At eight in the morning on Wednesday June 24th, I sat on a folding wooden chair in a musty village hall in a small village in Berkshire and looked around. It was an inauspicious start to the longest ultra-marathon ever staged in the UK. The same event in California would have warranted a car park full of TV vans bristling with satellite dishes, a giant clock counting down to the start and a dozen sponsors' flags fluttering in the breeze.
Here we had two volunteers at a trestle table, handing out numbers and safety pins, and a lady in the little kitchen brewing builders' tea and instant coffee. The runners -thirty or so- sat around the edge of the hall, some making nervous small talk, others silent; deep in pre-race rituals of Vaseline and tape. A man in a faded vest swigged from a carton of milk. I suspected I was the least experienced ultra-runner there by far. I was almost certainly the youngest.
We started (too fast, most of us later concurred) in blazing sunshine, running in small packs at a conversational pace. It was unseasonably hot, and avoiding dehydration soon became a challenge. I refilled my two-litre Camelbak twice before the first checkpoint -at 27 miles- and I spent much of my time scanning for taps, or friendly-looking people with hosepipes.
The run turns to a walk on the morning of day two. Photo by Alastair Humphreys
The checkpoints were heavenly. The first, in dappled shade in the corner of a field, felt like a picnic at a school sports day. I jogged in grinning to quiet applause, like I'd come third in the long jump, and lowered my bum into a stripey deck chair. I hadn't expected to be waited on, but one of the event's big-hearted volunteers came over with my bags, and a minute later with a cup of sweet tea. I stuffed my face with a chocolate protein shake, a fistful of flapjack and a few strips of biltong (happily, much like Doc's car in Back to the Future II, my stomach seems to burn anything) and trotted off again.
As our individual paces waxed and waned I would meet other runners and, often without knowing each other's name, we would launch into abstract and weighty conversation. One fellow competitor described the self-loathing that fuelled his ultra-running; another exchange touched on the joy of parenthood, and one runner's fear that his young children might see through his facade of confidence and wisdom. It had never occurred to me that having children might bring a fear of the unknown: later that evening I ran alone in happy tears, thinking of my mother and her bravery. She had never seemed overwhelmed to me as a boy, despite bringing my brother and I up on her own for a period, barely out of her mid-twenties. My run seemed a paltry challenge compared to that.
There were highs and lows throughout. I still smile at memories of the sheer beauty of parts of the Thames, the raw, shining spirit of my fellow runners and the magnanimity of the volunteers that stayed up to nurse us through this bizarre test. And I still clench my jaw with rage when I recall the jarring news at the second checkpoint that three runners had been mugged, on three separate occasions during the night (one apparently on his knees, begging to keep his stopwatch, another beaten by three men as a fourth filmed the scene on a mobile phone). We're a peculiar species.
I walked and jogged through the brief hours of darkness with two companions, one agitated, belching and cursing under his breath to no one in particular, the other with a metronomic gait and wire-rimmed glasses. The early sunrise brought primeval joy, and clouds of riverside flies, which gave the burping chap something else to swear at. In fairness, it later transpired that his feet were in a terrible state.
Later that morning I shuffled from the Thames to the Grand Union Canal, though any of the canal's previous grandeur was masked by graffiti, semi-submerged traffic cones and scuttled shopping trolleys, like some strange robotic beaver had tried to dam the stream. My mood fluttered lower as my right ankle started to hurt. There had been dull background pain for a while (I'd clocked up 75 miles by this point) but this was something sharper; more insistent, and at the third checkpoint, at 82.25 miles, I decided it would be prudent to throw in the towel.
Out for the count after 82 miles non-stop. Photo by Sam Christmas
I'm still second-guessing that decision today, though I felt gladly vindicated at the weekend when I heard that Dean Karnazes, widely seen as one of the world's finest ultra-marathoners, had pulled out of the Western States 100 after 62 miles. Dean called his race a "spectacular failure", but I'm being a little easier on myself. Two thirds of the field dropped out of the Thames Ring 250 – nine had retired before I did – and I've never run 82-and-a-bit miles in one go before. Another to falter before the finish line was the ebullient Rajeev Patel, and I'll let him have the final word, with a quote from a fizzingly enthusiastic email he sent the field a few days ago:
"The voice of caution knows nothing of real joy. What joy is there in doing what there was no doubt you could do? Try something you could fail at… that just could be living."
In 48 hours time, I'll be toeing up to the start line of the UK's longest ever non-stop running race, the Thames Ring 250. Two hundred and fifty refers to the distance in miles, and the cut-off time is 100 hours. Nearly ten marathons in four-and-a-bit days. It's organised by the two chaps that mastermind the Grand Union Canal Race (145 miles, and until this week, the longest non-stop running race in the UK) and in wonderfully understated British style, the Thames Ring doesn't even have a website. Orchestration so far has been via a series of emailed Word documents; one mentions "You will be travelling a full marathon between checkpoints", another that says checkpoints will have "Rice pudding… Marmite sandwiches… crisps… custard". Nothing isotonic, no hype, no hyperbole, no bullshit. As soon as I heard about the event, I knew it was the perfect opportunity to sort my head out.
If you've been following along for a while, you've probably surmised that I didn't make it back to the North Pole this spring. The problem this time wasn't a dodgy ski binding, it was a dodgy global economy, though much like the equipment failure that scuppered last year's expedition, it was a hurdle I never expected to bring me crashing down, and I still lose sleep wondering if I could have avoided the situation, or if I could somehow have overcome it with a little more effort or ingenuity.
I curse myself along more than I praise myself. Perhaps this is an unavoidable part of the English condition; we (or at least I, certainly) feel awkwardly self-conscious giving high-fives, but we revel in self-contained suffering. Expiation with a stiff upper lip (from the Latin expiare – to end something by suffering it to the full).
And if the Thames Ring 250 sounds like anything (to laypeople and dilettante joggers, at least), it sounds like dreadful, pointless suffering. Blisters, chafing, sunburn, sleep deprivation, endless miles of towpath. I faced a volley of questions over a sunny Sunday afternoon barbeque this weekend, largely on my motivation. On many levels it's near-impossible to justify: it's plainly a stupid thing to attempt.
I have two reasons. The first, Sri Chinmoy would call self-transcendence, and -while I balk at any talk of spirituality (I'm English) and "the Will of the Absolute Supreme" (I'm an atheist)- I'm relishing the chance to plumb the depths of my mind, my ability and my potential as a human, and to slay a few demons (in what I am sure will be a bizarrely bucolic backdrop). The second is the chance to distance myself -and bear with me if this sounds macho- from what Mark Twight ruthlessly terms "[The] wannabes, pretend-to-bes, has-beens and never-will-bes".
I'll be posting updates from the race on Twitter, and I'll publish a write-up here with some photos at the beginning of next week.
"I don't know what sort of general significance running 100 kilometres by yourself has, but, as an action that deviates from the ordinary yet doesn't violate basic values, you'd expect it to afford you a special sort of self-awareness. It should add a few new elements to your inventory in understanding who you are. And as a result, your view of your life, its colours and shape, should be transformed. More or less, for better or for worse, this happened to me, and I was transformed."
9am: Interval training at Barn Elms running track with Kerry Anley and Andrew Tongue:
3pm: Andy Ward (SOUTH's Expedition Manager) and I cutting and taping USGS charts of Antarctica in order to plot the route from Berkner Island to the Antarctic Plateau:
(Larger photos on my Flickr stream.)
I raced in the Ballbuster Duathlon yesterday, the second time I've competed in this epic event (the first was in 2005). At 40 miles (64km) in total (8-mile run, 24-mile bike, 8-mile run) it's not spectacularly long, but what makes Ballbuster so formidable is that those 40 miles contain a combined 875 vertical metres (2,870 feet) of climbing, and that it's in mid-November, around narrow, potholed lanes that seemed covered in wet leaves and horse droppings.
I called my brother afterwards to tell him how I'd done and he signed off saying "Isn't it great it when you set yourself a goal and then go on to achieve it?" My goal was to finish in under three hours – a bit of a step up considering my 2005 time was 3:15 and that I came 77th that year, but I finally grimaced my way under the line in 2:57.33 (coming 21st), an 18-minute improvement. [Disclaimer: geeky detail follows that may be of more interest to athletes than to my regular audience.]
It wasn't a perfect race – the bike leg of the 2005 Ballbuster was the only time I've had bad cramp during a race, and it happened again yesterday. The last run was tough, and I'm not sure I took on enough fluid or calories throughout the race (750ml of carb drink on the bike, two half-cups on the run legs and about 250ml of water at each transition, so roughly 1.2 litres in total, or 240ml per lap. I saw a couple of the leaders running with small drinks bottles and ignoring the cups at the one drinks stop, and that's definitely what I'd do next time round. Food wise, I had a gel halfway round the first run, the carb drink (High5 Isotonic) and a Powerbar on the bike, a gel at the second transition and the last gel halfway round the final run. 716 calories in total, which at 238 cals/hour is theoretically perfect, though I seem to be able to tolerate 250 -275 cals/hr when I'm going hard and another gel at some stage (or carb drink during the run legs) would have been ideal.
I was pretty slow in the transitions (and forgot to remove my spare tube, CO2 canister and tyre levers at the second one, so I was carrying some excess weight up the last hill!) but in all, pretty chuffed with how it went. Next year I'll be in Antarctica, so perhaps I'll break into the top-ten in 2009…
