To put my ultra-marathon training into one short blog about
training would do it a great disservice. The training was in fact harder than
the ultra itself, and it went on for 12 very long weeks. I could never have
anticipated my training to be as tough as it was, and it wasn’t just the
physical demands, there was the strict nutrition and the mental conditioning.
Physically….I shouldn’t have been able to complete the
ultra. Being unprepared and putting off training, I left myself with 12 weeks
to train; I should have trained for at least 20-24 weeks. You were meant to get
in rest periods…a rest week was 40 miles and a lot of burpees. You were meant
to have completed an previous ultra of around 40-50 miles…the most I had ever
ran was 28 miles.
From the offski the odds were against me, and it wasn’t a
surprise that my body played up, constantly. I spent most of the 12 weeks
constantly strapped up in tape, compression tights, having 20 minute ice baths
twice a day and the most brutal sports massages, to keep every niggle at bay.
Even with all of this the majority of the training was painful, having to work
through niggles, alter running stride and grit my teeth and bare it, and hope
that come race day it would all pay off and my body would be stronger and heal
itself.
From a physical side, the training wasn’t necessarily what I
expected. Yes there were miles, lots of miles. There was also every kind of
hill, from being just half a mile to being over 3 miles long, you would have
been deceived looking at my Garmin that I was in the U.K and not a mountain
region. However, I went from hills being my enemy, having to stop every 30
seconds, to being able to complete a very hilly 10 mile run without stopping,
and actually running it quite fast. My nemesis had become my best friend and
actually I began to find running hills fun.
The hardest parts were pushing through my physical
boundaries, yes I could run 10, 15, 20 miles in my sleep. But completing 50-60
miles in less than 24 hours? Having to complete another 10 miles having just
completed a marathon. Brutal, and tiring. Mentally I just had to shut off and
get on with it. To get through that sort of training, a part of me that
acknowledged pain, boredom and frustration had to shut off and I had to let go
of all logical thinking. For 12 weeks everything I did lacked any kind of logic
and the things that I put my mind and body through lacked all normal sense.
But my training didn’t just stop there. To say I just ran a
lot of miles would be the easy part. There was the getting up at 2 in the
morning to go out for a ten mile run or hill training session, staying up for
over 30 hours training, the hundreds of burpees, and then there was the 10 mile
yomp with 18kg on my back.
Physically I put my body through everything I needed to in
24 weeks, and more. Let’s just say it was character building!
The ultra itself was just the final product of everything I had
done and everything I had given up for 12 weeks, it was a way of showing how I had
pushed my body to its limits and strengthened myself both physically and
mentally.
When people ask how I managed to run a 100 miles, I think to
myself, I’ve done harder, I completed the training.
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