The first of November brought with it a real winter feel, and today the sky was clear and the temperature crisp - a great day to go out for a run.
Today I took water for the first time and wore a ‘Bum Bag’ to carry it in. I usually use the bag for cycling but this seem to work OK for running, staying reasonably stable for most of the run. At some stage I’ll have to make the decision as to whether to do the Ultra with a light backpack - probably with a hydration system, or to run with a bum bag, staying really light weight. This worked fine today, but I don’t know how well it will work with more weight in it - it may press against my stomach which I don’t think will be good. But we will see - I’ll test out the options and see which works best.
Carrying the water and sipping it as I go seemed to work realy well. I’m definitely going to carry water from now on.
For the record, the run was the same as the last - 8.1km, 450m Ascent, done in 1Hour 5Mins. Felt fairly good at the end - almost did further in fact, so the training must be having some impact !
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.
