Portland Coastal marathon

The Portland coastal marathon was always going to be a long, hard day, but I had to beat it. I'd DNF'd Endurance Life's Gower marathon and had vowed never to do a coastal mara again, and had given away my South Devon and Pembrokeshire places. However, I HAD to do one, to prove I could do them, even if I was right at the back and hating it. They make me feel like a really rubbish runner and a weak one too, but if I could just beat one of the damn things, it would ease my mind a bit about being a quitter. I'd also been very very low lately, with my finger firmly on the self destruct button. My motivation for all the running is partially the constant feeling of underachievement, I always have to do more and, if I can do it, it can't be that hard, can it? In a similar way, when things go really really well, I believe that I don't deserve it or haven't earned it and end up pushing it away. It's totally stupid, but Saturday was me beating myself up for almost 7 hours. The good cop on my right shoulder would identify the insecurity and paranoia and suggest that being rational and logical would address the issue, but then the bad cop on my left shoulder would whisper "who the hell do you think you're kidding? you think that's good enough? look how crap you're running this race for a start." It was a long, lonely, miserable day.

The course is 2 laps of Portland, starting off up a steep hill, then along the east coast which was relatively straightforward and reasonably quick to Portland Bill, the picture postcard lighthouse. It was calmer and shadier on this side so offered a bit of a break. Beyond Portland Bill, however, was a long muddy drag uphill and then a flat stretch of trail-shoe-defying mud. That wasn't too bad. After a fell-runner's paradise of a downhill came the beach. Chesil Beach is a long spit of shingle, pebbles bigger than gob stoppers sucking your feet down, every step sinking in to your ankles, and every push off resulting in nothing but backwards movement. It's totally exposed along there, and the wind was whipping across the bay, it was freezing. After a few minutes, the noise of the pebbles became deafening and it became this absolute nightmare - pebbles as far as you could see, there was 1.7 miles of it, dead ahead in a straight line. I lost it a bit here, there were quite a few tears as my legs turned to jelly, my hands started to freeze and the noise became unbearable. I couldn't let myself think of doing it again on the second lap.

Coming off the beach was peculiar, you hit firm ground and there's utter, beautiful silence beneath your feet, but your legs can hardly hold you up, they're just buckling. The ground though receives each step and bounces you back into the air, you'd feel light as air if only your legs would keep you upright. Thankfully, there's a mile of flat path to the half way point where I shoved down a mars bar and fought the bad cop who wanted me to pack it in. I had to finish it, these races are brutal and sadistic but I wasn't going to be beaten by it again. Plus, I'd just eaten a mars bar, I had to burn that off and that would take at least 2.5 miles. Jeez, I'm finding carb loading for these races very tough at the moment, I do it because I have to but it's so difficult when I'd happily never see food again.

I made it past the half way point / finish line and carried on. Thankfully, I made reasonable progress to the Bill again, but seriously struggled to maintain anything over a shuffle thereafter, my legs were so so wobbly. This time on the beach, I knew how long there was to go, and breaking it down helped enormously. V'rap bounded past me in the final few hundred metres looking very fresh and happy and I tried to summon a grimace for El Bee who was there at the finish with his camera but there had been such a roller coaster of emotions that it was next to impossible. But it was done, in 6 hours 40, I never have to do a coastal marathon again, and it was thankfully a road marathon to follow the next day.