It's Only Running...

I'd said from the outset that this one was a training run. In all honesty, this was me giving myself a bit of an out if things went horribly wrong. I'm not  competitive insofar as I want to beat other people (that would be a case of ambition outstripping ability), but I do always want to be the best that I can; or at least feel as though I'm improving. I'd been pleased to come away from the Lakeland 50 more or less unscathed  (apart from some quite spectacular toenail damage) and had eased myself back into training in the hope that I could avoid a recurrence of the injuries which had plagued me for the best part of 18 months. So I hadn’t done any very specific training, just upped my miles gradually, reintroduced speedwork for the first time in over a year, and switched back to road running for some of my longer outings - the logic behind this being that Ennerdale is very runnable and you're not allowed to walk the hills on tarmac. It's the law. Fortunately, th

Montane Lakeland 50 I’d only been running for a few months when I first heard about the Lakeland 50. I wasn’t much good at it, but neither was I quite as shite as I’d expected to be, and I like taking things to extremes (although I understand now that the 50's the soft option), so I resolved there and then to have a crack at this event sometime before I was 40. I was 31 at the time, so this wasn’t exactly an ambitious target and, far from being phased by the idea of continuous movement over 50 miles of roughish terrain (it’s only running), I figured my navigational ineptitude would pose the biggest obstacle. I’m not a daft lass though, surely I could learn to read a map? Fast forward two and a bit years and my running hadn’t improved as much as I’d have liked; many marathons had been entered and then subsequently sacked off due to my apparently limitless propensity for mangling my legs. I’m not sure whether it’s because I run like a complete twat (not according to gait analy

So, if I'm going to write one of those self-indulgent running blogs, my first ultra seems like as good a place to start as any. I'll do my best not waffle. And I will fail miserably, sorry. I was probably less nervous about this than almost any other race I've ever done. I've had a pretty rubbish 15 months in terms of running, the main issue being with my right tibialis posterior. I've spent a fortune on physio, PT sessions to kick my gym hating arse into much stronger shape, taken time off, more or less given up road running altogether, but the problem refuses to clear up properly. There's a simple answer: more time off. But, well, yeah. Anyway, having rather unexpectedly made it to the start line, I found myself in a distinctly unspring-like Cumbrian field at 6.15am on Sunday 17th May, having run a meagre 300 miles in 2015. I'd done a marathon in February; my first, incidentally, and at 28.5 miles with over 4000ft of ascent, pretty good preparation for