Ultimate Trails Lakeland 100k

The bad news was that it was only 2 weeks after the UTMB and I was trying to recover from a heavy cold. The good side was that I knew it was a great course and the weather forecast looked very promising. And it's always nice to be in at the start of a new event, for this was to be the inaugural running of the Ultimate Trails 100k, which describes a biggish circle around the South-Eastern quarter of the Lake District, starting and finishing at the Brockhole Visitor Centre near Ambleside.  "100k" is in fact a rather modest description of the treat on offer as most of the watch technicians on the day had its length as somewhere between 66 and 68 miles, confirming what I had found when I reccied the route back in May. The 11000ft of climbing is also not huge, but the course has a fair amount of technical ground which makes it a rather bigger day out than say the Lakeland 50 while still being a long way short of a typical "100 miler" undertaking.  My reccie over two days, missing out a couple of miles or so of the total course, had taken a total of 15 and a half hours, so I reasoned 18 was a good enough target for a single push. After two hard recent events, this should allow me to take things a bit easier and, as my friend and mentor Murdo would put it, take some time to smell the flowers.

I wandered up on the Friday afternoon, registered and met up with John and Katrina Kynaston and their friends Jonny and Frances, all of them here to run, with the ladies taking on the 50k course starting at the halfway point of the 100. After fish and chips in Ambleside we wished each other luck and sidled off to our various tents and cars for the night.

The 100k started at 6am on Saturday morning. It's not a time I'm very familiar with so I was fairly surprised to find it still dark and had to fumble around in my carefully pre-packed rucksack for the torch before making my way down to the start.

Trying to wake up for the start (photo John K)

I met John and Jonny and wished them well, I didn't expect to see them again. JK in particular was a man on a mission, Katrina was due to start from the half way point in six hours time and he was going to try and catch her before the finish. I think there were maybe a hundred and fifty or so in the field and we were off on the dot, a loop of the Brockhole grounds then out into the breaking day.

Countdown to the start

By the time we were out of the grounds it was light enough to put torches away, and it was clear that the weather forecast was good, it was going to be a beautiful day. I won't waste a lot of time describing the route (you can go back to my post on the May reccie if you're interested), I'll just recall a few random impressions of the day.

Sunrise at the top of the Garburn pass was so bright and straight into our eyes we could barely see the ground underfoot, then it was down to the first CP at Kentmere, a banana and water top-up and away. The way over Nan Bield to Gatescarth is beautiful, they really should use this route for the Lakeland 100, and the field started to thin out. I was taking things very easily at the start, walking anything that even sniffed of uphill. My cold hadn't really gone away, my nose and eyes ran better than the rest of me for most of the day and I must have presented a fairly snotty sight to marshals and fellow competitors, but it didn't really get in the way of forward progress.

Marshal on Nan Bield posing for photo...

Along the side of Haweswater from Maredale Head it started to warm up and I rather wished I'd brought a cap, but it didn't turn out to be a problem, though I think most of us picked up a bit of sunburn along the way. I was happy and running slowly and easily. From Mardale Head to Howtown is the easiest section (two legs in fact) of the whole route, time to relax and make some easy progress. I enjoyed the cinnamon porridge at the Brampton CP and was welcomed by Dave Troman on marshalling duty at the Cockpit on Askham Moor.

Warm sunshine along Haweswater

Approaching the Cockpit (photo Dave Troman)

We took the "Tour de Helvellyn" route down to the Howtown CP (slightly quicker than the Lakeland 100 one past Mellguards) and just coming out of here I caught up with  Mark Barnes who was running with a friend of his; we carried on more or less together for a mile or two. I left them eventually and had a good steady run up Boredale, knowing it was the last easy ground for quite a way. The little hill up to the hause always seems to go quickly, then it was an easy cruise down to the halfway CP at Patterdale, which I reached in around seven and a quarter hours from the start. I hadn't stopped much up to that point but I had a drop bag so decided to have a change of shirt and a cup of tea, and a top up of food supplies. I found the food at the checkpoints suited me pretty well, I was eating crisps and ginger biscuits at each one, coke when it was available and "treats" when they were there, like the porridge at Brampton and some great soup at Langdale. The CP marshals were really helpful, and I found someone to make me a cup of tea at almost every CP from Patterdale to the finish. In between CP's I was going well enough on the odd gel or shotblok, and a half litre of water seemed enough to see me through each leg.

I sloped out of Patterdale after a stop of nearly 15 minutes (where did that go?) and on to the second half. Unlike the Lakeland 100, the second half of this event is quite a bit tougher than the first (which in itself makes the 50k a good run), but has a lot more interest and variety, a bit of almost everything that the Lake District has to offer. I carried on my way, ambling the ups, shambling the downs and trying to joggle along the flat bits. It was a gentle run for the first part of Grisedale, a steady walk up and round the tarn, then a short but technical descent down to Dunmail. I expected to see the CP on the flat ground of the Raise, but it eventually turned up in the woods above Thirlmere a half mile or so further on, another little oasis in the sunshine. I was a bit surprised to see Jonny turn up here a few minutes after me; the explanation was that he had taken a wrong turn coming up Grisedale and wasted maybe 40 minutes, very frustrating for him. We saw each other at every checkpoint after that, with me leaving just as he turned up, until he finally got his act together over the last leg and came cruising past to beat me to the finish.

After the rocks of Grisedale we were then treated to the boggy wastes of the open fell over to Watendlath. This is quite a tricky path to follow even in good visibility, but the course had been marked with wands at regular intervals (more about this later) so the navigation was very easy but you never escape from here with anything other than completely soaked feet so it was good to hit the dry land again just before the final descent to the Watendlath CP.

The next leg was the longest on the route, 9 miles according to the route map but nearer to 11 by my reckoning. I left Watendlath just after 5.30pm hoping to reach the Langdale CP (at the New Dungeon Ghyll Stickle Barn) in daylight, leaving only the straightforward trails to the finish to be covered in the dark. I was soon up and over the hill to Borrowdale and kept up a steady jog up past Stonethwaite and for the first half of the Langstrath valley. Then the path, although still virtually flat, got very bouldery and difficult to maintain an easy rhythm. I felt the going a bit tedious for the first time since the start, so I decided to walk from here until the top of Stake Pass. This mile or two of walking on the flat turned out to be a good move. I slowed down a bit but really regained some energy. The pass itself is steep but on an easy recently rebuilt path and I was now able to power up it which  gave me a huge mental boost for the final few miles, especially knowing that it was the last big climb. I jogged down the other side and along to Stickle Barn, arriving well before a light was needed.

Again, I probably stayed in this welcoming haven a bit too long but I wasn't rushing and it looked like an 18 hour finish would be OK from here. It was dusk as I left but I didn't mess about tripping over in the half-light and put the headlamp on straight away.

Not a lot to say about the trip from here to the finish. I was mostly alone in the dark, enjoying moving through the countryside and thankful that the weather had stayed so fine all day.  A last cup of tea at the Ambleside Church CP then it was just up through Skelghyll Woods and down the final stoney lane (real Hoka territory!) to the finish. I was home in 17:10:58, which turned out to be 37th place and good enough for the Vet 60 prize. I really had a lovely day out. Katrina, Frances, John, Jonny and I finished within a couple of hours or so of each other so gathered for tea and soup in the Brockhole cafe. John and Katrina both had particularly good runs; John finished in 15 hours 18 mins, although with Katrina managing 8 hrs 19 mins for the 50k, he never did manage to catch her!

For the first running of such a big event I thought the organisation was very good. It was a great course with evenly spaced checkpoints and the marshals were friendly and helpful everywhere. It comes at a good time of year and I hope it becomes a regular feature of the calendar. There were a few teething problems drawing criticisms from some competitors but these seem to arise with every new race and I'm sure will be ironed out next time around. Personally, my only concern was the philosophy of going for a fully marked course requiring no navigation. I've only come across this in shorter races in the UK, run in daylight and over much easier terrain, and in the big European events which are on much better defined tracks and even then have a reflective marker every 50 yards or so. We were lucky with the weather on Saturday but the Lake District can be an unforgiving place when conditions worsen so I think the requirement to have a map (the Harveys 1:40,000 covers all the course except a few miles of road) and the ability to use it to get yourself around the course would be a safer approach.

So, some success after a summer of being battered by a couple of bigger events, but what now? Well I'm going to have a few weeks off from running, something I haven't done for several years, to try and cure a few aches and pains, then I hope to be back in December for the Tour de Helvellyn and looking forward to next year. But I'll keep posting on the blog now and then, when I've had a chance to think about what this year has taught me. Watch this space.

UTMB - time to move on

I just needed to get this post done while things are fresh in my mind, while the memories good and bad are still memories, and not the edited version of memories we often live with.

I pulled out of the UTMB at 12.30am on Sunday morning, at Champex in Switzerland, with 76 miles and just under 23,000ft done, about three quarters of the way around the course. I won't do a long narrative about my run but here is the story in brief.

My plan was to run a conservative race to get a finish, by working gradually up to 1-1,5 hours ahead of the cut-off times and staying there, to get back to Chamonix in 44-45 hours. I was fine as far as Courmayeur and really enjoying the race. I took the long hill up to the Bertone hut slowly, pleased that I had never felt as good on reaching this point in previous attempts. 

From this point my race went rapidly downhill. I was very slow along to the Bonatti hut, feeling very tired and unable to eat. I stopped for a twenty minute sleep on the sunny hillside along the way but felt very little better for it. I had another twenty minute rest at the Bonatti then carried on slowly down to Arnuva. I lay on the grass here for half an hour thinking that I would probably have to stop at that point, but I was still ahead of the cut-offs and knowing that this would probably be my last shot at the race I decided to carry on in the hope that things would improve. I was painfully slow up to the Col de Ferret, being overtaken by dozens of people. Worse, on the beautiful descent which one of the most runnable parts of the whole course, I could only manage a steady walk. Before the final descent into La Fouly the course goes up a number of short re-ascents; together they add a height gain of only around 600ft or so but I found them pretty soul destroying. A mile or two before La Fouly I sat on the grass, rang Jan and told her I was going to stop. Amazingly, having done that I felt quite a bit better and walked steadily down to the checkpoint.

I didn't quit straight away because I was now feeling as good as I had since the Bertone, and actually fancied some food. I had a couple of cups of fizzy water, a bowl of soup, a bit of bread and cheese. The loudspeaker announced 15 minutes to the cut-off and I thought why not, the next few miles are all down hill. I rang Jan again to tell her I was continuing. I had 4 hours to get to Champex so I did all the way to Issert at a determined fast walk. But the little hill out of Praz de Fort was a warning that things were still not right. The 1500ft climb from Issert up to Champex was the hardest couple of hours I can remember doing for many years. I needed frequent rest stops and was again passed by lots of runners going at a slow, sensible pace which would get them to the finish. I reached Champex 20 minutes before the cut-off. I knew what was coming from here, I've covered the rest of the course on several occasions, and I knew that continuing wasn't on - I wouldn't make it to Trient in the time allowed. I went straight over to the control desk and stopped.

Since first discovering the UTMB on a trip when Jan and I went out to Chamonix to do the classic "Tour du Mont Blanc" walk in 2005, I've only missed coming back each year on one occasion. Over that period I've completed one CCC race and one shortened (due to bad weather) UTMB. I've also had five (yes, FIVE) shots at the full course, which I've never completed. 

This year, conditions were perfect. I was as fit as I am ever likely to be, had spent the previous two weeks in the mountains and was confident that I would give it my best shot. I know what my basic problem is and I'll maybe cover that in a separate post. But for now I think it's time to accept that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is probably a little short of real sanity.  I'm sure I'll come back for one of the shorter races because the atmosphere in this town over this weekend is just too good to miss, and the trail running  in the Mont Blanc range has to be as good as it gets. But as for my long, and in spite of the results very rewarding,  affair with the UTMB, I know now that it's over and I won't be back for another attempt   -    time to move on.

UTMB Time Again

Not much from me on the blog lately. I've been too busy sitting in the sun, drinking wine, eating pizza and pretending that all those aches and pains will go away soon, an activity otherwise known in the ultra world as "tapering". It's time for the annual Chamonix party again. I missed it last year because I was otherwise engaged in the Tor des Geants race starting over the other side of the hill in Courmayeur, but I'm excited to be back this year for another crack at this iconic event.

This isn't a wilderness experience you understand. With 2300 runners on a course that for many of its 105 miles is a singletrack, you're never going to be alone. But that is more than made up for by the stunning nature of the course, with its big climbs, never-ending descents and views to die for. And of course, the welcome you get all along the way  -  the "Bravos", the "Courages", a bonfire in every village and checkpoints you can hear long before you see them. Chamonix is completely taken over for the week by the UTMB, and of course the concurrent events, the PTL, CCC and TDS. It's a scene that every ultra runner has to be part of at least once in their career.

The weather hasn't been kind in recent years, the last time the "official" course was run was in 2009, so let's hope this year it comes good again.

So on Thursday I'll be heading over to a town that I've been visiting on and off for the past 48 years. Time for another dose of adventure.

 Bonhomme hut  - but in the race it's always dark when you get to here!

Finishing the Lakeland 100

It's only about a week now until entries open for the Lakeland 100 and 50 races. Even though (or maybe because) I have a pretty unimpressive record in the "Lakelands" myself (one 50 finish, one 100 finish and two 100 DNF's) I'm fairly hooked on the events now and it struck me when at this year's race that I saw many of the same faces, so there must be some sort of "Lakeland" community building up. I thought it would be interesting to see how people have fared in the events as a whole over the years, rather than in individual races (this will turn into a lot of numbers, if you're not into this sort of thing, now's the time to go to a different blog and read a race report!).

I started by putting all the L100 results onto a spreadsheet to see where that would lead. Now there will probably be some mistakes in this because it's sometimes difficult to see whether last year's "William" is the same person as this year's "Bill", the results for the first couple of years are fairly basic, and so on, but overall it won't be far out. I haven't included the sheet here because (a) I don't know how to do it on this blog (it's a date of birth problem, I probably need a ten-year-old to show me how), and (b) it means you can search for the names of individual heroes yourself if you're interested, they can't blame me for unwanted publicity! What I've decided to do in this particular post is to concentrate on the question asked by many Lakeland 100 suitors  - "how difficult is it to finish?" Well the honest and simple answer is "pretty hard", but if you're on the point of throwing your hat in the ring and would like to know what your chances are, you might find the following statistics interesting.

Before starting, I have assumed that a "finisher" is a runner who is recorded on the results as having a Coniston Finish. This is not the same as finishing under the 40 hour cut-off because each year a number of finishers are declared up to 2 hours after the 40 hours. I don't know how the Organisers/Marshals make this call, but it might be encouraging to anyone crawling out of Tilberthwaite with the hours on the clock running down alarmingly to know that all may not yet be lost!

I should also point out that these are statistics, and the individual performances that they summarise are just that - individual. The easiest way to illustrate this point is probably the oldest example - you toss a coin and it comes down "heads" 99 times in a row, so what are the chances of the next toss coming down "tails" - 50% of course. But with that proviso let's carry on and see how the results have panned out.

There have been 6 Lakeland 100's since the event started in 2008, and the success rate (ie the percentage of starters that eventually finished) are easy to get:

2008  -  39%

2009  -  44%

2010  -  57%

2011  -  52%

2012  -  52%

2013  -  45%

The curious will already be wondering why the years are different, why it goes down as well as up, but hold that thought for now; there is a lot more going on in the background.

Over the six years, 704 individuals have started at least one Lakeland 100. But some runners make multiple attempts:

494    runners have started the race once

137    started twice

53      started three times

14      started four times

4        started five times, and

2        started six times

And success comes sooner for some than others:

329   runners completed the race on their first attempt.

51     completed on their second (ie after one DNF)

9       completed after two DNF's, and

1       completed after three DNF's - now that's serious persistance!

So overall, your chances of success at your first attempt are 47%, but that goes up to 53% if you're prepared to keep at it. Looking at the DNF figures next........

349   runners have had one DNF (some of these have had one or more finishes as well of course)

51     have had two DNF's (again, some of these have finishes as well)

13     have had three DNF's (four of these have also had at least one finish)

4       have had four DNF's  (two of these have also had at least one finish)

You have to feel for the guys with 3 or 4 DNF's without a finish  -  how long would you keep trying? But let's wind up on a more positive note with the successes:

310   runners have finished the event once

56     have finished twice

20     have finished three times

3       have finished four times

And one runner has five Lakeland 100 finishes to his credit. On his sixth start, he pulled up at Ambleside.

So overall, 704 runners have taken on the challenge of starting a Lakeland 100, and 390 of those have finished at least once.

But for all 704 it has probably been an experience they won't forget in a hurry. So if you click your name in on 1st September, good luck on the journey!

(I was tempted to include the 50 results because many runners have done both and I was interested to see how experience in the 50 translates into performance in the 100, but in the end I decided that was a bit too geeky even for me)

Just another number

I try not to think about this too often, but August comes around again every year. 
 
Five years ago to the day I climbed the Cassin Route on the North East Face of the Piz Badile in Southern Switzerland, one of the classic Alpine climbs made popular by Gaston Rebuffat's book "Starlight and Storm". Modest in difficulty by modern standards, it still requires you to get up around 3000ft of continuously good rock climbing and down again before you're overtaken either by nightfall or one of the frequent thunderstorms that sneak up on the mountain from the hot Italian plain to the south. It was first climbed in the 1930's by the famous Italian mountaineer Riccardo Cassin with three companions (two of whom died in a storm on the descent), but the more interesting fact is that over fifty years after his first ascent, Cassin went back and repeated his climb -  at the age of eighty.

This time last year I was in the Olympic Stadium watching David Rudisha cruising through his 800m heat, but a few weeks later I was off to Italy for the Tor des Geants race. I wandered happily through the Itailian Alps from Sunday morning until Friday evening and was pleased enough to arrive in 270th place out of 631 starters. There were only 6 Brits in the event last year, and the speediest pair were George and Anthony who came in a good 24 hours ahead of me in 64th and 65th places, fine performances. But it was also encouraging to see that just ahead of them in 63rd place was a guy called Raymond Rebischung, winning the "over 60's" category.

Joss Naylor made his round of 70 Lakeland tops, 50 miles and 25,000ft of ascent in 21 hours, when he was 70,  and earlier this summer Gavin Bryan-Jones completed the West Highland Way in 26 hours 15 minutes at a similar age.

But my all-time hero, and forgive me if you've heard this from me before, is still a guy called Ivan Waller. I first became aware of him back in the 70's when he was still climbing, but he is summed up perfectly in a short passage written by Ronald Turnbull many years later, which reads:

Once there was a man called Ivan Waller. In 1931 he climbed behind Colin Kirkus on a seriously overhanging route called Mickledore Grooves in the days when falling off generally meant death, or severe injury if you were really lucky.

What happens to mountaineers as they get older? They just turn into older mountaineers. At the age of 70 Ivan turned to the Munros and climbed 140 of them in two years to become Munroist number 207. Three years later he backpacked across Scotland in the Ultimate Challenge event. Still in his seventies he completed the 45 mile walk of the Lakeland 3000ft peaks in a day, and climbed Tower Ridge in winter conditions without causing the slightest anxiety to my cousin, who was his companion. He also traversed the Cuillin Ridge twice, the second time escorting an older companion. He considered the Corbetts: "This may be beyond my span because I still have more than 160 to do at 81 years of age  -  but a man can try".

I've spent today climbing in the slate quarries above Llanberis, after the wet weekend and Monday probably the fastest-drying rock in the world, so I've had a nice day. Then after a few more days in the hills I'm off to France in a couple of weeks time for the UTMB at the end of the month; life's far from dull.

So thanks for all the birthday wishes. I've changed the number in the panel on the right, but it is, after all, just another number.

Lakeland 100 - "The most important muscle in your body is your brain"

For the last couple of years my blog has been mostly good news  -   places visited, runs run, achievements achieved, interesting things learned an so on. Well, last Saturday I had a bit of a downturn and pulled out of a race that I could and should have completed. It annoyed and frustrated me hugely, but I've had a day or two to think about it and look at some of the facts, and I think I now know what went wrong. Setting it down will be good for me and may be of interest to anyone who has had a similar experience, either last weekend or at other times.

The Lakeland 100 is a tough but by no means impossible event for the average tourist ultra-runner. I had run it twice before. In 2010 I stopped at Ambleside (with 90 out of the 105 miles completed) because I had wasted too much time in the middle stages and simply ran out of time at the pace I was able to go near the end. In 2011 I completed the course a couple of hours or so inside the 40 hour time limit feeling I could have speeded up a bit at the finish if it had been required. I know the route well and last year I finished the Lakeland 50 in just under 10 hours. This year I was generally better trained, having run PB's at the Highland Fling and West Highland Way races and finished a number of other "training" ultras comfortably and in good shape. I went into the Lakeland with a plan for 35 hours which I felt was conservative and which I was confident with, and didn't doubt that even if I needed a bit of wiggle room for unforeseen setbacks, that I would finish OK.

The outline story is that in the event I was very comfortable to Braithwaite (32 miles) but then spent the next 35 or so miles unable to eat or drink anything of note due to constant nausea. I eventually accepted that I had been running on empty for too long near the top of the climb out of Howtown (around 68 miles), so returned to Howtown and retired. I had not been remotely near the cut-off times. I got the bus back to Coniston, slept for a few hours, and felt completely fine the next morning (when the race was still going on), fit enough to have started again. So what was the problem?

Well, one or two friends have suggested that the race was too close to my run in the West Highland Way five weeks ago, but I don't really buy that. If you target one ultra as a life-changing event then you probably don't get really as fit as you need to be for it and it may take a long time to recover, but for those of us who participate fairly regularly (I've run over 40 ultras in the last seven years), then you get fit enough to compete at your chosen level, recover quickly and move on. I've never had the sensation described by some people as "still having the last race in the legs" three or four weeks later. I had no major muscular or joint problems. I was worried about a chronic knee problem going in to the race, but I strapped it up well and on the day it caused no more than a minor annoyance at times. I know how to look after my feet so I don't normally get blisters. I've practiced hydration and fuelling over a lot of events so I think I know what works for me. Conditions were not ideal (a bit warm to start with followed by rain) but certainly not the extremes you get in the Alps. So for a day or two I was puzzled, but I tried to remember my race in detail to see if I could work it out.

Successful world-class coaches such as Clive Woodward and Dave Brailsford talk about dramatically improved performance coming from the sum of a large number of small gains, and of course this works for everyone, not just elite athletes.  I think what I learned last weekend is that the reverse is also true; performance can be severely compromised by an accumulation of small errors of judgement. You get one or two things wrong and the process starts; if you then don't use your brain to recognise and correct them , you just get into a downward spiral to eventual failure.

Let's go back to the beginning. 6pm on a sunny Friday evening in Coniston and we were away. The "warm-up" legs over to Wasdale went easily and I reached Seathwaite in 1hr 39mins (plan 1,45), Eskdale in 3,23 (3,30) and Wasdale in 4,56 (5,00). The views were stunning, particularly looking back to Burnmoor Tarn with a stream of headlamps reflecting off the still water, and it felt a pleasure and a privilege to be on the course. I should mention two things here though. Firstly, I don't get thirsty, not running, not even in a normal day. If I go for a walk in the hills a litre will keep me going for 8 hours or so in normal conditions. So the received wisdom of "drinking to thirst" just doesn't work for me, and I've had to work out what I think I should take in. In ultras I normally drink about a litre every three hours in the early, more active parts of a race, going down to a litre every four hours after tiredness slows me down. I don't know how this water intake compares with other runners, I would be interested to know. As it was a warm evening at the start, I upped this a bit for the first leg or two, then cut back to a litre per three hours as it got cooler between Wasdale and Braithwaite. I found the climbs over the passes easy enough, kept jogging the downhills and flats, and had drunk 3,5 litres by the time I got to Braithwaite, which I reached in 9,41 (10,00 plan). 

The second issue I have is that I don't like the taste of water on its own, so I'm always playing around with different flavours. On Friday I was using SIS GO Hydro Tablets which I hadn't used much before but which had a pleasant lemon flavour. But because this is an electrolyte I was not taking Succeed (S-Caps), which I usually use when hydrating with "non-electrolyte" drinks. This may have been mistake No 1, playing with a non-familiar electrolyte. I'm not sure, because latest thinking seems to be that electrolyte supplements are over-rated anyway, but the wisdom of doing this certainly played on my mind a bit later in the race.

However, on checking back, my first clear mistake in this first 30-odd miles is that I ate too much in relation to the water I was drinking. It's easy to eat early on in a race, particularly if you choose to walk all the uphills, so with ginger cake, flapjack, soup (brilliant at both Wasdale and Buttermere!) supplemented by regular gels and shotbloks, I took in about 1500 calories before Braithwaite. Now I think the figure is that you can digest while active is around 200/300 calories per litre of water, which meant I needed nearer to 5-7 litres instead of the 3,5 litres I had drunk. So by Braithwaite, although I didn't know it, I was already either over-full or dehydrated.

Braithwaite is a sort of oasis in the Lakeland 100, the end of the really tough ground, the first place you can get inside for a bit of a break, the first place serving real food. I was pleased with my efforts so far so rewarded myself with two full bowls of pasta and sauce, and a couple of cups of tea. You can see where we're going here (although I couldn't at the time), the food to liquid balance, already bad, just got a lot worse. Walking out of the hall I suddenly didn't feel great, but just put it down to eating too quickly, I felt I just needed to digest the food so decided to walk along the road and up the hill to the Glenderaterra valley. Once past the Latrigg car park I started running all the flats and downhills again, feeling that I was going strongly, although I still felt queasy and the SIS drink was now a real turn off. I drank nothing during the leg but had a cup of tea at the Blencathra checkpoint.

Another error was coming up here. At this point, in my bit of the field it was mid-morning and starting to get hot. I read a report recently about the recent extra-hot Western States race this year where the RD at the briefing said something like "It's going to get hot. Forget about your pre-planned splits and slow down. Drink plenty and you'll survive".  What happens if you go too fast in hot weather and don't drink enough is that your body temperature rises and you feel nauseous. In the 18 miles from Blencathra to Dalemain I drank maybe 750ml of water in tiny sips, plus a cup of tea at Dockray. I had stopped putting the SIS tabs in but could not drink enough water in one go to use the S-Caps (you need a good slug of water when you take one or you tend to get immediately sick). So no electrolytes from here. On the walk up to the Old Coach Road I passed Nick Ham who was struggling. He said he felt he had overdosed electrolyte and might have to pull out (he didn't, he went on to finish in under 34 hours) but that didn't help my current frame of mind in trying to work out what was wrong with me. And instead of slowing down I speeded up. I had this idea sort of pre-programmed into my brain that this is the part of the course where you have to get a move on because it's so runnable, jam for nothing sort of thing. The result was that I did this 18 miles almost an hour faster than I had planned, arriving at Dalemain in 16hrs 52 min (against an 18 hour plan).

I had it in mind that having a good rest at Dalemain would put me right. I lay down for a quarter of an hour or so at the checkpoint, chatting briefly to Jon Steele who was there at the same time and just getting ready to leave. I then managed to drink two cups of Coke and two cups of tea slowly, and had a bowl of beef stew. After about 45 minutes I didn't really feel any better, but it was hot and there was no real shade either inside or outside the checkpoint marquee so I decided to push on. I walked steadily along to Pooley Bridge then up the hill onto Askham Fell, with a continuous stream of good wishes from Lakeland 50 starters coming past me. When the ground levelled out before the Cockpit everyone around me was running, so I started to run too (why, I ask in retrospect!!), and kept up a steady jog all the way to Howtown which I reached at around 1.40pm. I hadn't drunk anything since Dalemain so felt pretty rough when I arrived.  I was even more determined this time to get sorted out so I just lay down on the grass at the back of the checkpoint and sipped my way through another couple of cups of tea. I told the checkpoint staff I was going to be there a while. After an hour or so I still didn't feel any different but I reasoned that walking slowly wasn't going to be any worse than just sitting around doing nothing, so I set off again.

Now that the main rush of the Lakeland 50 had gone through, I was going no slower than the people around me as I made my way up Fusedale, overtaking some people on the way. But by the time I got to the point where the path starts its final right-left push for the top my energy level had pretty well reached rock bottom. Normally I never stop on climbs, but on this one I just had to sit down. I considered the situation. It seemed to me that I wasn't going to get through this bad patch, which had now been going on for something like 10 hours. I was no nearer to being able to drink any real volume of water than I was at Braithwaite more than 35 miles back. I might get over to Mardale but it was unlikely that I could get any further. Decision made, it was over for today. I turned round and went slowly back to Howtown, where I retired from the race at 4.25pm. As I sat around at the checkpoint waiting for the bus back to Coniston, L100 runners were still arriving at Howtown, well over 3 hours after I had first got there; some of these people finished the event through to Coniston.

Getting back to Coniston took a while, I was back at maybe 10pm. Getting off the bus, I went immediately to the food counter in the school to satisfy a craving for lemonade and crisps. After that I felt fine.

So what is the learning from this? Well, from the story so far you can see that I made a number of mistakes which led to dehydration, and I then carried on making mistakes which prevented me from resolving the situation, which I could otherwise have done at many points throughout the day. Even at Howtown, had I sat around for two or three hours instead of one it is very likely that I could have got going again and completed the race. So my biggest takeout from this failure is that dehydration affects your judgement  - once your brain stops working logically then you're in danger of getting out of control. I'm never going to let this happen again. Pulling out of an event is a rare occurrence for me, and it hurts!

Practically, I'll do what I should have done long ago, take weight measurements over plenty of long training runs to get a better idea of how much fluid I do actually lose over a range of conditions, so I know how much I should be drinking (It's a genuine problem, I went out rock climbing near Llanberis yesterday; we were away from the car for over 6 hours, I drank nothing and didn't feel thirsty). I'll pay more attention to the calorie to fluid balance in future. And I'll try and get it programmed into my brain that if things are getting bad, the only practical way out of the situation is to stop and sort it out!

And the Lakeland 100? Well, after success in 2011, I thought I had its measure. Now there's a ghost to be laid. I'll be back next year.

Pacing and the Lakeland 100

With the Lakeland 100 coming up in two weeks I thought I'd better re-familiarise myself with bits of the course that I haven't seen for a couple of years, particularly those done in the dark, so yesterday morning I got myself up early to be parking in Coniston at 6.30am ready for a long and probably hot day.

It's surprising how much the countryside changes, or is managed, over a period of two years. The old rocky defiles of the Walna Scar Road have been filled in to make it almost motorway-smooth and the deforestation around Grassguards Farm has changed its appearance completely  - and the new forestry road there has helped dry out the very boggy section to our advantage! Even the minor details change over time. The first time I reccied the route back in 2009, the final turn up to Sail Pass before Braithwaite was so obscure that I missed it and had to go back. Then it grew a cairn, now the cairn has got big enough to fall over and the "turn" is quite clearly the most-used path at the junction  -  the Lakeland 100 is creating its own trails, as the Bob Graham has done over the years. Well, the day was as hot as predicted, so I walked anything that smelled of uphill and jogged the rest at a very modest pace, and eventually arrived at Braithwaite after nine and a half hours on the go. Good enough. A quick ramble from Ambleside to Coniston next week to remember the fell after Tiberthwaite and I'll be good to go. I ran this in the Lakeland 50 last year but just made it to the finish in daylight, and things change in the dark.

So I started putting together some sort of plan for the race. Now the Lakeland 100 is quite a gnarly event, not to be taken lightly, and a certain amount of unpleasantness ensues if you get it wrong. By my own rule of thumb I should be able to get round in about 30 hours (3x Lakeland 50 time), but my ambition this year is for a completion in good shape, in whatever time it takes - I don't want a long recovery period afterwards with the UTMB coming up 5 weeks later. Allow a few hours spare for the wheels to come off occasionally and this means I'm targeting 35 hours. In any case my record in this event isn't great; in 2010 I stopped at Ambleside, by that stage going too slowly to complete in the 40 hours, and in 2011 I finished in 37:39 having had to stop for a longish sleep at Kentmere, so a 35 hour plan seems sensible. 35 hours is an average of 3 miles an hour start to finish, including stops. Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that the strategy for completing this race and enjoying most of it (we do this for fun remember) has two key elements:

1. Get to Braithwaite feeling good. By here, you've all the really tough stuff behind you but it's still only one third distance. If you're feeling bad by here, the rest is going to hurt quite a lot.

2. Don't waste energy early on running in places where you should walk. There is a lot of easy ground in the middle and later parts of the course, and having to walk this at three miles an hour or less is a great way to ruin your overall average.

So I put together an initial plan which sees me at Seathwaite in 1.45, Wasdale Head in 5 hours, and Braithwaite in 10 hours, and so on. Out of interest, I then checked this against Nick Smith's time split predictor based on the 2010 race actual finishes  -  http://climbers.net/race/Lakeland100-2010. What I found was a bit of a shock. Plugging a 35 hour target  into Nick's model told me I should be at Seathwaite in 1.21  and Braithwaite in 8.31 -  suicidally fast according to my thinking. But there are two linked factors at play here, both coming from the way that Nick has constructed the model (don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism, it's a great and fascinating tool, you just have to understand the way that it works).

The figures are based on the times that runners actually took in the 2010 event. I looked a bit closer at the sensitivity of the target time, and a very abbreviated spread is shown below:

You can see for example that if you target a 33 hour finish the model tells you to start much more conservatively than for 35 hours. What happened is that the 35 hour result was skewed by two competitors in particular who started out at the model's 30 hour pace then "blew up" and finished very slowly indeed. So if you use this model to have a go at planning your race, check the sensitivities on either side of your target before you go firm on a plan.

But the second and more important point is that the model reflects what runners actually did, and not perhaps what they ought to have done. My stake in the ground here is that I believe that the majority of runners, and especially middle to back of pack performers, start far too fast when competing in long distance events. It may appear that I'm diametrically opposed to Stuart Mills here (we've had some debates about it!) but I don't think I am. A couple of points to think about:

1. I've analysed the results of a lot of races over the past few years, and one very consistent trend that comes out is that over the course of a race, slower performers slow down significantly more than faster ones. The good guys keep running all the runnable bits, they just go slower. The weaker performers are walking everything way before the end. Now assuming that you are unlikely to walk at much faster than a 15 minute mile pace, whereas even a slow jog gets you 12 minute miles on level ground or downhill, being able to run the runnable stuff for as long into the event as possible pays huge dividends. To do this you need to conserve your energy early on, not run uphills at a marginally faster rate than you could walk them.

2. As everyone says, overall performance in ultras, and particularly how you fare when you have a few miles already done, is largely governed by your mental attitude. How do you stay feeling good, and therefore focussed on the task in hand. Some runners (most likely near the front) will get this from feeling competitively successful, beating their peers, having a chance to win and so on. I know people who feel good so long as they are ahead of their plan, beating their splits  - a danger here of course is that if you fall behind your plan the motivation takes a big knock. After well over 50 marathons and ultras in the past few years I know what keeps me going - I like to feel, until the finish is comfortably in sight, that I have "something in hand", I could go faster if I chose but I'm taking it easy. You only get this by starting conservatively. I've done races where it hurt from a quarter of the way in; I don't like it and I try to not let it happen these days - if things start to feel tough I slow down, have a rest, get it sorted now rather than hanging on hoping that things will improve. I've done marathons with both negative and positive splits; we could argue forever over which gets you the fastest time on the day, but I know which ones feel better, the ones where you're accelerating to the finish rather than desperately hanging on. Of course everyone slows down in an ultra, but it's the perceived effort that's the key. When you're 50 miles in, does it still feel fun? Remember, we're not talking here about winning the race or getting your absolute best time, we're talking about finishing the event successfully and in good shape.

So as we set out on the 26th July, I'm expecting to be one of the last to reach Seathwaite. But I'm also hoping to be able to run the newly-surfaced Garburn Road down to Troutbeck a few (!) hours later. If you're interested this is my plan:

But I have a number of ex-military friends who say that the only thing that you can guarantee about a plan is that it never survives the first contact with the enemy.