How did we get here?

I have been fortunate enough to take part in some amazing races around the world. For those that don’t know me I will digress a little and explain how I came to be at the Spine Race in the first place.

OK so for those that have never heard my story, I have been a runner of sorts for around 25 years. I started when I unwisely took up karate. I needed to get fit in order to be able to avoid getting hit too much so I started running as a cheap and easy way to build stamina. After a while I was much fitter but still getting hit a lot so I dropped karate and kept running. In 1998 I did my first half marathon (The Great North Run) and in 2007 I did my first marathon (London, like a lot of people). I kept doing the Great North Run, did London again, Edinburgh Marathon a couple of times, but I was exclusively a road runner and mainly stuck to 10km to half-marathon type distances.

Things changed dramatically in 2013. At the end of March 2014 I would be 50. This event had to be marked with a ridiculous, over-the-top, grand gesture. There was this race I’d heard about years before and had always kind of interested me. some of you may have heard of it, The Marathon Des Sables. I wasn’t interested in it’s billing as the toughest foot race in the World (it isn’t – controversial among some people I know but it just isn’t) it was the idea of running in the Sahara Desert that appealed to me. Bear in mind at this point in my life I’d done four road marathons and never run off road since school cross-country (my school cross-country is now almost certainly banned as a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’). However after spending six weeks in New Zealand doing a whole load of stuff I had no prior experience of (canyoning, white-water sledging, mountaineering (well, we had a rope anyway)) I went for my normal approach of sign-up first and ask questions later.

I asked a lot of questions. I got a lot of answers. Most were either, wrong, contradictory or wrong and contradictory. However it became clear I needed to do some ultra races. When I was advised to do ‘Druids’ and ‘Pilgrims’ I did start to wonder whether I was going to become an ultra-runner or a Wiccan but it turned out these are multi-day events run by Extreme Energy and are a staple of many peoples Marathon Des Sables training.

One of the best things to come from my running was my wife, Sharon. We both worked on the same site and had access to a gym. In 2007 the spring was lovely and I (and a few others) used to run from the gym at lunchtimes. Sharon was very jealous as she was stuck in the gym on the machines so I offered to take her running after I had done my marathon. To cut a long story short she went from barely being able to run half a mile in May, to 10km in October, the Great North Run the following year and her first marathon in 2010 – by which time we were married.

In 2013 there were still a lot of people at work running. I’d slightly changed my employer and now actually worked with the same people as Sharon. There is a local 5 (and a bit) km race held every year in Chelmsford called the Race For Business, which, as the name suggests, is open to runners from local businesses. I arranged a team for my business and yes, this does have some relevance to my story, it’s just taking a while to get to it.

At said race there was a small A5 flyer advertising the first running of the Saltmarsh 75, a two day event of 75 miles duration (it was 76, it’s always (at least) 76) around the coast of Essex. This looked like an ideal event to start my ultra career with and so it proved. I had another blog at the time of my MDS training, which includes much rambling and race reports so I won’t go into to much detail here (I can hear the sighs of relief). Go to http://colinsmds.blogspot.com/ if you really want to read about my early adventures in ultra running but as you’ve got this far I would recommend wading through the rest of this blog post first (or going for a nice cup of tea, probably the best option of all).

The net result of all this was that I was hooked on ultra-running. That was never the plan, the MDS was supposed to be – as it is for many – a once in a lifetime thing. I’ve done it twice. I’ve run in Hungary, Bhutan, Spain, Cambodia, and Sao Tome. I’ve also done the previously mentioned Pilgrims and Druids many times and even occasionally won trophies for being old. I’ve done numerous trail marathons, 50km races and a few 100km races. I’ve done one 100 mile race and a 184 mile race (of which, more later). In 2019 I completed my 100th ‘marathon’ (I was actually averaging 38 miles per marathon at this point) and joined the 100 Marathon Club.

Anyway I’m supposed to be explaining how I ended up in Edale on the start line of the 2021 Summer Spine Race, so lets go back to my 100 mile race…

There was some banter on Facebook about a race I wasn’t even slightly interested in doing which resulted in me being told I couldn’t enter it anyway because I’d never done a 100 mile race. True – I’d never wanted to, sounded horrible. However it became a bit of an itch that needed scratching. I had a few good results on my ultra races, on my 100th marathon I was third overall and first place male over 50, but the lack of a 100 miler on my running CV was bit of a gap that I was starting to think should be filled.

OK so find a 100 mile race and get it over with. Most were sold out but I found one that ran from the Thames Barrier to Streatley along the Thames Path called the T100. I entered and, to my utter amazement both enjoyed it and won. There is an account of the race here https://colinrunning.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-t100-or-how-i-learned-to-stop.html.

The T100 has a big brother, the T184. This goes all the way to the source of the Thames (or at least, to a stone that probably isn’t really at the source but claims to be). when I finished the T100 another itch started, I hadn’t really finished had I? 100 miles was OK but I really needed to do the full thing. So a couple of years later I did – and that also went very well. Race report here https://colinrunning.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-t184-from-barrier-to-source.html

So I’m on a roll, loving this longer running and looking for my next challenge and this is where I should have calmed down and had a bit of a think and not done what I did next…

I’ve never fancied the Spine Race. I mainly run for location and scenery (hence the MDS). 6 hours of daylight and blizzards don’t appeal. However a summer version with 6 hours of darkness and (hopefully) no blizzards, that sounds nice. So I signed up, again with about as much idea of what I was letting myself in for as when I signed up for my first MDS. But I was feeling confident – however to quote Dilbert ‘It’s too bad being smart doesn’t come with some sort of good feeling like that’. Covid put paid to the 2020 Summer Spine Race so I was transferred to the 2021 edition – by which time the feeling of confidence was wearing off. The T184 is quite hard but it’s 184 miles, has two small hills and is basically flat. The Spine Race is 268 miles, has nothing but hills and has one or two flat bits just to remind you how hard the hills are.

I should explain I didn’t enter the Summer spine Race because I thought it would be easy, or that I was likely to do well in it, quite the opposite. As I’ve said, I’ve had some good results in some of my races and it’s easy and fun to keep doing those races, and I do. I’ve done about 30 events with Extreme Energy and I still love them. However I needed to get out of my comfort zone, stop being a largish fish in a medium size pond. In the pond that is the Spine Race I wasn’t even a minnow, I think I was a stickleback at best. In many ways not finishing was the best result for me, it’s made me think again and realise just how unprepared I was and how different the challenge is to what I was expecting. This blog post was going to be about one of those differences but veered of into some sort of autobiographical ramble. Hopefully it was a bit interesting to some of you but the next post will be back on topic and attempt to explain one of the key things that I didn’t really fully get until I ran the Spine Race, the difference between stage racing and non-stop racing. Until then, the only way is Pennine!