Country to Capital

Well, that’s one down!

7 hours and 25 minutes of plodding through beautiful countryside and some mind-numbingly boring canal tow path (more on that later) I’ve ticked the first ultramarathon of the year off and all without any obvious injury. So that seems like a win to me.

Prior to Country to Capital I’d had the pleasure of twice running both the Shires and Spires and the Thames Trot ultras that Go Beyond organise and really enjoyed both events so I was looking forward to a good day out across the Chilterns.

Despite the cold out it ended up being a pretty lovely day and the flattish course meant that the vast majority of it was runnable which kept me nice and toasty throughout compared to the cold I’ve felt while walking towards the end of some other ultras I’ve done previously.

I managed to start the day off in a pretty comfortable way, racking up a fair few sub or round about 9 minute miles for the first 15 or so miles all without any real concerns as I chatted to other idiots who feel like 7ish hours of running makes for a good weekend. Coming up to 19 miles though, I started to feel a pretty familiar twinge in my hip flexor that I knew was only going to get worse as the day wore on. The biggest thing for me when I start to feel niggles during a race is trying not to blow it all out of proportion and panic about my lack of training and whether I can possibly make it through another however many hours with a worsening injury. Most of the time it blows through after a few hours (or gets hidden behind everything else hurting like hell) or I simply grit my teeth and drag my broken body to the end. It takes quite a lot for me to admit defeat!

Coming off the slightly undulating and interesting part of the course at about 22 miles I was looking forward to a dead flat run in all the way to the finish, something that you can only dream of when yet another smart arse marshall points out you only have 3 more mountains to climb before the finish on other races. However, after about 8 miles of slowly trundling along I realised that the flat makes it really difficult to justify walking for a bit to try and regroup when you know that you should easily be able to run on that kind of terrain. At least when you’ve got a mountain to climb (or at least a sharpish hill) you can walk for a bit and try to get some food in you. How on Earth people manage to do the Grand Union Canal Race with 145 miles of towpath (and the finish being basically the last 20 miles of Country to Capital) without going mad, I have no idea!

After slowly falling apart along the towpath as I mentally broke down, with the lack of training finally catching up to me, I’d resigned myself to a pretty slow finish and called Laura to guesstimate how long I’d be so she could meet me at the end. Of course, not long after that, instead of getting even slower like I’d expected I began to rally and actually started running more than I had been and generally feeling in less discomfort.

Trotting in towards the end I suddenly realised how much better the race had gone for me than my expected 8 and a half hours that I had pessimistically set as a target for myself after the complete lack of training or preparation for the race. As I came in over the finish line I then also realised that I’d ballsed up guessing my time mid way through and thus Laura was still a few minutes walk from the finish. I felt pretty torn by being happy about how well the race had gone but sad that I didn’t get to see Laura as I crossed the finish line just because I had managed to do so well.

Afterwards I managed to get myself a victory pint and reflect on a nice day out and hopefully 11 more to come this year!