Fear of Failure

In a week’s time I’ll hopefully be coming up to Fleet Moss, ready for the long, cold night ahead of me after already completing 12 hours of hard running up and down some of the biggest mountains in Yorkshire. Well, probably not running.

Considering how badly the Fellsman went for me back in 2014 I’m pretty bloody terrified. The fact that I’ve managed to somehow put in less hours of training this year than two years ago only makes the whole thing more awful really.

Fellsman 2014 was my first, and so far my only, DNF. A large part of that is down to my ridiculous bloody mindedness dragging me far further than I really should be putting my body through. In fact even when I dropped out at Fellsman that was only due to suffering from hypothermia when descending from Buckden Pike and completely losing the plot. I should really have dropped out back at Cray but I kept telling myself I had done Fleet Moss and so should have broken the back of the run. All I had to do was get out the back of Park Rash and I was going to make it round. But in reality I probably endangered the group and others by trying to take my spent, wreck of a body up yet another mountain in the cold.

I may well have got around the inaugural SVP100 back in 2013 but after trying to hobble nearly 30 miles on a damaged knee I couldn’t walk properly for about a week. The memory of nearly blacking out from the pain of stepping on to a bridge about 2 miles from the finish and putting my weight through my ruined knee is probably going to stick with me for a while.

So even though I know I can push myself stupidly and well beyond when I should quit I know that next week is going to be brutally hard. Having drawn attention to my races this year with this blog and the fact that I’m doing it for charity makes the whole thing even worse in my mind. The thought of falling apart again during the Fellsman (or any other race this year) and having to DNF or even picking up an injury from a race and not being able to recover in time for the next fills me with dread with the thought of letting down everyone who has sponsored me or encouraged me through this daft challenge.