London to Brighton 56 Mile Trail Ultra Marathon
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As many of you know over the last nine months I have been training to take part in an UltraMarathon. I was originally booked on to take part in a 78 Mile Run around the rim of the Grand Canyon but in June that got cancelled because apparently there weren’t many people wanting to run that kind of distance in the middle of the desert. Surprising!
Well, I stayed true to form and kept training regardless. I had a little niggle in my knee that I had to take about 5 weeks off for and do some good corrective exercise to strengthen my hips and stabilise my knee better, but all this was without a specific goal after the last cancellation. Come the middle of July and my 5 weeks off, I really thought I wasn’t going to end up doing any organised run this year and all my training would have been to no avail, and then I read back through my old blog posts and found the original post I wrote when I announced I was doing an UltraMarathon. I remember I was very excited and mildly cocky considering I hadn’t ever run more than 6 miles before in my life. I decided I had to get this excitement (and cockiness, if I must) back.
So I started searching for a race to do!
One of my friends who is equally crazy had signed up earlier in the year for the London to Brighton 56 Mile Trail Ultra Marathon so I e-mailed the organisers expecting to waltz straight on to the starting line but it was fully booked. Ouch. What next? I decided to relax on my search, a few more weeks passed without progressing my running too much, and I get an e-mail that some people have pulled out and that they had a place for me. “Yes please!” I was in.
The only problem?
6 weeks to go. I have signed up to run 56 miles in 6 weeks (5th September) and I haven’t run more than 21 miles, and that was months ago and I struggled with it. So, against all my better judgement I upped my mileage about 20% per week (about double what I would have considered normal) and pushed on hoping to achieve a reasonable training peak before the run.
I have since run 22 miles, 27 miles, 18 miles (after also cycling 64 miles in the week too), and finished a monumental 36 miles total in a day two days ago.
I think I am now ready.
I have contended with blisters from getting my FiveFingers wet, trialling new hydration back-packs, working long hours on top of the training, cycling too much and not being able to get too many runs in, and the mental strain of successful running friends telling me they had enough by 38 miles when they tried the London to Brighton.
I am sure that I will succeed, but I know it’s going to be tough. This time in two weeks I will probably be trying to convince myself to stop. I will be stopping for frequent walking and food breaks so I’ll be sure to let you all know how I am getting on live, as it happens, via Twitter and Facebook. So Follow Me there on the 5th September and please give me as much motivation as you can.
Alternatively, come and meet me mid-run. Here’s the course details, and if you want to arrange to see me on the way, Contact Me through the site. I’d love to have anyone there.
I’ll let you know how I get on!
Brett
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[...] and I have now (in the last year, particularly) progressed to running and plan to run my upcoming 56 miles ultramarathon in them [...]
well u should do some swimming as it uses both leg and arm muscles. it is good to do a little bit of work on your arms as the higher u move them the faster and longer u can run. also with swimming u cant see if your sweating or not and you don’t smell like sweat.