Larmer Tree 20

First off, gym news. I’ve been swimming. While I am a good swimmer, I can’t breathe when doing front crawl and I eventually have to stop or drown. I was focusing specifically on my breathing technique last week and neither stopped or drowned. Good news for the triathlon I have coming up, I just need to practice.

Swimming is not really what this week’s blog is going to be about though. It is all about the aches I have today. My hinges seem to be suffering the worst, knees and (strangely) my elbows hurt, my ankles are also trying to be noticed over the general holistic din of pain going on. I make it sound bad, but this is the good pain that you get after a race.

Yesterday was an early start to get to the Rushmore Estate for White Star’s Larmer Tree 20. Last year I took part in my first WSR event here at the Larmer Tree (it was the Half for me in 2015) and had such an amazing time that I knew I had to come back. It is difficult to explain why WSR create such an enjoyable experience, they just do everything you would expect from an event company excellently, with a dash of humour thrown in. Oh, and the medals are quite nice too. Go and find one of their events, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

What first caught my attention with the Larmer was the half marathon medal, it is a pretty piece of race bling and one of my favouites in my collection, but they also run a 20 mile and full marathon at the Larmer so I obviously had to come back again to get the next medal in the series. The idea of doing 20 miles a year ago seemed ridiculous to me, but I seem to have got over that particular mental hurdle since then and I was really looking forward to the race yesterday. The weather was perfect, the going was good to soft (with one exception where my trainer got stuck in a 5 metre section of claggy mud and I ended up hopping rather pathetically trying to not get my sock muddy) and I was feeling fast.

The race didn’t start perfectly for me mind you… After setting off from the back of the pack (as my friend was stuck in the queue for the loos) I then realised after about 500 metres or so that I had the car keys and that my wife would kill me if she couldn’t get into the car for the four or so hours I expected to be out running, I had to dash back to hand them over. Minor crisis averted we then settled into the race properly. It was long, and there were some big hills which were tough on the calves.

At about the half way mark my friend was beginning to struggle with a long standing injury and she made me go on ahead fearing that I was being held up.

While I was able to run on, there were still a lot of long stretches of walking, frustratingly up inclines that I would have run earlier in the day and trying to spur the legs back to running after a period of plodding was always tough.

I took my Polaroid Cube on a selfie stick on a bit of a whim. I wasn't convinced that it would take any good video when running but the human arm does a surprisingly good job (most of the time) of dampening the jogging motion, and I have some surprisingly good footage which I will edit into something at some point.

4 hours 18 minutes to cover approximately 34 kilometres was not bad considering the hills, and cider at the penultimate feed station (Oh, That’s another reason to love WSR). I think I’ll have to come back next year to finish the set and get the Marathon medal.