All The Gear? No Idea.
Training For And Running The South Downs Way 50. Including how a cup, a phone, and a chat with a friend almost ended in disqualification.
At about 10.30 am on Saturday 3rd January this year I returned home from a gruelling 20-mile run incorporating many miles of hill repeats. In my confused state of mind I saw my neighbour leaving his house and I asked if he was off down the pub. I just had time to observe the look of incredulity spread across his face before I fumbled my keys in the door and escaped into my house. Apart from the time of day, we were amid an unprecedented lockdown and no pubs were opening anywhere for months! He’s been a bit off with me ever since.
In the hallway of my home, I sunk to my knees and crawled into the living room where I lay almost catatonic on the floor. As my daughter prodded me asking if I was alive all I could think was “in three months, I have to run two-and-a-half times that distance and four-times the elevation. Impossible!”
I had begun my training for the South Downs Way 50. A fifty-mile ultra-marathon along hill top coastal paths from Worthing in West Sussex to the town of Eastbourne.
I signed up to this race as one of my 50@50 challenges, one of a dozen goals related to the number fifty that I want to achieve in 2021 to celebrate reaching my half-century but, as a running enthusiast, I have long harboured an ambition to do an ultramarathon so it was a good excuse to do one.
The Training Bit
I wasn’t really sure how to train for an ultra. It’s a different proposition from a regular marathon. Particularly the reasonably quick, flat marathons I have focussed on over the past six years. Essentially marathon training involves volume and intensity as I try to load my legs up with between 50-70 miles a week for about three months. Runs include intervals, tempo, recovery and long runs. My marathon pace is about 6.45 minutes a mile, so I would complete an easy 20 mile long run at 7.30 min/miles in under 2.5 hours. I often return from one of these Sunday excursions before any other member of my household has shed their dressing gown, so it doesn’t disrupt family life much. Training for shorter races is simply a scaled-down version of the above, more or less.
It doesn’t really work in the other direction though. At least it doesn’t for me. Disappearing for a 5 hour run on Sunday and running 100+ miles a week is not an option. Instead, I planned to train a bit like a marathon but with less focus on intensity and more focus on longer runs and building in the all important hill training that is a big feature of most ultras. My marathon training long runs usually peak at about 25 miles so, for the ultra, I planned in a 30 and a 35 with hills in the later stages of my training. Come race day, I would simply drop my pace a little and knock out fifty miles in cruise control, or something like that.
After my incoherent babbling to my neighbour, things improved over the following weeks. I consistently exceeded 60 miles with a respectable amount of hills, considering the lack of altitude where I live in East London. The grim winter conditions, including endless sub-zero temperatures, and frequent lashing rain somehow compounded my determination to tough out the training. I’m grateful to my main lockdown running buddy, Paul Gaimster, who accompanied me on many of these expeditions. Twenty-one repeats of Spring Hill in North London would not have been possible as a solo effort.
Frozen
By mid-February, I managed a 30 mile run across the capital to Hampstead Heath on one of the coldest days I can remember.
After Paul ducked out at mile 20, it left me lapping the steeply banked Springfield Park alone. I was training in my ultra-kit to get used to the extra weight, which it meant I had my phone, headphones and an energy bar so I decided to fuel up and listen to some tunes to get me through these hard yards. I hadn’t realised quite how useless my fingers had become in the cold. The simple act of taking an energy bar out of my bag and looping my headphones over my ears was impossible. My fingers had no feeling, and each disembodied digit felt more like a soup spoon than an appendage. Attaching my headphones was like trying to operate one of those the claw crane slot machines you see motorway service stations, with a blindfold on.
A group of women walked passed as I whimpered to myself on a park bench and I briefly considered asking one of them to help. I was in Stamford Hill and even in my discombobulated state, I quickly realised that asking a Haredi Orthodox Jewish lady to feed me during a pandemic was unlikely to yield a positive result. I got up and began running again, but I tried pumping my hands as I ran. It was a painful exercise, and it took an age, but eventually the feeling and the warmth returned and I chomped down an energy bar and plugged my buds in.
Injury strikes
Unfortunately, the sub-zero 30 miles was the high-point of my training. The following Sunday I picked up a painful, intermittent tendon injury on a long run, which resulted in my weekly milage dropping from 60+ to about 15. Four weeks later I had just about shaken the injury off, but it derailed my training and my fitness had vanished. The race was just a couple of weeks away at this point and I would normally taper but I actually had to increase my milage just to claw back some fitness. A flat twenty-mile run at over eight minutes a mile was leaving me utterly destroyed. It was bizarre, and I felt like it was the worst shape I had been in for years. How could things deteriorate so quickly?
On reflection, I had lost the plot. I hadn’t missed running when the injury hit me and it eventually it became an excuse not to run. I wasn’t training much during the week and then I was trying to make it up with very long runs on the weekends. It wasn’t a formula for success. This has led me to consider more searching questions about my running motivation. I certainly still enjoy running but it has become more of a social thing and I find excuses to avoid the more punishing sessions that are an essential part of a proper training programme. These questions are still unanswered, so I won’t get into that now.
Race Day Draws Near
Before I knew it, the race was a few days off and I realised that, besides being woefully undercooked, I hadn’t really made any solid plans for the day, including travel. Worthing is a few hours' drive from where I live and the race had a rolling start from 6 a.m. to 8.30 a.m. It’s good to do this type of event with someone else, but there had been scant interest when I mentioned it to running friends months before. Fortunately, a kindly friend who lives down that way offered me a bed for the night. A further consideration was that this race was a point to point, so I needed to figure out how to return to my vehicle when I finished the race. It is surprising that I hadn’t thought about this earlier but I think a symptom of living in London is that I never really make travel plans. I just go to a station and expect to be heading to my destination within a few minutes. Mind you, maybe I have always been like that. A friend reminded me recently about a time when we were stuck in traffic on the way to see a film and I thought the cinema would delay the film for us. But I digress. It transpired that I had to park at the start and take a couple of trains back after the run. I didn’t relish the prospect of walking a couple of miles at each end of the train line with shredded legs, but I was not prepared to shell out £90 for an Uber.
All The Gear
If you haven’t run an ultra before, you may not be aware that unlike conventional road races, they often require participants to carry a certain amount of gear. For the record, here is the mandatory kit list for the South Downs Way 50.
- Mobile phone
- Water Bottles/Bladder capable of carrying a minimum of 1 litre
- Survival Blanket
- Waterproof Jacket
- Whistle
- Head torch or Primary Light Source
- Back Up Light source
- Warm Hat
- Gloves
- Base layer or fleece top — This must be carried separately from the start and kept dry, for use only in an emergency.
- The race is cupless which means you must bring a cup with you. You must carry a cup IN ADDITION to your bottles/ bladders.
With my lack of planning, I skim read this and packed the gear the night before I set off to my overnight stay at my chum, Steve’s house. The only snag was I didn’t have the last item on the list, a cup. I am sure anyone reading will appreciate that a china mug won’t do for this sort of thing. It’s bulky and prone to breaking. There wasn’t time to order a collapsible, silicone ultra-running cup (yes there are such things) from Wiggle so I abandoned the cup. I don’t recall consciously rubbing my hands with an evil laugh and saying “They can stick the cup where the sun don’t shine” but either way, I was going to run the race cupless.
Race day arrived. It was a bright and clear day and the start was well organised. Staff and volunteers were friendly and efficient and stationed along the route to help you along the way. The South Downs Way is a picturesque 100-mile National Trail from Winchester to Eastbourne. There is an annual race along the whole thing but being a novice to the world of ultras, I thought the 50 mile version taking in the second half of the trail was ample.
It was a chilly morning, and I set off at a conservative pace of about 10-minutes a mile. The first couple of miles were a steep climb out of the town and onto the trails. Once I reached the top, the views were stunning, rolling hills to the left and to the right a vast sweep encompassing open fields, punctuated by a copse here and there, chalk paths and about five miles off, the sea stretching out to the vanishing point. It’s the sort of landscape the BBC shows as a fly over when playing Jerusalem on Songs of Praise. At least I imagine they do that.
I will not give a blow-by-blow account of the run itself, but I will say that it was a very enjoyable experience, running across this beautiful landscape on a bright cloudless day. It was cold though, much colder than I expected, and it wasn’t long before I had my bag off and was digging out my ‘emergency’ base layer to keep myself warm. I hadn’t factored in the lack of warmth my body would generate running in the low zone 2 heart rate bracket.
They punctuated the race every eight miles with a feed-station. Unlike shorter races where all that is on offer is water or, at posh races, energy drinks, these feed-stations featured a mini banquet of hi carb grub. In a marathon, there would be no question of stopping at the drinks station; you simply grab a few gulps of water without breaking stride. When I run a 3-hour marathon, my digestive system would have no chance of converting a mid-race sausage roll to energy before the end of the race. This ultra was a different as I expected to take up to nine hours, so I sampled just about everything that was on offer: peanut butter sandwiches, fruit, mini-scotch eggs, Soreen, nuts, etc. I also completely refilled my two half litre water bottles with the very weak energy drink that was available at every stop.
My chief concern was bonking too early. Technically, I mean depleting my glycogen resources and depriving my muscles of the energy they need to move faster than a hedgehog. In a marathon, energy sources become seriously low with 8–10 km to go and you just try to grit your teeth and get to the line. I didn’t fancy being stranded on the South Downs way 25 miles from the start and 25 miles from the finish — perhaps that’s why they tell you to carry an emergency base layer though! Fortunately, my cautious strategy paid off, and I felt good up to about mile 35 when the expected tiredness started to bite and things became tough. Fortunately, a nice surprise was in store when, struggling along at about mile 38/39, a familiar face appeared sitting on the bank of a hill and to my amazement, I realised it was a very good friend from my running club, Jo Singer. I was absolutely astonished as it was totally unexpected but it couldn’t have come at a better time. A keen cyclist, Jo took the 130+ mile round trip down to the south coast that morning and she couldn’t have chosen a better spot for our encounter. I was struggling and still had over ten miles to go. She was also well stocked with some badly needed energy powder to add to my drink — I hadn’t counted on the mix supplied along the route being so watered down that it was almost useless.
Jo’s road bike couldn’t accompany me on the harsh stony path of the SDW so we arranged to meet at the next waystation a few miles away in the village of Alfriston (mile 42). Little did we know this innocent rendezvous could have such potentially serious consequences.
I arrived at the final waystation to be greeted by an unusually stern looking marshal (all the others had been cheerful, encouraging and amazing). She announced it was my ‘lucky day’ and she wanted to inspect my kit. She marched me off to a corner of the village hall and began scrutinising every item in my bag. I was expecting an open and look inside job, a bit like when you go to an outdoor concert and they want to establish that you don’t have an incendiary device that will cause mass death. Unfortunately, this inspector wanted to examine every item individually, so I emptied the contents out and answered her questions about each item. Of the items I listed above, there were three red flags.
- No cup
- Emergency base layer being worn
- No adequate secondary light source — she deemed my phone torch unacceptable
I thought I might get a stern warning, but The Marshall texted my misdemeanours directly to HQ right there and then. Suitably admonished, I trudged dejectedly out of the waystation, contemplating the consequences of my crimes. I brightened up when I saw Jo sitting on the village green by her bike. We chatted for a bit but she was there to say goodbye as it was early evening and she had a 65 mile ride to get back to Hackney before dark. Before she departed, I asked if I could refresh my drinks with her energy powder, she obliged, handing over a polythene bag full of white powder. Maybe it looked suspicious because suddenly the kit inspector from the feed station came charging over to us red faced. She must have followed me out of the village hall and she was pretty splenetic at this point as she launched into a lecture about crew. “You are not allowed crew here… No crewing… You can only crew at designated points on the course… etc.” I was nonplussed. I knew crew referred to support, but I didn’t think talking to someone on a bike would fall into that category. Presently, the bag inspector scuttled back towards the village hall, and either started taking photos of us or started sending a text with her phone pointing towards us! Feeling slightly intimidated, we moved away from the green to the nearby road and said goodbye. Little did I know, this was the worst thing I could do as she reported we were ‘moving’ together, which could be considered as Jo pacing me.
The last eight miles were the least enjoyable part of the race. Not only was I hanging following the day’s exertion, but I was under a cloud about the consequences of my rule infringements. I knew there would probably be a time penalty for the missing gear, which I could swallow, but there was now a genuine threat of disqualification or DQ. A DQ is a something no runner wants on their record, it's a black mark that basically says you cheated. The prospect of this was mortifying, and it weighed heavily on my mind.
I was so concerned that, when I reached the finish, I spoke to Nici, the person in charge, to give my side of the story. Nici, couldn’t have been nicer. She was very understanding and had already received the report of my infringements. She confirmed the rules are there for a reason and there is a one hour time penalty for each missing item — too many can take you past the 12.5 hour cutoff time and DQ you by default, anyway. Nici said the Race Director would review my case on Monday and she would email me the outcome then. I left knowing there would probably be time pen, but I’d have to sweat on the DQ until Monday.
My journey home was pretty unpleasant. I hadn’t travelled on a provincial trainline on a Saturday night since I was sixteen; it was an equally depressing experience back then. Cold, windswept platforms. The only other person on the platform was a youth with a nosebleed who asked me for a painkiller and then asked me if his nose was broken or I think that’s what he meant with, “do you dink dy dose is doken”. I got on the first train that came even though it was going in the opposite direction to where I needed to go. I didn’t get back home to East London until midnight.
On the train I researched the consequences of my rule infringement. It didn’t look good. Unauthorised crewing can not only mean a DQ but there is a possible lifetime ban too!
I spent the next 48 hours with the cloud of a DQ and lifetime ban hanging over me until, true to her word, Nici emailed me late on Monday. Thankfully, they were lenient, and gave me a two-hour time penalty for the missing cup and torch. They accepted the base layer was in my kit, even though I should not have worn it. Crucially, they did not to penalise me for having crew.
All things considered, I think was a fair decision. I broke the rules and I can’t dispute that. The time penalties are harsh but as Nici said in her email, the rules are there for a reason. It was sloppy preparation on my part rather than trying to gain an advantage. If I had read the rules closer and earlier, I would have packed the correct kit. I hadn’t acquainted myself with the rules on crew because I didn’t have any crew but they accepted that and didn’t DQ me. However, the ultra running community can sometimes seem like a bit of a clique and an experienced ultra runner would know all the issues around crewing. For the novice ultra-runner, it’s a bit of a mystery. It might open the sport up a little if there was a little less red tape — or a less pedantic marshall.
That said, this was a superb event and I wouldn’t hesitate to run it again or recommend it to anyone who fancies doing an ultra. The volunteers on the course were amazing. Cheerful and full of encouragement, they spent a long and chilly day for no financial gain at all, making sure a few hundred runners were well fed and watered and going in the right direction. They all have my gratitude.
The key lessons I have learned from my experience are:
- Read all the rules and plan the day well in advance
- Don’t rely on the energy drink on the course, bring my powder
- Organise a ride at the finish line
- Train more: more miles, more hills
- For a point to point like SDW, run it with someone. This could take care of point 3, if you both deposit a vehicle at the start and finish. It would also help with point 4.
