At the start line for Day 2 of Race to the Stones
The Race to the Stones course is much more uneven than I had imagined, in just about every possible way. My trail running in Swinley Forest and daily wobble-board exercises took me a long way, but not quite as far as I would have liked, in terms of how much actual running I achieved. By the time I'd reached marathon distance (42.4 km) I was pretty much in full walk mode. In total I probably walked about 10km out of the 50.
You had a mix of grassy trails eroded into multiple levels of path of various widths and heights, hard chalky/clayey mud roads that had dried into multiple ruts, and only one quite small section of actual road, just before the biggest hill on the course. In the forward direction, there was very little even ground, most of the time being spent on an uphill or a downhill (and sometimes the gradient and narrowness of the path could be a bit extreme).
My memories of this race will be: the early start and drive up from Wantage to an almost empty (5 other runners starting off at 5:28 am) venue; the incredible beauty of the landscapes surrounding the course; running for the first 3-4 hours pretty much completely on my own to listen to the birds, smell the earth and vegetation/flowers, and only occasionally hear the footfalls of someone overtaking me.
The 4 checkpoints I passed in my morning of running (I finished in just under 5hours 30mins) came and went in incredibly rapid succession. I messaged my wife Diane as I approached each one, and barely stopped (I didn't stop at the first, and it was still so early there was no-one there anyway). My total intake from those stops was: 4 bananas, 1 gel, and 2 bottle refills (once orange drink and once water).
After the fourth pit-stop it became a different race for me, not only because I started encountering a lot walkers who had been going all night, but also because I was now also mostly walking myself. My left leg from hip to knee started announcing its pain/presence. I wouldn't go as far as to say injury, but had I really pushed myself it probably would have ended up that way.
I finished uninjured in part because I forced myself to listen to my body (like that Kenyan marathon runner Finn tried to get to run ultras in his Ultra-Runners book). I mentally went over what I'd learned from my running reading, mostly thinking about Finn's The Rise of the Ultra-Runners and Hutchinson's Endure. Finn talks about the 'pain cave', and I had a little pain cave talk with myself, saying "you can go there if and when it hits". Well, this was naive of me. In short, there's no pain cave, only pain, especially towards the end.
At the finish line
I did not find myself bounding down hills after 45km because I'd turned off (I hadn't) what the central governor in my brain was telling me (the theory expounded by both Hutchinson and Finn). In retrospect I'll train a bit differently, and do more long runs on hilly trails. There will be a next time, because I'm signing up for next year, both days. I decided that as I was nudging towards the start line this morning.
