Since today was a recovery day after the triathlon yesterday, and since I've never gone further than 30km (and that was last week haha) I wanted to get a feel for the full 50km distance this weekend. Officially it's actually 42km per day for the actual challenge, but on all the blogs I've read (and on tracking the course on MapMyRun) it's definitely more like 50km.
I didn't want to stress my body massively unduly and put myself out of training for any length of time, so I decided to walk the distance. I planned a route that took me from my house to Richmond Park, around Richmond Park a few times, and home again.
All my planning was going really well until I realised I had to be in Hampstead at 16:00, which meant leaving home at 15:00 ... which meant that at 5km per hour (and thus a total of ten hours for 50km) I'd have to leave home at 04:00 to get home by 14:00 to get showered, fed, and out the door again. Ummmm ....!!!!!!!!!! 04:00 was not a viable option when I'd raced the day before and then driven back down to London, so I thought I'd leave at 07:00 and get as much in as I could by 13:00, still being six hours. That would leave me time to have a little nap as well as having a shower and lunch and also left me slippage time since my sense of time is TERRIBLE and cutting it fine just meant I'd be twenty minutes late.
So that was the plan! With last week's bonking vividly lodged in my mind, I got up at 05:30, made a HUMUNGOUS plate of oaty, proteiny, Bodyism pancakes for fuel and scarfed the lot with blueberries, Fage yoghurt and maple syrup.
I finally set off on time and headed over to Richmond Park, which is 7km from my house. The walk there was soooo uncomfortable! I had filled up my water reservoir to its full capacity of 2 litres, which meant that everything was sitting in my pack a bit weirdly, bouncing around on top of the water. In addition, I'd also packed my warm sweater into a snaplock bag in case it rained, but that meant that it couldn't drape across my bag and sort of lurked there, pulling me down. Everything felt tight and horrendous and uncomfortable and I'm sure I spent the whole 7km pulling at various tabs and straps to try and readjust. Luckily I had a lovely view over the Thames for part of the way which kept me vaguely distracted.
It took me an hour and a quarter to get there, and my first stop was the loo. I took my pack off (obviously!) to use the bathroom and fortunately, when I put it back on, something had shifted somewhere and it was soooooooo much better. It was a real lesson to me to take it off next time and shake it about and put it back on, as it was such a simple fix and made me feel 100x better. From the loo, I set off round the park. Someone once pointed out to me that if you go clockwise round the park, you look at men's faces, and if you go counter-clock around it, you look at men's bums, because all the
Richmond Park is such a strange place - it's got forests, bush, flat plains, a deer sanctuary, lakes, and what look like wheat fields (but are actually fields of long grass) and - unless you stick to the perimeter road - you sort of get flung from one to the other without much warning. You also run the risk of running face first into a pack of deer, as they roam around the entire park.
I got a bit bored of the perimeter quite quickly (hard to believe with all those bums flashing past) so I headed up through the bush (which turned out to be entirely made of ferns, which was a bit weird, I thought I was back in New Zealand for a moment!) and towards the forest. Over the following three hours I basically just headed around the park in a squiggle shape to try and take in as much as I could of the terrain. I'd been expecting it to be quite hilly but it wasn't really - a few gentle slopes and that was it. I'm sure I remember cycling around it and thinking the hills were killer, perhaps I'm just more hench than I used to be after all my encounters with cliffs!
In the end, I had to leave Richmond Park with an hour and a quarter left on my time to make sure I got home in time to eat and rest a little bit before I went out. The best thing about my trip home was that on my way over I'd noticed wild blackberries growing on Rocks Lane and I'd promised myself I'd get some on the way back. Wild blackberries fresh off the bush are AMAZING - nothing like the tasteless garbage (even the organic ones) you get in the supermarket. They're tiny little explosions of juice and sweetness and flavor - I was so so excited to grab a handful on the way back!
It was good that I had them to look forward to because what had been a bit of a drizzle when I left Richmond Park was a miserable downpour by the time I got home. At least I could test my waterproofing of my sweater (yup, my Waitrose snaplock bag was totally up to the job) and as the walk finished at home, I could just throw myself under the shower. I could also eat within about 15 minutes of getting home! Best ever lunch!
I learned A LOT on this walk, even though it was only 34km in the end. My new knowledge includes:
- Running is obviously harder on your body in some ways, but I was in a lot more pain walking! My feet, hips, lower back and glutes were basically screaming at me after about 20km, they were not happy. That doesn't seem to happen when I am run/walking and I think it's because a lot of running uses elasticity whereas walking is solid effort.
- I don't get hungry when I'm going long distance. I'd noticed this last week when I was reflecting on my bonking episode, so I was hyper-aware of watching for it and I didn't feel hungry at all throughout. I did stop twice within the park for two-ingredient cookie breaks and I did feel far better after them. Therefore, I just have to make sure I stop every hour or so and eat something without waiting to feel hungry.
- Speaking of two-ingredient cookies, apart from being a bit melty, they are PERFECT on-the-go fuel. The banana is sugary enough to give me instant energy, and the oats give me more medium energy. I might experiment with adding some coconut - I think with coconut they would be even better as that would give me some fats to add to the carbs.
- It's really hard to start running half way through a walk - I tested a couple of mid-walk runs on downhills, and my ankles nearly staged a revolt. They simply would not have it. That doesn't happen when I start off with a run or a run/walk alternating, so I'm much better off run/walk alternating so that I have the choice to run if I want!
- If you don't like a song a LOT before you take it on a six-hour walk, you will really really really hate it by the end of it. I just put my iPhone on shuffle for all my songs but it seemed to get stuck on repeating about twenty 80s and 90s rock (hello Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams and the Goo Goo Dolls ...). I'm definitely making a better playlist for next week; if I never hear Bryan Adams' 18 Til I Die ever again it will be too soon.
Having said that, since I didn't make the full distance, I'm going to repeat it all again next week to try and understand the distance and get to grips with it. I'd rather do some more hills running, but Richmond works out well for me because of the loos and the cafes (I also want to test out running after eating soup as part of my nutrition, because I know that soup is on offer at the feed stations on the challenge and it seems like something that I'd be able to wrap myself around even if I wasn't that hungry). Luckily it's a bank holiday weekend so I have lots of lovely time to spend walking and/or running, although I've got to fit in a few social plans as well. Hopefully I will get to improve my squiggly map!
No comments:
Post a Comment