After the Scotland Coast to Coast last year, it was time to look at what was going to be the next challenge to fill my days. With my girlfriend on the other side of the world, there was the opportunity to be really selfish with my time and put it into training hard for something. With quite a few of my friends doing marathons early this year, mainly London, I though that it was time to join them and hit the 26.2mile trail.

While not overly keen on road running, “Have you done a marathon?” is pretty much the standard question asked by anyone hearing you’re a runner, and doing one was always on the todo list but a bit further down the line. However, I figured now would be a good time to do it, with plenty of others training for theirs it would make for a good motivator and learning opportunity, and I decided that it would be worth it as both a decent challenge and increasing my stamina towards where I want it to be for doing longer races in the future.

I’ve always quite fancied the Stonehenge Trail Marathon as an alternative to a proper road marathon, but being at the start of May it wouldn’t have given me much leeway on returning from Australia to kick off training. Being a couple of weeks later, and with my friend Helen being based there, Copenhagen looked like it fitted the 2012 schedule nicely, and being flat would hopefully prove to be fast!

So I’m now over halfway into my training, and things are starting to get tougher. Distances are increasing (which I can cope with) as are the paces (which is becoming more of a struggle), but I’m happy with progress so far – the next 7 weeks are where it really matters however.

So far I’ve only missed two key interval sessions, one after my Birthday weekend (late nights drinking & dancing, coupled with hours of coaching in the snow, are not conducive to good health, who’d have thought it?) and one this week after a similar weekend of long travels, late nights and not enough sleep in Romania. And in the first month I also had to bail on a long run due to a calf injury, but aside from these I’ve stuck to my plans well.

For a couple of key reasons I’m doing quite a low mileage training plan, I don’t think my body can cope with high mileages and it means I don’t have to devote my entire life to running, which is often a tough challenge in getting the balance right. This has meant weeks based around just three key sessions: intervals (mainly on the track with Heathside), a tempo session and a long run. In between this I’ve been in the gym most lunchtimes, either on the spinning bike or doing some S&C work focussing on core and back which seems to have helped my form quite a bit. Also done some other bits of biking, which doesn’t include my daily commute, all of which has kept me ticking over nicely.

This weekend is the Olympic Park Run, a good opportunity to see how my pace has come on since running a 17:31 5km at the end of January. Having comfortably run about 17:40 for just over 5km in training a couple of weeks back I know I can now do sub 17, but we’ll have to see how I can sustain that over the extra few km into the Olympic Stadium! There are however quite a few more kms and minutes to be done before the real test in Copenhagen…

Sunday saw Ben & I head down to Dorking for the Open 5 Adventure Race in the North Downs, our second time racing together as Team Nopesport after an 8 hour effort over a year before, which Ben pretty much had to drag me round the second half of the run section before a much more satisfying bike section.

Thankfully this time round, I am much fitter for long distance running and Ben is in fine running and biking form, training for the London Marathon and having done an epic ride from Southend to Galway for charity last year.

Neither of us get out enough on our mountain bikes though, and the North Downs have some pretty tough (but fun!) trails in store, so we were definitely weighting our focus tactics-wise on the running side of things.

The weather forecast during the week just got bleaker and bleaker, and I even noticed a suggestion of snow which I disregarded as unlikely, but knew that endless rain was likely to be the case. While I have no problems being out in harsh weather, subscribing to the adage that ‘there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad preparation/kit’, it was the weather that proved to be our downfall. At least my Norrøna Bitihorn Dri1 Jacket finally got a proper test, and came through with flying colours as (arms aside, due to open pit-zips & looking at watch) I came out of 3 hours cycling in rain, sleet and snow bone-dry.

Run section

We got caught out on the first control, chatting and following the crowds rather than reading the map (stupid), and missed a path on the third one (31) too – which by the looks of the GPS might have been in the wrong place or the OS map is wrong (wouldn’t be surprised, we were cursing it at times). After that it improved, but there were a few wobbles and we could have been a bit cleaner, but we were running at a steady sustainable pace. In hindsight we should have done 33-30-26-25-22, would have been a much shorter route and maybe knocked off 10 minutes, probably lost another 5-10 with the other mistakes.

Covered 19km and came back in just under a couple of hours, having only missed one control, a ten pointer – 39, which I think was worth the trade off. The other controls we missed were dummy controls.

Transition

This is where I really need to improve, we took 17 minutes in transition, which given the conditions, was waaaaaay too long. I was the culprit and it has been a common problem in races I do (see the final, albeit timed out transition, in the Coast to Coast – 43 minutes!) and I need to fix this. While I was very glad I changed thermal and socks, as I would have got cold far quicker otherwise, I should have done so far quicker and instead done my eating when on the bike rather than standing in transition getting cold.

MTB Section

I left Ben to navigate this, and I took care of descriptions, and not looking at the map and being reliant on someone else is really quite strange – not sure I enjoyed it! Especially as Ben was struggling to get and stay warm, and towards the end when we decided to bail,  started making mistakes. When running, we were both navigating and sharing decision making, which is great, and far more enjoyable than being in the position of being sole navigator!

It was all tough going, in heavy rain and then sleet and snow, and our motivation was lacking. The trails on the special controls at 12 and 14 were great fun, although we somehow missed 14 in the process which was frustrating! I really need to get out more on my mountain bike though to improve my confidence and enjoy them properly though, but given a decent few months of regular core work am feeling much stronger on the mountain bike which is a positive.

At 10 we decided enough was enough, and to head for home, via 11 and 6. Unfortunately, coming off the road below 11 disaster struck as Ben’s chain, which had been skipping around all afternoon, snapped. After 15 minutes of Ben battling to make use of frozen fingers and attempt to fix the chain, it wasn’t happening, and we retreated to a nearby pub to phone for assistance. Ben was seriously cold at this stage, I have never seen anyone visibly shaking so much, and I was starting to go downhill too. Thankfully the pub landlord invited a soaked and mud covered Ben in to thaw out by the fire amongst Sunday diners while waiting for Bruce to pick him up, while I was quite grateful to get back on my bike and regain some warmth whilst cycling back to transition to pick up our stuff.

So not the best day out, but I was still smiling at the end, and what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger… with a lot of lessons to take on board.

I’ve uploaded all my pics from Australia onto Flickr, although I had fully intended to self-host them here, but have run into a few problems in doing so.

Firstly, my ftp upload was ridiculously slow for some reason, not sure if it is being throttled by my ISP Plus.net, or whether I need to kick my firewall into place, but uploading a zip of the images was taking forever (like, days!). Instead I managed to upload them to Flickr in an evening…

Secondly, I decided to spend a bit more time investigating how I’m going to self-host, I’ve previously used Menalto’s gallery to host my backups, but I’m not a massive fan, so am looking for an alternative in Zenphoto which looks like it should do everything I want it to do.

Thirdly, in order to get all my old photos off Flickr and into Zenphoto I had to get a pro-membership again, so might as well use it. While I do have all the photos scattered around various hard drives, I’d much rather just transfer them across as they are, in their sets and with titles, descriptions and tags, which I can do with a bit of hacking of this depreciated Zenphoto extension.

Why do I want to move away from Flickr? As much as I like the service and it’s simplicity, I want to retain control of as much of my content as possible and I don’t really need to be spending money having my photos elsewhere when I have great unlimited hosting thanks to Dreamhost (coupled with 50gb of space for personal file backups).

There are a few other areas where I’m planning to self-host services I currently use elsewhere. I’m keeping an eye on SparkleShare for their Windows client so I can move away from Dropbox (and I love Dropbox!) and similar services like CX.com which I’ve been giving a go too in the meantime.

I guess mainly I’m a bit stingy, and don’t want to be paying for services I can provide for myself… provided the experience is as good. Hopefully Zenphoto can add a decent uploader soon so I can fully move away from Flickr by the time my pro-membership runs out next year!