Rip off Running! How much to enter a trail race?

Note the modest £5 entry fee!

And what a nice race it was too - I galloped round in 55 minutes to find that Chris Wilcox (same age group as me) was already standing at the finish with a big grin on his face. I'd been pushing like mad to finish strongly thinking he was behind me and, most likely, catching me up! Still it was good fun on a cold, wet, windy, muddy course. The friendly guys at Clwydian Range Runners have been successfully organising races round the forest for years, most of them on forest tracks and made up paths and mostly at night (The famous 'Dashes in the Dark'), now the staff at Llandegla centre have marked out a running trail to complement the excellent MTB trails. So this was the grand opening of the route. We paid our £5 fee which included soup and a roll and set off to enjoy a very well organised safe race. I must point out at this stage that the Clwydian Range Runners break even on the race and this is a non-profit making venture. Imagine my disgust on arriving back after the race to find that another group of people (not a running club) have announced a race on the same course in summer with the entry fees starting at £23 (the ad says 'no booking or hidden fees'.) Someone is clearly making a fat profit out of this and they'll no doubt target fitness centres and the like and entrap naive first timers who think they're getting a good deal. Anyway thanks to all the marshalls and timekeepers who stood out in the pouring rain - there's devotion to the sport.

Bad news for the Union of Bridgepainters .

 We took this picture of the Forth Railway bridge when we were just about to cross the Forth Road bridge on our LEJOG cycle ride. This was almost at the end of our longest day - just short of 100 miles! Could not see anyone at work painting it though! Apparently the practice of starting to paint it all over again as soon as it was finished ended fairly recently - it was reported in 2011 that 'A 200-strong team has been applying a triple layer of new glass flake epoxy paint, which is similar to that used in the offshore oil industry. It creates a chemical bond to provide a virtually impenetrable layer to protect the bridge's steel work from the weather.'

Go, go, go.

And here are a few statistics from our wee cycle ride across the UK:
Total Distance - 871.7 miles
Total time on the bike - 78hrs 22mins 12secs
Total Climbed - 49494ft (almost twice up Everest!)
Average pace - 11.1mph
Best days pace - 13.5mph (last day!)
Top Speed reached - 45.1mph (last day)
Furthest Distance in 1 day - 96.7 miles
Total Calories burned - 42267
Not bad for 2 non-cyclists I think

Cranking up again

It's me Martin - just in case I forgot who I was!

OK I think it's time I got this blog powered up again. I guess most people have stopped checking up on me after a six month hiatus but I'll see how things go now. Much of that time was spent at the wonderful Chatterbox English School in Sardinia where I was teaching a lovely class of Year 5 children. Just as busy as schools in the UK though and little time for anything else such as a blog. So after this sabbatical I'm ready to go again and I'll chip in with bit and pieces from the missing six months as I go along. Running has been on the agenda and I did a couple of half marathons in Italy at Assemini and Cagliari (more about those later) and back in the UK in January I ran the Four Villages Half in Helsby followed by the Village Bakery Half at Wrexham (there's a theme there which I've only just noticed!) Times have been remarkably consistent with me coming in in 1.40.42, 1.35.02, 1.35.46 and 1.35.22 respectively. The latter performance earned me a North Wales gold medal in the regional champs and a packet of crumpets.

Nice red bell!

Just before Sardinia Lou and me managed to fit in LEJOG, i.e. the Land's End to John O'Groats bike ride which was a frantic twelve day dash! Because of my sudden plan to go teaching we had to fit this one in quickly - two weeks before we'd intended. I'd done most of my training on this faithful old Dawes Audax  (pictured above). However several hours on slow ups and speedy downs convinced me that my dodgy gears and brakes were not up to it. Rather than spend a few hundred quid on upgrades I thought I should spend a few hundred quid on a new bike, hence the shiny bright red Fuji Tourer you see in the photo below. The very helpful chaps at Evans Cycles fitted some nice mudguards and more robust tyres and I can tell you it was all money well spent - the disc brakes proved themselves on a couple of notable occasions and the 900 miles plus was puncture free.

Not quite so shiny now though!

LEJOG

5th day of the Land's End to John O'Groats cycle ride over and done with - a wet rainy day so we decided to treat ourselves to a cuppa at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire. Cycling has taken up most of our time so we've not been able to access the internet, however I will now try to upload some of the more interesting photos as we go along. I'll start with a bit of a retrospective.

Racing the Dodo

Another early wake up call - buses left at 6.45 for the start and there we were, nearly 300 of us attempting the 25K. The smaller number of 50K'ers had already been running for over an hour starting in the dark. We were a bit luckier as we didn't need head torches. This was a serious race, in fact all of them were including the 10K race which skirted round this rocky peak - our job was, with the help of strategically positioned ropes, to go up and over; this at the end of 4 hours of running through jungle avoiding tree roots on steep uphills and downhills.

What a well organised event though. Aid stations were manned by dozens of volunteers providing water, coke, energy drinks, bananas, energy bars, fruit, raisins, you name it it was there  - and it was all needed. There's one photo of Ricky Lightfoot from Cumbria, who won the 50K comfortably for the second year, having a positive picnic at one stop. Ricky's fairly tall but he's certainly light on his feet.

A new friend!

 So, results then, Vicky was second V60 lady in the 10K - it looks from the picture that she was beaten by the cuddly Dodo but, in fact the first over 60 lady had disappeared - Vicky had obviously run her into the ground. Lyndall paced Vicky for much of the race but once she realised Vicky was going to make it OK, she took off and waltzed through the field to gain an additional sixty places. Lou 329th in 1.46.24, Vicky 392nd in 1.53.33.

Bit of a breeze really!

 Also on the podium - me! I found that I was first placed 96th overall in a time of 4.52 - I've not run (not sure much of it was actually running) for that length of time for years. Astonishing how many locals do this event - the population of Mauritius is about 1.2 million and here were nearly 1200 lunatic mountain runners, mostly from the island but interspersed with a few tourists, mainly from South Africa.

It's nice up here!

And would I run this race again - if you'd asked me after I'd finished I'd have said no but now I'm not so sure. Mauritius is a friendly place with lots to see and we only saw a few of the sights. One of the most impressive in my book was the sight of a White Tailed Tropic Bird Phaethon lepturus gliding over the high forests. They have a wing span of nearly a metre and are about the same length. We tried to get decent photos of them but they move rather swiftly so this is a Googly snap.

And I though I'd better include a photo of Lou in the water with a smile on her face!

Learning to fly!

All for me grog!

A hot and humid afternoon, perhaps not the best time to go tasting rum, but it was a mile or so up the road so we thought we'd give it a go. Chamarel Rhumerie is in a beautiful setting with fine manicured lawns and perfumed gardens - I thought this photo came out quite well! The rum itself came in tiny tots but we had several of them and were a bit woozy on the walk back. I thought the various flavoured rums were a bit on the sweet side and I can't really enthuse about them, however their double distilled white rum was something special, quite different to Bacardi!

Almost Race Day

I'm not running up that!

The big race tomorrow and we are thankful that this is not the final peak that we have to climb for the  Dodo Trail Race - this is one of the views from the starting point of tomorrow morning's jaunt. The final peak is in the other direction - just as high but not as spikey. We signed in this morning at a well organised race HQ - 750 runners in total at the three distances. Last year's winner of the 50K race was Ricky Lightfoot from Cumbria and he's down on the list again. I've settled for the 25K event which has 1500 metres of climb much of it on trails covered in tree roots and other debris.

Off we go!

And by way of a warm up.on Monday we decided a bike ride was in order. This took us down to the Seven Coloured Earth site which was described earlier - here we are passing between sugar cane fields on our way back. These appear to be quiet country lanes but every so often an ancient bus with a smoking exhaust pipe or a mad Mauritian taxi will come hurtling round a corner on the wrong side of the road. So it was with a sigh of relief that we cut off the road and pulled into the service road at the back of our hotel.

Now this won't hurt.

And then disaster struck - I tried to avoid a large puddle by skirting to the side of the gravel track and my front wheel gave way sliding off to the side - I slid forward on my knees and ended up in the local clinic! The gravel of the track was collected from a stony beach and comprised small lumps of dead coral. Coral, as divers on reefs know full well, can be extremely abrasive and therefore this mishap meant that my knees were well and truly shredded. This particular doctor (who attended to me the second we came through the door!) was accompanied by a no nonsense nurse who was quite handy with a scalpel, cutting away loose skin in order to clean out gravel from underneath. All in all an interesting day we thought! The challenge now of course was to cosset the wound carefully such that I could run on Sunday, large quantities of betadene and iodine were employed to try to avoid infection and, after today's careful examination the decision is to go ahead and go for it!

What to see in Mauritius

Perhaps if I jump a bit higher?

This big fellow is in the park at a tourist attraction called the Seven Coloured Earths. He (or she) is one of several giant tortoises on Mauritius. The original giant tortoises died out at the same time as the Dodo (Oh those hungry sailors! Did they realise what they were doing?) This gang of dipsochelys gigantea were imported from the Seychelles in the 1880's. They were sitting/lying down in a group contentedly munching away when one of them lurched to its feet and raced across to these stumps to see if any had fallen over.

Who left this mess?

The Seven Coloured Earths is a small area of sand dunes in the middle of nowhere which are somewhat of a mystery. Nothing will grow on them and despite the area's torrential rains they don't wear down. The key feature though is the stripey pattern consisting of seven different colours - this photo doesn't really do it justice. A range of different coloured ions give rise to the colours which separate again even when mixed together. What a great opportunity for a chemistry school field trip!
 

Is it a bird, is it a plane?

Finally something which I thought was a bird at first - this is the Mauritian Flying Fox  a fruit bat or megabat with a wingspan of around a metre. Most bats only fly at night but you can see these guys throughout the day. Interestingly fruit bats have lost their ability to find their way around using echo location. This photo doesn't show it clearly but there's a tiny Garmin attached to this chap's right shoulder.