Racing, Sore Legs and Birthday Fun

The Dumyat hill race... where to start. It strikes fear into the hearts of staff and students alike. 390m of climbing in 7.9km, not the hardest hill race I’ve ever done by a long shot but by no means easy. It’s a very runable route up Dumyat and down making it not particularly technical but this makes it a very, very fast race! Which more than makes up the deficit on the toughness scale! Hill races always hurt, just some hurt in different ways.

However, just because a race hurts and you push as hard as your body will let you, doesn’t always produce the result you want, need and were hoping for. For me, this is an all too familiar feeling but under quite difference circumstances this time. I didn’t run great but still a good experience.

I’m not sure why I thought I was going to run to my full potential, there was nothing to say I should have run fast. Something I have come to learn is that just because you feel good doesn’t mean you will run fast! What dictates whether you will run fast is the quality of the work put into training! Now I have been putting in a lot of quality in order to prepare for Xterra Italy, leaving me in a bit of a sorry state. I entered on a bit of a whim, having done the Stirling Bike Club APR the night before, basically a 60km ride where the middle 40km is to put it simply as hard as you can go. In the morning I swam 5km and rode for 2hours... all of this off the back of a race weekend at BUCS with considerable time spent travelling. It now feels like just having made the start line was a not bad effort, haha!  

Thanks to one of my best friends and flat mate Chris for riding up to watch, cheers me on and take some pictures! After 5 minutes of running I realised just how badly this was going to hurt after my legs decided that they didn’t want to run as fast as I was telling them to.

Surviving on the way up!

Descent

More going up....

In a less insightful and more light hearted news. It was my Birthday yesterday, at a grand old age of 23 still can’t believe it. It was a brilliant weekend! Got 210km of riding done and got to go round one of my favourite loops: http://app.strava.com/rides/8370685

Map of Route

And on Sunday another wee 75km spin with the old man and it was well blowy! But the windy just makes you stronger on race day! And my Dad will need to be strong for the Celtman, Scotland’s and possibly the toughest Ironman distance race in the world. Excited to be a part of the 1^st year its being run and his mountain run stage support runner.

Aside from that... I ate a lot of cake...

Cake... well what was left after I got at it. 

Next step in the plan is Xterra Italy in 2 weeks time!

Relief, Disappointment and Excitement... All here.

The dreaded dissertation... every student’s worst nightmare. Well, mine is done! It’s been done for quite some time now but upon finishing it I pretty much lost all enthusiasm to write or do anything out than swim, ride my bike and run until my legs couldn’t run anymore.

Finished product! 

Hopefully it all comes back okay. I even became a “Lab Rat” myself in order to help along the study as participants are hard to come by! Needless to say it was tough, mentally, physically and a strange but rewarding experience to be sitting on the other side of the table. It did leave me in somewhat of a fragile state the following days but being able to manage training the following days was just confidence inspiring.

Leg all electroded up to collect some data!

Eight Hundred and Seventy Nine miles later...

Last weekend I got the chance to see how my fitness faired at BUCS after completing my dissertation, forcing me to reduce my training volume. I found it really hard to put words on paper when tired and it would have been a waste of 5 years to not put as much effort as I could into my dissertation making the reduced volume of training a necessity.

I don’t want to say too much about BUCS because I got a 2min time penalty for “drafting” which was something I consider to be pretty serious as I pride myself on being very strong on the bike which I have proven on countless occasions. I wasn’t drafting just got mixed in with a select few who were drafting and I’ll leave it at that. What was more important was I ran well off the bike following a 100km plus run week and having done very little speed work. While not being super quick it’s not a bad base line starting point of 17.10 on what it not a super quick 5km run course.

Apart from the obvious disappointment of the race the trip was pretty successful, no injuries or trouble with accommodation. Apart from the dashboard of Blair’s van lighting up like a disco it was a good weekend. I did find the drive much more taxing than I expected, tightening up through my right side pretty badly. It was just a coffee and red bull fuelled riot of a drive with Russell to keep me company, listening to the BBC Radio1 surgery and some classic tunes.

Planning the race the Dumyat Hill Race tonight, my local stomping ground. My legs still have a lot of fatigue in them but I have wanted to race this for some time now and can deal with a pain to see how I fair to the current record of 32.52. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some good news to write about! Really excited for the race!