I met up with my good friend Becki on a pleasant spring morning for the Caythorpe
Canter, a trail marathon near where I live in Lincolnshire. I had warned Becki that
it might be a bit of a slow one given that I am now solely in run/walk mode but it
is her first marathon so she was willing to go with whatever speed I wanted. The
atmosphere at these events is great, very informal and welcoming and I was very
much looking forward to out day. Becki has done a few events with me before and it
is always fab to run with her and have a good catch up. She is totally selfless about
it and always lets me run at my pace and walk when I want and I am always grateful
to her for helping me out. We estimated around 5.30-6hrs given stops for homemade
cake etc! Happily the Canter starts at the civilised time of 9am so after registering
we made our way calmly to the start line. At the start line I saw my friend Anthony
Gerundi who won the Double Ironman 2010 and was looking to post around 3.30
today. Given that that was the only time I was likely to see him today (!) I wished
him good luck for the race and wandered off a bit closer to the back of the group!
The gun went and off we went. The first few miles are all on roads, pretty much until
the first checkpoint at around 6miles so we had decided we would run pretty much
all of that unless there were any major hills. About 3miles in we were confused to
see the fastest runners heading back towards us. Knowing there was no out and back
section to the course we stopped and waited to see what was going on. Turns out they
had taken a wrong turn and like lemmings we had all followed! Anthony was leading
and if had known that I would have relied more heavily on my own navigation skills
as he has somewhat of a reputation for getting lost! Thankfully being near the back
we had only gone half a mile or so out of our way unlike the front runners who had
probably gone over a mile before the realised they were wrong and had had to double
back to the rest of us! To think at one point therefore we were almost in the lead!
J With the extra distance it was probably 75minutes before we reached the first
check point and I think Becki and I were wishing we had decided to carry our own
water. Becki had sensibly brought a camelback to run with but not so sensibly had be
swayed by my insistence that we’d be ok between checkpoints! It was a pretty sunny
day and we definitely felt thirsty which was not a great sign. Still we were happy to
reach our first marker and have a couple of glasses of squash and a bit of fruit cake.
During the race there were quite a few off road sections on trail and through fields
and it was beautiful scenery. The first have passed reasonably quickly and both of us
felt comfortable. The longest Becki had run prior to this was 18miles and we were
both excited about reaching that point and celebrating her new longest run! However,
around 15miles, Becki’s knee was really starting to give her some problems. I think
probably all the running in fields where the ground can be quite uneven and the path
was often so narrow that your feet fell at different heights as you tried to follow the
established path, was probably putting a strain around the knee joint. We decided to
walk more and only run where the path was flat and wide. This reduced our speed
but was a chance for us to have a nice chat. Becki kept apologising for having to
walk but I told her that walking was as valid as piece of training for me as running
and anyway, I was hardly begging to be able to run, I was pretty tired! I think not
fuelling properly was probably also beginning to take its toll and we were starting to
feel it as we made the last check point in a local school. The 18-mile point had come
and gone and we took a moment to toast Becki’s longest run! We took the chance to
have a little sit down and refuel on Penguin biscuits though we were cautious not to
sit down for too long as the chairs we made for little people and it was pretty hard to
get back up especially with seizing knees!! We were warned that the last challenge
was just around the corner, a particularly infamous hill but, once we had made it over,
it was a nice steady run into the finish.
We set off on the last leg and, upon reaching amoderate hill, I enquired of Becki whether this was the hill everyone had been talking about as she has cycled up it before. She looked at me with amusement and we headed round the next corner where I was faced with something altogether more Himalayan. I may have had a little curse but we had no real choice except to get on with it. We slowed right down and I spent a lot of the following minutes adopting a
bent over position using my hands to push off my knees with every step just to make
forward progress!! We finally crested the top of the hill and were relieved that there
were only a few miles left to face. We walked and jogged those last few miles, the
highlight of which was me managing to do a comedy fall as I tripped over a tree root
and narrowly avoided landing on a dead blackbird, and finally crossed the finish line
together a few minutes over the 6hr mark. It was great to get a long run done –
probably somewhere between 27-28miles with the detour and, as always, it had been
a pleasure to spend the day with Bec. We had a happy time refuelling with some
fabulous sandwiches and homemade cake before setting off to our respective abodes
for a welcome bath!
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