This is a milestone in my training as I ran for longer than an hour today ! I know this sounds like nothing in comparison to the 15hrs that I’m aiming to do the Ultra Trail CCC in but it’s still a good feeling to have got past this milestone.
Of course the time isn’t the only important thing, and distance wise it was 8.1Km and Ascent wise I did 450m of ascent / descent, so it is getting close to a tenth the total distance and ascent that I am going to have to do (90km, 5000m of Ascent).
I’m trying to match my training runs to the sort of terrain that I’ll encounter on the Ultra, as I’ve always believed that the best training is doing the thing you are training for! So far this is what I’ve been doing. It’s definitely tough going - running up these hills is not easy ! But then this is exactly what I’m going to have to do, so pain now is pain saved later.
Since I’ve missed a lot of my early training (Often the worst bit) as I started this blog a little late, I’ll give a recap in a later post.
The dates for next years Ultra Trail, and Ultra Trail CCC have now been anounced, and it will be the 24 - 26 August 2007. Entries open on the 8 January, and I’m hoping to enter for the Ultra Trail Courmayeur-Champex-Chamonix, a trail run of 90Km with 5000m of accent and descent, to be completed in under 24hours ! This is the equivelent of 2 Marathons over mountains terrain back to back.
A number of years ago I walked the Tour de Mont Blanc, which roughly follows the same route, and it took us 8 day. For this challenge I have to cover half of that trail in just 24 hours !
This is no small task as I’ve never taken part in any running event in my life, but I like a chalange and i’ve got nearly a year to prepare for it, and my training has already begun. Of course the route is on my doorstep so I have the perfect terrain to train on - exactly like the course, but with that comes the problems of having to deal with winter which leaves snow permentantly on the ground for 4 months, cutting off most of my training runs.
I’ll be keeping a record of how my training goes, and my musings on running, training etc here. So keep checking back or subscribe to the RSS feed.