New Forest marathon - #107

Plan A - beat 4:09:26 (previous course time)
Plan B - beat 4 hours
Result - 3:47:41, a 22 minute course best

I really liked this race when I did it two years ago, but suffered with a dodgy stomach and ran 10 minutes slower than I wanted to. I wasn't sure if 4 hours was on because it's a hilly course and I only did 3:56 on the flat Vilnius course a few weeks ago. As it was a training run, I decided to run fairly comfortably in the first half and see what happened after that, ideally without too much of a positive split. Ideally, I'd run all the hills and not stop to stroke the ponies.

It was great to see some old friends with lots of 100 clubbers out. I had a nice chat with Dave Lewis (who beat me by 8 seconds, another 1/4 mile and I would have had him) who wondered if I'd lost weight lately. I made some comment about not carb loading quite as often as I used to. I know I'm a fraction smaller at the moment but didn't think it was noticeable, christ, maybe marathons were making me a bit of a porker  After a few foreign races, it was good to be back in a UK race where you see people you know all the time.

My right ITB's been tight for a few days and my hip's playing up as a result. By 15 miles or so, it was pretty sore and by 17 miles I was having a reasonably sized wobble, it was hurting quite a bit, there were more hills, I was hot and dehydrated and low on energy. But that's standard at 17 miles no? I had one of those elevenses bars (not the nice ginger one, the sickly chocolate one) and got half of that down with a lot of water. By 19 miles, I was feeling much better. One of the marshals had told me I was 25th lady at about half way which works two ways. You're not going to get on the podium, no matter how good your second half is, but top 25 isn't too shabby. That extra bit of motivation kept me running up all the hills, even the big nasty one at 22 miles. As I went up, a supporter starting shouting "Whoo, go lady runner!" (there was a lot of encouragement to the girls, we must have been few and far between) but I was tracking down a girl ahead of me and shushed the supporter, pointing ahead of me and putting my finger on my lips. She thought this was hilarious and mimed shooing me up the hill. I passed the girl about two thirds of the way up, she hadn't heard me coming.

I knew it was all downhill from 23 so stepped on it a bit, last 3 in 8:38, 8:26 and 8:15 with the last 1/4 mile at 7:30 pace. I took out 3 or 4 other ladies in that stretch and finished 18th of 150 ladies, sod the legs!

Race notes:
Lovely course, with lots of very scenic stretches and loads of ponies
Loads of water stations, but nothing else on offer
Some great support for a smallish marathon, especially the signs up the hill
Directions to parking were rubbish
It's a bit galling when they have free food for "runners" but all the half runners have scarfed it before you get there. They've only run half the distance too!
The only good thing about the goody bags was the Waitrose bag for life. Has whoever makes those oaty biscuit bars ever sold one? They're in half the goody bags across the land!
Fab 3 mile downhill finish, though it doesn't feel very downhill when your legs are about to fall off
Extra mentions to the men with a Viking warship and the firefighters with oxygen tanks. Very impressive.
And thank you to the marshal at the turnaround point who made me laugh when he pointed at me and said "I'll see YOU at the finish"

Vilnius marathon

Some time ago, it seemed like a good idea to use marathons as an excuse to visit lots of places I wouldn't ordinarily have gone to, ie. an excuse for a lot of weekends away. Flights were cheap, short haul journeys swift and painless, small European cities charming and dirt cheap. Sadly, in these times of high commodity prices, flights are not a total bargain (still cheaper than visiting my mum near the Lake District by train), short haul journeys are a total pain in the arse if you fly through Luton or Heathrow and the euro has priced most of us out of EU cities. On the positive side, they're still charming, especially as the tourists can't afford or be bothered to go there any more.

I've run Nottingham a couple of times and fancied a marathon somewhere different this weekend, and the choice was Wroclaw, Tallinn and Vilnius. I can't remember why we chose this one, I think it might have been the cheapest and didn't involve running around a traffic cone. Or so we thought, there was one turn around a traffic cone, repeated 4 times, policed by a chip mat and a bloke in army fatigues lying in the bough of a tree looking supremely comfortable and half asleep. The sod.

So we ended up in Lithuania, and it's quite nice really. The local dishes are terrible and makes you wonder just how bad the food was before they had any money but the city is rather sweet, full of crooked streets, ankle turning cobbles and millions of churches. Saturday is definitely wedding day, we saw a lot of shiny puffy frocks that you wouldn't want to wear near a naked flame. Maybe love is in the air, as we walked along the banks of the river, the Lithuanian for "I love you" and "I love you too" were planted into opposite banks with flowers. The effect was dampened slightly by all the broken glass about and the scary looking down-and-outs dangling fishing rods into the river.

I wasn't looking forward to Sunday's marathon in the slightest and because I was avoiding thinking about it so much, overdressed on autopilot purely because it was a bit nippy at 9am. Two layers, capris and Mark's gloves were huge overkill especially by the finish when it was pretty damn hot and the freebie tech t-shirt that acted as a second layer chafed a big gash under my arm within 5 miles. I had to carry it the rest of the way which made me look like I had a giant pink boxing glove on.

The race was quite nice, 4 laps of a loop down the river and around the town with plenty of company from the other races. The relay runners were generally shit, each leg was 10.5km but hardly any of them seemed to be capable of running the whole lot without stopping. I passed one walking about 6km in. In the full, there were a few ladies knocking around at my pace and a 100 clubber complete with cowboy hat I didn't recognise who turned out to be an American, running about my pace and told me to call him Cowboy. Seemed a bit familiar, but I suppose you should respect local customs. My strategy was to have a solid training run and ideally pick up the pace each lap. It didn't really happen. My pace felt very comfortable for the first half, to the point where Cowboy said "Jeez, you're so quiet, I can't hear you breathing!" I lost him after some time and started to pick off the odd lady but only because they were falling behind rather than because I was speeding up. It was the usual put more effort in to maintain the same pedestrian pace.

I'd hoped to speed up in the last lap but I was too knackered and dehydrated by then, the water stations were spaced really poorly and only gave you a thimble of liquid in each cup. Fortunately my pacing meant no walk breaks were needed and that my pace didn't slip too much. Sub 4 was a bit tight though, I managed 3:56:56. To be honest, the 3:30 seems impossible at the moment. It was enough for 7th lady of 28 (about 250 runners in total, it's not a girl's game round these parts). After the Cyberman style walk back and a shower, we'd cleverly booked into the spa to which our apartment was attached. A light massage was blissful, it got rid of just enough soreness without making you chew the pillow. A calm dark room, no sweaty kit, loads of fluffy towels and no smell of liniment were far from a brisk rub down in a gazebo from a chatty physiotherapist. I got the better deal than Mark whose "herbal ball" massage seemed to consist of hot towels being slapped on him. His paper g-string made me giggle too.

It's now 4pm and I have been awake for 14 hours due to the obscenely early flight where I sat next to a giant Russian-looking man who seemed to gradually expand and fill more and more of my seat as time passed. His forearms were bigger than my biceps and I wouldn't have been surprised if the girth of one of his thighs was as much as my waist. He snored too. I was too scared of him to elbow him in the ribs so just had to push Mark towards the aisle. At least if I stuck behind him through security, I wouldn't be the one having my bags searched.

Helsinki marathon

I've just read this back and it's boring. Sorry kids.

I can't comprehend how I've run over 100 marathons, or why. It's so bloody far and takes hours. I am quite out of practice, it being 3 months since my last marathon, the longest gap in 2 1/2 years, and have had to do long training runs for the first time since then. 2 had gone ok and 2 had gone appallingly so Helsinki was likely to end with a whimper rather than a bang, even if I did resist the temptation to go bombing off.

Continuing to get my excuses in early, it was a 3pm start which isn't right for all manner of reasons. I'd had a long day on Friday, only arriving at the hotel after midnight, and then had to walk to the start, back to the hotel and back to the start again before the race, which was over 90 minutes in total. It was also pretty warm and windy. Not terrible conditions but a fair bit is over the islands and waterways and quite exposed. I decided to run to feel and try to enjoy it.

It was an enjoyable race, the Scandinavian countries are brilliant for running with all their cycle ways and their races have a great atmosphere. None of that aggression in French races, nor the stinkiness of German races. This was very civilised and polite, with hardly any argy bargy even in the first k. It amused me to notice I was wearing one of 3 pairs of Stella McCartney running shorts within 5 square metres in the start pen. I've never seen any in a race before, other than my own, and here were 3 of us, all in virtually the same ones.

The route was rather nice, some of it in the city centre but a lot just outside, over small islands and some very pretty bridges in the later stages. Luckily it wasn't too big a race so the cycle paths weren't too crowded. There was quite a bit of gravelly path too, and not a small amount of cobbles. It was largely flat with a few bumps, noticeably a steep 50 metres at 15km, a longer climb at 40k and a hoick up a small bump just before the 42k marker that wasn't at all welcome. Running into the stadium for the last 200 metres was great, especially as I had my name and club called out. No matter what I think about the marathon being devalued, I was quite proud to be announced as a member of the 100 club.

My legs had indeed forgotten how to run for the best part of 4 hours and got slower and slower throughout. Half way in 1:49 was steady but likely to be followed by a positive split. It was feeling really really really long though, glaciers were traversing valleys, layers of rock being laid down on the Jurassic coast and whole continents were separating from each other in the time it took to get round this race. I'd been drinking loads of lemon Gatorade (much more refreshing than sticky orange flavour) and chucking water over myself at each of the very frequent water stations and was now walking through them for a bit of a break. The distance was a bit too much for me though, and I need a few more goes at the full 26.2 before I have another bash at the PB. How I used to do this every weekend, or even on consecutive days is baffling.

When I finished (3 hours 50) and had collected my drinks and stuff (including a delicious yoghurt drink, and chocolate weetabix, not sure why they gave us that), I lay on the grass of the stadium trying to get the pain to subside. It was awful. How had I normalised this distance so much that I forgot how much it hurts? I had the shakes really badly so decided to get back to the hotel for a hot bath rather than try to find 10 in 10 Chris and his daughter who was running her first. It took a lot longer than the usual 30 minutes, in fact, I got overtaken by an old lady with a stick by the lake. She had the inside line, but still, that's embarrassing.

Oh yes, I had reindeer meatballs for lunch yesterday. They would have been nicer if they hadn't been so undercooked.