkrun) so while I have retained plenty of endurance and the ability to climb hills all day, I no longer have the basic speed to get near my pre-2014 performances. I'm not over worried about it, it's just a fact of life for me, I have to work with the abilities I have now.

So I was back to the Fling in 2015 without any clear plans other than to enjoy it. I had a nice run and finished in 10:53, but I also felt that the race had got rather too big (the field was by now ten times the size of that for my first participation) and a bit impersonal. I had left booking accommodation too late so ended up with a hotel out by the airport, and overall it seemed a bit too much trouble for the reward. Added to this there are so many more other interesting events around than there were ten years ago, so I thought I would give the Fling a miss for a while.

But then last year I completed my tenth West Highland Way race, a total of over a thousand miles on the West Highland if you include my one DNF about 10 miles from the finish. After that I decided to give my family a break from their normal sleep-deprived, midge-infested and quite often wet weekend in Scotland at the end of June which they had enjoyed for 11 years crewing for me, so no WHW this year. I was sure I would get withdrawal symptoms if I missed out on running any of the WHW course, so it was back to the Fling after an absence of 3 years.

Based on my previous experience of finding places to stay difficult these days, I booked the Premier Inn a short walk from the start in Milngavie early last summer, assuming that (a) the race would be on the last Saturday in April, and (b) that I would get in through the ballot, both of which fortunately turned out OK.  My son John (now aged 39) took up running a couple of years ago and was planning to run a marathon last autumn so I asked him if he was interested in the experience of something a bit longer. He was enthusiastic and prepared a lot better than I did. He duly ran the Chester marathon in a couple of minutes over three hours in October, then we both entered the 32 (ish) mile White Rose Ultra in November. I was happy to get inside the first hundred finishers, he was seventh. He then ran the 50 mile Chester Ultra earlier this year and declared himself ready to take on the Fling.

My knees had prevented me doing a marathon effectively for a few years  -  a typical outing was London in 2018 when I got to near 18 miles at comfortably under 4 hour pace then the pain kicked in and I hobbled to the finish in something around 4:20. But in the autumn of last year I had a great session with a specialist knee physio who gave me a method not of fixing my knees (not possible) but of maximising what I was able to do within their limitations, and this has started to see me actually running a bit again  - slowly but definite progress. John and I both ran the Manchester marathon three weeks before the Fling, with him getting round in 2:56 and me in 3:54. As well as a good confidence booster, this gave us both an indication of the time to go for in the Fling, following the "three times your road marathon time" rule of thumb which seems to work for the majority of runners. The 12 hour target time that I had put on my Fling application application back last autumn now didn't seem so much a declaration of hope over reality than it perhaps did at the time  -  though balanced against this I hadn't completed a 50 mile ultra in much under 14 hours for several years.

The other thing I told John was not to bring much stuff because the Fling always has good weather, so when we turned up in Milngavie on the Friday to a forecast of pretty continuous rain it wasn't the best start to the weekend. Everything else went super smoothly though; I had pre-placed a car in Tyndrum so we didn't need the bus back and got easily back by train to Milngavie meet John who had come straight up from Manchester in good time for a rapid registration, a good meal and a reasonably early night. I got leaving the car at Tyndrum wrong though; it was a dodge I'd used on many previous occasions, and I parked in the visitor centre as normal. Except that I didn't notice that the visitor centre has disappeared since I was last there, replaced by a cafe; when we went to collect the car after the race we noticed the cafe, and a big "No Fling Parking" notice  -  sorry JD, won't do it again!

Race day dawned with no rain as yet. John settled himself in the elite "sub 10 hour" pen and I joined the masses somewhere near the back. The race overall seemed to go pretty smoothly for me. I had a strategy for getting just under 12 hours; based on my previous performances I guessed I would cover the second half of the course about an hour slower than the first half, so I estimated five and a half hours to Rowardennan then six and a half from there to the end. It started raining somewhere around Drymen for me, and although it seemed to be more wet than dry for the rest of the race it wasn't unpleasant as the temperature was quite warm. I didn't get around to putting a waterproof on until somewhere along the lochside, some runners including John didn't bother all day. I duly made it to Drymen in 2:08 in 468th place, which turned into 5:13 for 348th by Rowardennan. I've never really understood why so many folk hammer along over the first twelve miles only to slow down dramatically afterwards, but each to his own I suppose.

Over a wet Conic Hill in 2019

A quarter of an hour up at Rowardennan was better than I expected. I was definitely keeping to my "no heavy breathing before halfway" rule so felt comfortable, but it had been a long time since I was still running much over the second half of a fifty miler so I stayed conservative and didn't push on particularly. I enjoyed the northern half of the lochside because of its technical interest as usual and it was good to see John Kynaston marshalling with his team at Inversnaid; we've covered a bit of ground together over the past twelve months preparing for his Dragon's Back adventure due to start in a couple of days as I write this. I didn't attempt to run up the hill at the end of the loch which I have normally done in the past,  but still found time for a minute's reflection at Dario's post. 

Julie Clarke, Neil MacRitchie and team were doing a great job in the steady rain at Bein Glas, Julie remarking "I think you probably know the way from here" just as I left. One thing that I did notice since my last Fling four years ago was that the checkpoint organisation is now incredibly slick at each one, drop bags, water and so on are available to each runner the instant he or she arrives, really impressive. The steep little hill after the railway and road tunnels was the first point that I began to feel that I had come a fair way since the start, but once up on the high jeep track after the climb I was running the gentler bits fine again. A feature of the day on this normally dry track however was the number of streams needing to be paddled across ankle-deep, the result of the fairly continuous rain we were experiencing.  On the flip side, the resurfacing work done recently on the track from cow poo alley to the big gate into the forest must have taken several minutes off the average runner's time; smooth enough for one foot in front of the other and let your mind wander, rather than picking your way carefully around every rock, hollow, and various insalubrious mounds.

From the big gate into the forest it is about 6 miles to the finish. Reaching it in 10:03 from the start, I had nearly 2 hours to cover this ground and still get under 12 hours. I immediately relaxed and slowed down, walking steadily all the uphill bits of the forest switchbacks and shuffling the downs. I think in my mind I had finished, job done, good result. It was only when I got down to the main road crossing and the boggy field after it that I looked at my watch again and saw that 11:30 might just be on, but I would have to run all the way from here to the finish. It was good to get a bit of purpose back; I had to walk two or three maybe 30 yard sections but otherwise managed to keep going all the way to the piper and the red carpet to finish in 11:29:48 in 243rd place out of 726 starters. John was at the finish waving me in having finished in 59th place in a time of 9:27:03.  I later discovered I was the second over 70, finishing just under 9 minutes behind the category winner Graham Arthur. I hadn't given this a thought before or during the race, I just wanted to finish in good shape in a half way respectable time, so it was pleasing to know that for 50 milers at least I'm getting back to there or thereabouts for my age group. Whether it would have spurred me on a bit knowing that Graham was not far ahead, I'm not sure, I think probably not. My plan was to finish not too stressed and going faster over the last few miles would have hurt a bit.

2019 done and dusted

Back for Fling No 10? Well, probably not next year as there are so many other tempting challenges around which I would like to have a go at before I get too old. But I had a really enjoyable day which somehow rekindled my affection for this great race, so I'm sure I'll be back again one of these days.

Many thanks to the organisers John, Noanie and their team and all the marshals for another nice day in Scotland.