Tales of Trails, Mountains and Rocky Roads

When I joined Stoke Athletic Club as an 11 year old back in the 1980's, I quickly became an enthusiastic, competitive track and cross country runner and spent the next 3 or 4 years competing in 800m and 1500m track races during the summer months. I never really had flat speed - my PB for 800m was only 2.22 whilst in the 1500m, I just about scraped under 5 minutes when I ran a 4.57 in the County Championships at the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham.  When I rejoined an athletics club several years later, I avoided the track like the plague - there was something about stepping onto a track that put the fear of god into me, and I used to find my stomach doing somersaults even when it was just a weekly training session. I did a few track races for Newcastle AC when I was in my 30's and remember doing a 3000m race where I was wondering how on earth I was going to cope with 7 and a half laps of a track - thankfully it wasn't as bad as expected and I found that the time passed...

When I first signed up for the Javelina Jundred, the intention was to make it my A race of the year. Things didn’t quite go to plan in that respect, and come July and August, the hot summer heat of   Phoenix   meant that my training for the race was suffering. Mileage dropped to an all time low and the pace that I had was getting even slower. A DNF at   Bryce   Canyon   back in June had already knocked my confidence to some degree, and with just a couple of months until “the biggie”, I was starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to plan for a hundred mile race after all. I decided that I needed a break – a break from running, a break from my coach and structured training sessions, a change from the desert heat, a change in scenery. We took a vacation to   Colorado   for 10 days, and the lush green forests, raging rivers and the crazy high mountains brought a refreshing change to things and I found my running mojo was slowly on the...

A week or so ago, an old and distant friend of mine made a list of all the ultras and marathons he had competed in over the years and I was amazed not only at the number of races he had completed, but also that he was able to remember them all! A few days later, another ultra running friend posted that she had done in excess of 90 marathons /ultras over the years - how on earth could they both have done so many? Reading both Jeremy’s and Sandra’s posts got me thinking - how many long distance races have I actually competed in? It planted a seed, and with Andy being away, I have kept myself busy over the past few days looking back on old race results and newspaper clippings, trying to track down what exactly I’ve been up to. It made things easy to some degree having already done a blog post earlier this year about all the marathons I have done, but when adding the ultras, I really couldn’t remember really doing that many - except I have! I started ultra running back in 2007...