Mountain Marathon

[Photo credit: www.sleepmonsters.com]

Wow, what a week. After getting totally spent in the alps, I was well up for some R&R and some decent food. Due to some unfortunate timing, once back, I had 2 days to recover before running in a mountain marathon. The last thing I wanted was to find myself buying more museli bars, energy gels and dehy potato, but thats the way it goes.

I teamed up in A class with Konrad, a friend from the Uni Mountaineering club, recently back from his own adventures in the alps. I had never run with him before, had no idea how we would go together, but felt pretty wasted from my exertions and a subsequent cold. I tempered my normal strategy in these things of goings balls to the wall and crashing half way round, by taking it fairly steady on the first day, pleased to see we were of similar speed and temprement. Halfway round the weather got nasty, cold wind and rain and visibility of a few meters and funily enough, this is where we did well, slowing a bit, but keeping the navigation accurate to not waste time and keeping moving. I thought we had a steady, but not spectacular day and was pleasantly surprised to find us second overnight, just 30s behind the leaders. That night we had a pretty horrible night. I had bought a shitty tent off ebay for £20. It was very light (700g), but failed completely in the waterproof stakes, and we slept in a pool of water, having to wring the sleeping bags out in the morning. It was nice knowing we had both recently had worse nights, so the spirits were not too bad, but it was a relief to finally get going in the morning.

The second day has a chasing start, meaning we started 30s behind the leaders, and the first team back to the finish wins. It adds some excitement as a head to head race, and as we soon passed the others, we had the whole course to ourselves, and didn't have to follow anyone around, which was quite pleasant. We saw no sign of others for ages, and thought we had a comfortable lead, getting quite complacent. A few checkpoints from the end, we missed the control and spent about 10min looking for it, allowing another team to pass. This really fired me up, we pushed hard, soon passed them and got away for a seven minute win. I am feeling really knackered now, so finally will have some R&R this week.

A description and pictures here.