It's been a while since I posted here, because I've moved somewhere with rubbish internet. But this morning I woke at 3am with a folded ear and internet is cheaper and less sketchy in the small hours.
I love Stanley, it's friendly and there's so much going on, even though the whole country has only around 3200 people in it.
The running here is good. In Stanley, roads are either very flat and long and parallel to the seafront or very steep and much shorter and run at right angles. There is a near constant wind, often strong enough that it's easier to run up a 1 in 5 slope with the wind at your back than down it into the wind. The countryside is good for slow running, because the huge tufts of long grass hide the fact that the ground beneath is what I can only describe as "fractal" in profile, and you'd break an ankle if you weren't careful. If running near the coast it's also important not to fall into a penguin burrow as my friend did.
I did the world's most southerly registered HM in February. There was a Walking Festival in Stanley that week, so a lot of people walked the HM, setting off an hour before the rest of us. We got over 150 entrants in total which is about 4% of the entire island, and a few dozen people acting as marshals and water table monitors and a lot of friends and family of entrants on the route and every single driver waving, meant it was a lovely atmosphere. For the second time in my life I ran an entire HM without walking breaks, and I got a PB, 2:26. I wasn't aiming for one, because I had the marathon coming up and was saving myself, but with a few km to go I felt fine and made a push and it was worth it because I got the last egg sandwich and I don't like cheese. The course was nice, mostly flat but with three or four hills, and mostly on road but also on a peninsula where the road turns into track and then the route leads across country into that fractal landscape, though without the long grass that masks the view it's easy enough to run on. Then back into town, along a coast road where I could see dolphins, and where I've seen penguins and whales on other days.
The Marathon was far harder, because it had over 500m of climb to it, and the final quarter was into a wind far stronger than usual even here. The winner was okay, he was nearly finished before the wind picked up, but he was super elite, and the rest of us had it tough. My husband was in charge of the water tables, and had told me where the halfway turnaround point was, on the highest bit of road on the highest hill in the town. Bless him, he was wrong, that was where the water table was but the turnaround was part way down the other side of the hill, so it was rather galling to get to that water table and see that there was more hill to climb back the other way very soon. But he'd put jelly babies on all the tables so I forgave him. Many of the tables had pupils of mine on duty, so I made their lessons extra fun the next week.
There were relay teams as well as individual entrants, so 80 participants in all, about half and half. I think I came 36th out of 40, though that does include two people who did the thing in walking boots and tweed jackets and Ukraine flags. I also overtook a relay team at one point, though they overtook me back on the next leg. So I felt quite good, because in my other (very flat) marathon I came 68th out of 69. I got a PB, partly by having trained a bit better but also, I think, because of the hills. Although hills sap your energy more, they use different enough muscles than flat running that it's less strain on the ones that you use for the flat bits. So I had six pairs of legs to use, one each for flat, up and down, either walking or running. I walked a lot of the windy last leg, when even downhill was a massive effort to run. I could tell with a few minutes to go that a PB would be close, and in the end I went from 5:44 to 5:43, and took 19 seconds off. Marginal gains!
Afterwards there was a nice surprise, everyone involved in running the marathon or running the event got an invitation to a posh reception at the governor's house.
I love that I got really cool numbers for the two runs. The next one is either the occasional HM in October or the same HM again in February. (There was to have been the Three Peaks Challenge, a cross country romp up some local mountains - local mountains look like proper mountains all pointy and rocky but they're really not very high, so you can run three in a few hours) but it has been cancelled. First it was because the islands finally dropped Covid quarrantine, and everyone came down with it at once (one week seven people had it, then 195, then over 900 tested positive not counting people who hadn't done tests and my classes of about 20 were down to 3 or 4, then it suddenly got better and last week only one pupil out of 240 was off and nobody wears masks any more). So it was to be last weekend, but an early snow followed by sleet and then a freeze made it too dangerous, so that'll be for next year. I doubt I'll get the next number in the sequence, it would be too much of a coincidence, and I think they just order batches of 1000 and start each entrant number from where they're up to in the current stash.
I took a long break after the Marathon to let a shin splint heal, and I'm back to running now. Husband joins me at Parkrun, he walks with his camera hoping to catch a whale, I wait for him at the finish funnel, and then we walk down to the beach to greet the penguins.
Weekly Chat March 7th-13th 🎽☕ What's your running shirt max? 😃
Geeeeet ready, geeeeet set ... itttt's time to shake those pom poms again!!!
Bournemouth HM - Race Report
Autumn running plans
