The big day.

So, it's four thirty in the morning and today's the day. Need to be up at this ungodly hour to leave at 5.

8 weeks of running and the preparation has gone as well as I could have hoped for. Reckon I've given myself a decent chance of pulling this off without hurting myself.

Weather has turned properly bad though. It's been a rubbish summer here in Wales so all my running up to the taper was in mild damp weather. Today however is going to be plus 25 degrees centigrade, the hottest October day in many years. Bugger.

Sorry about the lack of posts during the taper, not much interesting to say and loads and loads to do. I mistakenly though that running would be much more affordable endeavour than biking but that's not how it's working out so far.

So, wish me luck, I may need it.

Big practise run :o)

Time has been playing games with me this week.  Being a horribly busy week between the babies being back in school, my Mum back in hospital and needing to do a last big run before my taper.  As such, updating the blog had to take a back foot, sorry.

Anyway, Thursday was the day for the big run.  I'd done a couple of leg openers in the evenings as well but Thursday was the tester that was to decide whether the 30 miler is feasible.

I'd decided on a testing 20 mile run off road between Pontypridd and Treherbert figuring there was no point making it too easy and set to sorting my feeding strategy.  Leaving things late didn't allow me to buy things online so there was a Wednesday trip around the local pharmacies trying to secure salt tablets and isotonic drinks.  It does however seem that Ponty is more suited to providing supplements for steroid boys than more useful aids for endurance sports. :oS

So my kit list was

Nike 3/4 running tights (oh so unflattering).
Endura base layer.
Windproof shell jacket.
Captains cap.
Salomon Speedcross.
1000 mile socks.
Camelback mule with stabilising strap removed. (more later).
Isotonic drink tablets.
Glucose Tablets.
Dioralyte sachets.
Cereal bars.

I'd taken a day off to make the long run possible and had hoped for reasonable weather at least.  The run was all on tracks that i'd ridden in the past on a MTB but despite knowing what i was in for i still didn't fancy what the weather could threaten at nearly 600 metres.  On the day, the weather certainly looked reasonable, hence the decision to go with a windproof shell that offered no rain protection.

The plan for the day was to start off with Arch, nice half mile walk to warm up then over a 250 metre climb and a a 100 metre climb to some spectacular clifftop singletrack before descending to meet Lis' and drop off Arch after 9 miles.  Oh yes, the stop was also going to involve curry and chips.  :o)

View of Porth at top of first climb

Top of clifftops over Williamstown

Now i know this doesn't sound like the most traditional energy food but i figured salt and carbohydrates, got to work right.  The 9 mile stop also allowed me to refuel at what is the best chip shop in Wales, and we have a lot of chip shops. :o)

Lis' walked with me for half a mile while i ate and then it was time for the big climb of the day, a 450 metre climb at which point i'd top out at around 580 metres.  Almost inevitably the weather closed in me and to the amusement of an old guy walking his dog there hung over me the very real chance of a good soaking.  Bugger!

Fortunately though it didn't come to pass.  The drizzle intensified to heavy rain which lasted for a grand total of about twenty seconds.  I was relieved, the coat really wasn't even water repellant and i'd not brought any sort of protection for the phone.  My iPhone may have survived a trip to the bottom of a full bath but i knew it didn't have the stomach to survive another soaking.

Now i'd ridden these tracks a number of times before on my MTB though not for a couple of years now, nevertheless i was confident in my routefinding.  This confidence was misplaced.  It seems like one of the fire roads has been diverted to accommodate an upcoming round of the World Rally Championship, unfortunately i only realized this when i found myself coming down into completely the wrong village.  Doh.  In a sign of things to come and a decision that probably wasn't the brightest due to fatigue and slight dehydration i decided to use the GPS to hack across open ground to the right road.  Like i said, fatigue is my excuse but i was lucky to get away with just losing ten minutes stuck in a swamp before back tracking.  I went down a number of potholes and could easily have turned over an ankle and screwed things up.  Hopefully a lesson to learn.  If you're in a hole stop digging.

Classic Rhondda view from the top of the Bwlch Mtn

Back on track i approached my favourite part of the route.  The descent into Blaencwn is fantastic.  The track is steep and technical in a few places and the views are about as spectacular as you can get in South Wales.  To say i enjoyed this section is an understatement.  If i ever need reminding why trail running is so cool, this is the place i'll come.

Blaencwm in the distance, literally the land of my father

The descent into Blaencwm was a little wet

I know it doesn't look it but this is soooooo steep and tricky.

Off the mountain and down the road to my parents house and the original plan was complete.  21 Miles done and I still felt ok.  I had however been cooking up a back up plan of adding a couple of miles as the valley is in the fortunate situation of having a train station every two miles all the way back to Ponty.  It'd be silly to not cover a Marathon distance now i was this far in and feeling relatively good.

This is when i realised how quickly things change 330 minutes into an effort like this.  I went short of salt again and despite realising it still managed to bypass two shops in a stupor because i didn't want to spend 5 minutes stopped.  Another lesson.  Massive moodswing then with salt and calories has me singing aloud to Bruce Springsteen as i ran through the village where i grew up before hitting another wall and hanging out my ass for the last mile before i finally stopped at a train station.

So, 26.8 miles it was.  More than a marathon. :o)
20 miles of it offroad including 2 technical singletracks, one large technical climb and a large technical descent.  I got what i needed out of the run but it has left me with a healthy respect for the effort needed next weekend to cover 30 miles in hillier terrain.  Time to taper and eat now. :o)

Counting down

As they say, shit's starting to get real now.

With 2 weeks to go it's time to do some last minute preparations.  Plan was for a nice long 3 hour run yesterday, with 2 more to go.  A 2 hour run Tuesday evening and a 5 hour on Thursday.

Had some disappointment after my long rambling post about shoes.  The green ones i wanted just weren't going to come in time to get broken in so i've had to suck it up and get a black pair instead. :o(
Saved £16 in doing so but i'm ashamed to say i'm shallow enough to regret it.

So, yesterdays run.  Was aiming for just a solid 4mph average for 3 hours to see how the shoes went and to try out some fuelling.  Apparently fuelling is going to be vital and i'm a little late in getting strategies in place.  No, scratch that, i'm very bloody late.

Weather was pretty poor, alternating between heavy rain and clear with reasonably warm temperatures.  My coat was been done up and being undone just about every five minutes.  Took a photo of a pretty grim bit on a northwestern facing ridge to illustrate but it looks like a lovely day, HDR on the phone does that though.

Run was good, 13.3 miles in just over 3 hours including a chatting stop and getting lost a couple of times.  In good news, the shoes and 1000 mile socks were great, no issues at all and a bit of wear might make the black shoes look a little less crappy.

Real artists ship

http://www.ghostinthepixel.com/?p=24

Fascinating insight into what makes some people successful.

Meniscal Tear

So the Doc says that the cause of my knee problems is a minor :o) meniscal tear on the inside of my left knee.  She went on to say that running on it a bit is fine but that 30 miles would be pretty silly.  Reckons they'll do some keyhole just to shave the loose bits off, nothing else needed.

The good news is there's nothing loose in there and it's certainly not a bad injury.  I reckon that i'll carry on as I am for the next couple of weeks and decide at the last minute.  Gut instinct says i'll do it but as carefully as I can.

Good news. :o)  (I think)

Doctors

Showing my stupidity in a much less rambling way than my last post.

Doctors tonight for MRI results on my knee.
9 miles last night, 1150 ft of climbing.
4 runs left before the 30 miler.

Not sure, those three sentences make sense together. :-S

Shoes

Trail Shoes

Coming from a long background in biking there's no denying I have a tendency to be a bit of a gear geek. Both mountain and road biking are steeped in a culture where equipment is of pretty major importance so the initial culture shock of not really having much to buy has been a bit strange to say the least. As such, trying to decide which running shoes to buy has been a bit of a minefield. Allied to general lack of gear geekery in the running world is an aversion I seem to have to spending big money on a pair of trainers, I'm very aware of the hypocrisy of having bikes that cost thousands of pounds and spending large amounts on technical bike clothing but being unwilling to drop a hundred pounds on a pair of running shoes, which, after all are pretty essential to the running process.

Running being a simple thing you'd at least think that once i'd accepted the necessity of a purchase, making my choice wouldn't be that difficult. Wrong! To me at least, there's a bewildering amount of choice and contradictory advice to be had from all directions. Surely, the massive international shoe companies must know what they're doing and there must surely be a tangible benefit to all the research they carry out. Not so simple it seems, Firstly good objective reviews are not easy to find (and perhaps not easy to do) and secondly there's loads of stuff flying round the internet and the running world warning of the dangers of overdeveloped footwear and the injuries it can unwittingly cause. Arghhh!!

Because I am a bit of a sad hippy the whole barefoot running thing does really appeal to me but i'm sensible enough to see that switching to barefoot just prior to a 30 miler would be a stupid idea. I do still like the idea though and will come back to it at some point in the next couple of months. So that left me with a few options.

* Stick with what's working ok now and keep using my cheapo New Balance trail hybrid shoes.
* Cough up for a significantly better pair of New Balance's on the basis that I know i like the ones i already have.
* Make the switch to another mainstream brand. Seeing what i could find that looks like a bargain.
* Buy specific use trail shoes from a company I know nothing about, using decision criteria I don't properly understand.

Of these options, 2 were quickly discounted. My current shoes are on their last legs and trying to last them beyond the 30 miler is just not sensible. They've probably not done more than 200 miles at the moment but the soles have started to feel noticeably soft lately when running over rocks.

Buying a bargain from a mainstream brand was also quickly discarded. If i'm spending a reasonable amount of money I want at least some sort of purchase excitement and the idea just wasn't doing it for me.

2 options to go then. So I dragged Archie, Lis' and her kids to try some on at a local large outdoors store which to be fair they took in good grace. Archie was more help than i'd have liked, he was obviously a little anxious so devided that the place he'd most like to be was on my lap. Well, apart from when he gave himself a seizure trying to jump up on the artifical grass that wasn't stuck down. Anyway, that's off track, sorry.

A better New Balance seemed pretty sensible. They felt pretty good, were reduced by £15 and seemed to do what i need. I couldn't deny to myself though that they justweren't getting me excited. Also, i convinced myself (and probably correctly) that there's no guarantee that New Balance use the same foot cast throughout their range and just because my current shoes work for me doesn't mean another set will.

So, on to the more exciting options, the Inov8's looked good. Again though, the choice was too wide and i didn't know which ones suited me best. The pair i could instantly discount were the lightweight ones that Sean has, there's no fun in buying something after somebody else already has it, sad but true. The rest seemed a little heavy and again, weren't really doing it for me.

It then dawned on me that I'd probably already decided what to buy. I'd seen a development blog post for Salomon Speedcross and realised my heart was already set on them. I tried on two sets, a 10 and a 10.5 but was obviously too much of an idiot to tell the difference in size. There seemed to be a small amount of heel lift on my bigger foot but logic was out of the window now and i wanted a pair. But they didn't have the right colour! I'd be damned if i was spending £90 on shoes that were the wrong colour. Logic said that the colour made no difference and that having the chance to wear them in adequately was much more important but by now i was full on in stupid mode. So after two and a half hours out of the house I left empty handed. :o(

Now you'd probably have thought my stupidity would end there? Nah, fraid not. Turns out that i could get last years Speed Cross for 75% of the price of this years. Bargain...Not. Nope, they needed to be this years because the blog I'd read gave some vague reasons why this years were better and besides they had to be like the menatl image i now had. I.AM.SO.GULLIBLE.

So the moral of all this rambling is, if you're a shoe company your development blog could be more important than all of the actual worthwhile development and marketing effort you involove yourself in. Well it would be if the world was full of more idiots like me anyway.

Hopefully, I'll tell you how awesome they are over the next few weeks and then won't feel quite such a doofus.

^^ The offending blog. ^^

Steve Jobs

Not running or biking related so feel free to skip or tell me I'm a saddo. But I wrote most of this the other week when Steve Jobs announced his resignation so thought I may as well post it.

Steve Jobs resigned, nothing to do with this blog really then but couldn't let it pass without saying something. It says a lot about Jobs' vision and about Apples virtually unique appeal that his resignation is such big news worldwide. How many of the other 50 biggest companies in the world have a similar figure? I reckon you could count on one hand those with any sort of such claim and probably none of those have a genuinely arguable case. Whether this is good or bad depends an awful lot on your point of view.

Apple haters would argue that the fanboys have no sense of proportion and that the Jobs cult of personality is overblown. I'm not going to argue that popularity alone is a sign of quality but as someone who hooked into Apple products just before their explosion in popularity I do like to think that this phenomenon is quality based. In my opinion Apple have based their success on making consistently good products 'that just work', it's not their fault that this makes them stand out from other companies so much.

What this desire for quality always meant was that unavoidably the prices for Apple stuff was a little steep, consumers got to choose whether price or the quality of the experience was their priority. The problem now for Apple's competitors is that this dynamic is changing. Huge economies of scale have put the IPad in the position where it's on a level playing field with it's competitors. Use the devices and the decision is a no brainer, the iPad having 90% of the market speaks for itself. All the guff about flash and openness shows itself for what it is, the excuse to go Android for cost reasons. There's nothing wrong with that but people hate admitting it.

Anyway, back to Jobs. I'd like to thank him for showing that being popular does not require being cheap, and that people will buy quality if you make the case compelling. Strange as it is to admit, I think my life is just nicer thanks to the things this guy has had a part in introducing and that makes him cool in my book. I hope that this transition has been planned for some time and does not mean he's had a big downturn in his condition and that he gets to enjoy easing back a little. Have a good one man.

Beacons :o)

That's a Motley crew (Me, Nige, Khalid, Sean)

Wow! That best sums up today. Well, maybe ouch needs to be in there too.  18k in the Beacons in a gale, 1000m of climbing (ish) and a pretty large sprawling fall.  


Sean floated the idea earlier in the week of a longer run in the Beacons for this weekend.  The Brecon Beacons are what passes for a mountain range in South Wales, and whilst they top out at 890m so they're only small in the scale of things they're still pretty beautiful.


So it was that Sean, Khalid, Nige and I found ourselves there this morning in some rather horrible weather. I figured that I needed to get a reality check on myself if I'm to have any chance of doing the 30 miler in 3 weeks time.  I'm running off road a lot at the minute but not in conditions that are particularly harsh. 


And a reality check was got I got pretty much straight off, a 350m climb in 2 miles right from the get go.  Ouch! Sean, Khalid and Nige set off at a run but I know from experience now that I need to walk for a little just to ease into things if I want my knee to survive. Turns out that wasn't such a bad plan today,  Nige saw the error of his ways soon enough and in reality walking wasn't all that slower than running.


At the top the weather really closed in and visibility was down to about 20 metre.  What didn't close in was Sean and Khalid as they absolutely roasted us along traversing ridge line. Admittedly it wasn't helped by me going arse over tit as we like to say around here. Ouch again, and a nice bleeding knee and banged up hand for the rest of the run, bugger. The rest of the ridge line was absolutely fantastic and must be spectacular on a good day, not today though.  Precarious and scary was the order of the day.

It certainly was next, straight down an escarpment, losing 200 odd metres in about quarter of a mile.  Again, Nige and I struggled and may (just may) have been a little out of our depth.


The gap pass was next, a famous old road (as in a thousand years old) linking the towns of Merthyr and Brecon.  This is a famous Mountain Bike climb which I must have done over a dozen times, it was pure relief to be honest after the technical challenges of the last three miles and it was also nice not to have my butt beaten by the saddle like normally happens on the rough track.


At this point, Khalid pulled his disappearing trick on us.  Khalid is super fit but I'd had it in my head up until now that his endurance is not always fantastic and I may yet get a chance at a small measure of revenge.  No such luck now though as he made off skirting the lower flanks of the hills, in his defence this was probably because he hadn't budgeted time for me and Nige's pace.


So over the three big peaks it was.  The wind was absolutely howling, to the point where I got a headache from the noise and perhaps a little bit of dehydration.  On a few occasions the wind caused proper stumbles which was a little hairy with a few hundred meter drop on our right.  Nige was suffering by now and is face was a picture when he foud out at the top of Cribyn that the big climb was still to come.  Worse though was mother nature playing tricks with us coming off Cribyn when it blew all the clouds and mist away for ten seconds and allowed the path straight up Pen y Fan to show itself.  I wasn't happy and I thought Nige was going to cry.


I was going to cry coming down the other side though, my knee was grumbling quite a bit and I was slooooow.  Nothing I could do seemed to make much difference and it was really frustrating.  Certainly gave me a lot to think about with the thirty miler so close.  Finally though we were out of the clouds for the last time, to our North the flatlands towards Hereford opened up and it was just a really enjoyable couple of miles of peaty bog back to the Storey Arms.

All in all it was a fantastic way to spend a morning and as I often think, i'm really lucky to have such landscapes so close to home.  More thoughts on the the thirty miler tomorrow I think.

New blogger app.

Yay. So a new blogger app allows me to upload photos from my phone now so this is a bit of a test to see how that goes. Also, a quick update on runs. Good week so far, a solid hilly 9 miler and a fast (for me) hilly 7.
Here's that photo of Lis' going beyond the call of duty on Monday. (if it works)

Quick update

Just a quick update, I'll write more later I think. Good start to the week, about 23 miles in 3 evenings. Some good mental bravery stuff going on too with a 5 mile fartlek session in some pretty shite weather.

Talking of which, thanks to Lis' for the company. :o)
Not the best experience watching someone sprint away from you an jog back for an hour... In bucketing down rain and howling wind. Above and beyond I reckon.

I'll post a photo from the brief calm between downpours later 'cos my phone doesn't want to play now.

Ho hum... :o(

Ho hum. Funny week this week, been really difficult to fit in enough exercise and suffered the grumpy ass knock back that inevitably follows. Started with a great 8 miler with Nige on Tuesday, some idyllic hacking through tunnels of foliage at the side of the river and meeting some of our more prosperous near neighbours in their farmyards. The rest of the week though has been really difficult, with Folk club and Lids' birthday not allowing anything more. I'm not grumbling obviously, both were fantastic as it turned out but just like any addict, my body is demanding it's share of chemicals and is rebelling badly in their absence.

So tomorrow, come what may I'll be out. Need to get a few miles in and kick start a proper week. Need to reign it back a little though as the temptation this week will be to overdo it. Repeat aloud... Don't get injured