These notes will largely serve as a personal unloading of the whole experience from my head. It may also be interesting, useful and possibly entertaining to read through and vicariously suffer a little bit back through all the kilometres with me.

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Firstly, here is the low-down on what the event entailed:

* 107.3km total distance covered, 7 of the complete 13 valleys (180km/100mile) route in the Lake District.

* Starting in Ambleside, north of Lake Windermere, into the central valleys around Seathwaite, back to Ambleside, then looping up to Keswick where it finished.

* Climbing up 3632m (max elevation 752m)

* Descending down 3,590m (min elevation 45m)

* Starting at 6 a.m. on a Saturday, and finishing at around 2:30 a.m. on Sunday.

* 20 hours and 24 minutes total time out on the trail.

* Awake for a total of about 22 hours.

* Some relevant stats according to Garmin (maybe some inaccuracies, but does display a good overall picture of my pacing) :

* Total running time: 6 hours 33 mins

* Total walking time: 10 hours 29 mins

* Total idle time (spent stationary): 3 hours 21 mins

* Average moving pace: 9:13 mins per km

* Average pace overall: 11:24 mins per km

For simplicity's sake, I will write these as a list. Some may overlap and there will unlikely be any specific order to these points.

A small disclaimer, I am writing these from my own perceptions and thoughts, they may not be true or even helpful for everyone. Everyone has their own ways of coping with hard events, dealing with discomfort, and preparing themselves to push physical/mental limits.

* This took way longer than I was expecting.

I had a time of 12-16 hours in my head which was based on very little other than a rough estimate of what I thought I could hold as a relatively achievable average pace. This was thought up in consideration of going much slower uphill and then running the flats and downhills at faster paces.

Whilst I was able to run good chunks of the flat sections, at least in the early stages of the race, a huge chunk of the course was just un-runnable for me. This was through a combination of being too steep uphill, too technical for me downhill, too slippery as the day went on, then too dark to really see where I was going properly, and finally just the overall fatigue slowing me down a lot in the second half.

This meant the overall pace was slower, but with a much longer duration, I spent a significantly longer time on my feet than expected. This came with its own challenges, including fuelling and foot/body condition.

* Pain and discomfort are similar, but not the same.

This one may be unique to me, in this race, at that distance but it was true for me here so I think it’s valuable to share.

Of course, running 100km is uncomfortable. This I believe is true for everyone entering and completing these distances, it’s just a matter of pacing and context for those at each end of the field. But it still gets uncomfortable at some point.

There was a definite distinction between discomfort and pain though. It became uncomfortable as the distance wore on with legs becoming fatigued, but this discomfort seemed to have a threshold. It gets to a certain point and then just endures. Sure your feet, legs, and body feel sore, but they don’t tend to get too much more sore past a certain point.

Understanding and embracing this discomfort is just a natural part of ultra-distance events. It comes and goes, it changes, but it doesn’t really tip over from bad to worse in many cases.

The mental side of this is more challenging, knowing you will be uncomfortable for a very long time can wear you down pretty quickly if you’re not used to it or unprepared to accept that fact.

Pain to me generally signifies something is wrong and damage is being caused. This does start to creep in towards the latter stages of any event I’ve done, the blisters get worse, and the aches and soreness turn to sharper pains. But I am never sure how much of this is physical, and how much mental in anticipation of the last stretches to be covered.

* Fuelling and mental state are very closely linked.

A big part of the draw to endurance is how it drags you into the present, sometimes kicking and screaming! You are drawn into all of the subtle shifts and changes your body goes through as it negotiates the task at hand.

Now again, this comes with experience and time spent doing hard things and knowing how your body copes and responds. I have a fairly broad spectrum understanding of what my body feels like during a variety of different exposures and I know when I am pushing hard or can push harder in most cases.In training, I played around with different fuelling strategies to understand how the use of gels/food etc would help keep fuelled during the race. Ultra running is often described as an eating contest with a bit of running on the side and this is definitely true in my case!

I knew what to expect from training and past events around fuelling and knew that I had a fairly good plan in place to achieve the right levels of intake to keep me performing and moving forward.

Something I hadn’t foreseen and something that really interested me was how my mental state was so closely linked with my fuelling. Whenever I found my mind dipping a bit into one of the natural lows of events like this I realised I hadn’t taken on any fuel for a while. This could be in part placebo, but by then taking on a gel or food my mental state lifted along with my physical and it was plain sailing again for a while.

This is largely speculation but based on a fundamental understanding of fuel usage. The brain predominantly needs glucose to fuel itself, and during endurance activity so do the working muscles to a much higher degree than at rest. It would make sense then that the brain is receiving a relatively lower concentration of glucose than normal and so these large fluctuations in blood glucose could occur. I think to combat this, aiming to intake more sources of fats earlier on in an ultra-distance race and including some lower carb-higher fat training miles could help with this diversification of fuel sources and help in maintaining more even mental and physical energy levels.

* Wet feet could be a show-stopper at longer distances without good foot care.

The lake district had had a named storm roll through days before the race and so there was a lot of water present everywhere we ran. On many of the paths, this was unavoidable and so my feet got essentially saturated with water from about 10km onwards and stayed wet nearly the whole duration of the race. I changed socks at the halfway point (~55km) but this made little difference with my feet soaked again pretty soon afterwards.

This started to affect my feet into the last 10-15km as the constant water softened the skin, along with grit and mud from the very boggy terrain, and I had a few bigger blisters form. I was able to adjust my gait, (turning my feet out like a duck, helped to relieve some pressure but probably made my walking/jogging gait worse!) to finish the race without too many issues.

This was helpful learning for longer distance or multi-day events though where foot conditions could easily become a show-stopper if not treated properly.

So some thoughts and takeaways for this one would be to trial some different sock options to avoid rubbing even when feet are wet, more regular sock changes potentially (although not always practical or possible), or the use of gaiters to avoid as much water/mud getting into my socks.

* Being present helps me keep moving. But an eye on the future helps.

I find that thinking too much about either side of the present can be unhelpful in longer-duration events when you're actually in the middle of it. Thinking about the past and what you could’ve or should’ve done is rarely helpful as you can’t control any of that now, you can only think about now and what you can do to change things going forward.

Thinking too far into the future can bring along with it all the dread and uncertainty of what’s to come and how much further you have left to go.

I like to settle into a happy medium, thinking about the present and the immediate future. Having a mind on where you’re at now, what you need to do at the moment to keep yourself moving forward, navigating effectively, fuelling right etc. Then think of the immediate future of the next few km’s or the next food station. What will you do when you get there, so it doesn’t come as a surprise to you once you arrive.

Time can get away from you if you spend too much time on the past or future, and you can get flustered or get into a bit of paralysis-by-analysis if you’re planning out the next 3-4+ hours.

These things are all helped by keeping calm, keeping yourself in the present, having an outline plan ahead of time, and controlling what you can at the moment!

* Uphills burned my legs, downhills hurt my legs.

I feel that I get away with quite a lot by being relatively strong. I have gotten myself through hard things by just being physically strong enough to muscle my way through sometimes. This is by no means a foolproof plan or even a reasonable substitute for proper training beforehand. That said, being 5-10% stronger is likely to be more help than a hindrance when things get hard.

That played into things when going uphill and downhill in the race. Whilst I’m not that fast uphill, I can keep going. It’s a familiar burn that I know and understand, it’s just muscular effort repeated on a loop until you hit the top. Being stronger helps here by making each step just slightly more efficient, you might end up saving a few % effort on each step if you are just slightly stronger. This mostly comes from concentric strength work in the gym. This can be done in a variety of ways and is beyond the scope of this report to go into detail, but broad picture heavy resistance training from 5-10 reps both double- and single-legged will go a long way here.

I was less prepared for the repeated and challenging eccentric loading on the downhills. My knees and hips took a bit of a battering over the first few descents and then were lagging behind for a lot of the rest of the race. More time spent practising the downhills, the specific skills of descending, the very specialised actions of the lower leg during downhill running, and getting stronger eccentrically (the lowering or negative phase of a movement) would’ve helped here massively in the lead into the race day. Additionally, using my poles more and earlier on would’ve helped distribute this load across my body. This leads to the next point…

* Poles are great. Use them early.

I bought poles before this race but didn’t use them in training. They were a bit of an afterthought that I thought might be useful if my legs gave up at any point.

In reality, I ended up using them pretty much constantly after about the 3rd quarter mark.

They help distribute some of the load away from your legs on the uphills saving the muscles for the flats and downhills. They provide beneficial stability and support on the downhills so your knees don’t knacker out early on. On the flats, they provide additional support and momentum, to keep you in a solid rhythm that you would be unlikely to maintain without.

In hindsight, I should’ve used them earlier on to help save my legs for the latter stages. I should also have used them in training more as my arms got pretty fatigued by the end as I just wasn’t used to the movement and motion for that duration.

* Suffering solo vs. Shared suffering.

I have always done 99% of my running and other endurance training alone. I have entered most of my events alone and not actively run with anyone for extended periods.

It was an interesting change of pace and mental headspace to do about the second half of this event as a group. Having people to pace off of, provide moral support, and just talk to kept me moving at a pace much faster than I was likely to have alone.

I think there is a lot of value in doing hard things alone. It’s a different challenge, even if it means paces are slower, but equally some shared suffering in a group of like-minded and even abilities is also beneficial.

They are different entities, both with value. Time alone in the dark, in crap weather, doing something physically/mentally challenging is good for your mind, body, and soul. But also doing those same things as part of a group helps you develop empathy, challenge teamwork skills, and have a laugh whilst doing it!

* Perpetual forward motion beats all.

Run, hike, walk it doesn't really matter. In ultra-distance events, the only currency that matters is forward motion.

The only guaranteed pace that isn’t actively moving you towards the finish is staying still!

Something I realised very early on in my endurance training is that ultra-running is basically a lot of stuff that might sound like running but often isn’t running. Essentially, you move at any pace that you can or that is possible at the time based on how you are feeling, what the terrain is doing, and how far you have left to go!

No one other than the very elite end of the field is running the uphills in these races. Power hiking mode is very much engaged. Me and the group I ran with kept joking that what we qualified as a ‘hill’ and therefore one we walked changed significantly as time went on. By the end, anything that even had a suggestion of an incline very much qualified as a hill and was hiked up not run!

All the inevitable small stops to adjust kit, eat, drink, restock food etc that come with these races add up to significant times over a whole race. My idle time (according to Garmin) shows this with over 3 hours of my total race duration being spent still. The more you can minimise this time and do things whilst still moving the better.

* Eat/drink small and often.

Taking in too much food/water in one go during races always makes me feel sick. Little and often is the best strategy that works for me. This was through a combination of gels and energy bars whilst moving and then more substantial food at the feed stations (sweets, fruit, bagels, chorizo, peanut butter, pasta as some examples.)

Your body is undergoing a fair amount of external stress and isn’t going to be diverting large amounts of blood flow to digestion. If you eat big amounts of food, your body will likely just make you feel sick to get rid of this when it can’t digest it all effectively. Small amounts often help to keep your fuelling more even and aid your slightly compromised digestion.

Issues with an inability to keep eating, feeling sick, or other GI issues are one of the most common reasons for people dropping out of races. If you can’t eat, digest, and refuel you can’t keep going for very long!

* Pain is often temporary and random. Ride the wave.

Pains and aches throughout the race came and went. Something would start hurting, it would stay for a while, then it would disappear and seemingly get better. I’ve had a similar experience in lots of races I have done. It might be a case of adrenaline overcoming the pains or it could just be your body settling into a section of the race and getting used to its new ‘normal’.

Pain is highly multi-faceted and not all of it means you’re body is about to give out or explode. Understanding different types of pain, and riding the wave a little bit before you decide there is a major issue often lets your body overcome the pain and move onwards.

This may again just be something that I experienced and might not be true for everyone. So I’m not saying to ignore pain and do nothing about it! Just don’t get worried if something unexpected pops up. It may very well just be a temporary ache that will disappear with a little time.

That said, if something does begin to develop beyond that point, do something about it early and don’t let it drag on and get worse. Hot spots can become blisters, pains can become injuries etc. Ride the wave, but know when to call it and get off!

* Good kit is worth it.

Simply, a good kit pays for itself in saved effort, efficiency and ease of use. This doesn’t always mean the most expensive kit, but the kit that does its job well and works every time.

If a jacket isn’t properly waterproof you will get wetter than necessary. This means you’ll likely get rubbing and chafing, or you’ll get much colder when the pace slows or at night time.

If your pack doesn’t fit right or distribute kit well your running gait will have to change or you’ll be pretty uncomfortable.

If your shoes don’t work for you then you’ll get blisters, slip too much, or get other issues up your legs.

Take the time in training to test and trial your kit. Find the things that work best for you, from trainers to fuelling. Except that you won’t always get it right, or unexpected things will pop up, but good training beforehand will let you manage these things as they come up.

* Focus on what needs to be done, not what you feel about doing it.

Feelings and emotions are obviously an important part of the process of doing challenging things. It’s necessary to allow your feelings to help push you through tough times and to understand how they can affect you when you hit those inevitable lows during the race.

That said, getting angry, frustrated, upset, or falling into self-pity does nothing to help when you are in the middle of these big challenging events.

This point may be something more specific to my own personal methods for dealing with physically challenging events, but I tend to try and keep my emotions separate from what I need to do in the moment. Keeping this dissociation from having uncontrolled emotional responses lets me stay in the moment and focus on what needs to be done, not how I feel about it.

* You chose to be here, so do it.

Running ultras is a strange thing to do. It can be very challenging, it can be very uncomfortable, and it can require a lot of time, effort and energy from those supporting you.

I think it is good to remember that you chose to be here in that moment when it all seems too hard to continue. You made the choice to put yourself in that moment, so you might as well get it done!

Being able to choose to be uncomfortable is a privilege, I often think about this when running long events or doing hard things. Others have to do challenging things daily and they don’t get that choice. So some temporary discomfort, that you have chosen to endure, that will inevitably end at some point, doesn’t seem so bad!

This is just a collection of some thoughts, feelings, and a bit of post-race analysis for what I need to work on in future.

Some of this might be helpful, or interesting, but plenty might not be!

Overall, I am happy with how my race went under the conditions and enjoyed the process of getting it done.

I sometimes struggle to keep perspective on things and get caught up in what I can do better or where things went wrong rather than what went right and what I was able to achieve.

But I am proud to have been able to achieve this distance in a tough race. Now onto the next!

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