Mick and I have just taken part in the Lakeland 50 event. Before I launch into some posts about how it went, here's a bit of background:
The Event
The Lakeland 100/50 ‘Ultra Tour of the Lake District’ is a set of two races (105 miles and 50 miles) that has taken place each year on the last full weekend of July since 2008. The 100 is a circular route from Coniston involving 6300m of ascent…
…and starts at 6pm on the Friday.
The 50 is a linear route from Dalemain (just north of Pooley Bridge) to Coniston, involving 3000m of ascent…
…and starts at 11.30am on the Saturday. The start time of the 50 has two purposes: 1) it puts the main field of the 100 runners and the 50 runners on the same part of the course at the same time; and 2) it ensures that all but the very fastest finishers will have some experience of running in the dark. For the slower competitors, they will go through the whole night.
The cut-off for the 100 is 40 hours. For the 50 it’s a significantly more manageable 24 hours.
How We Came To Be There
In 2019 an acquaintance and fellow TGO Challenger worked insidiously in encouraging us to apply for the Lakeland 50. Somehow her tactics worked and on 1 September 2019 we entered our names into the ballot. A few days later we got the ‘Sorry but you weren’t successful’ email, giving us a whole year to decide whether we wanted to apply again.
The 2020 event eventually got cancelled due to Covid, which seemed like it would remove any option to apply for 2021 due to the rolled-over entries. However, some people had removed themselves from the entry list and the decision was made to increase the field, resulting in an announcement that a limited number of places were going to be made available. It seemed that our chances of nabbing one of those places was remote, but I threw our names back into the hat anyway. The “I” in that sentence is possibly what resulted in the “Congratulations! Your application was successful” a few days later, as I understand there had been some level of positive discrimination towards women and our application had me as the lead.
With the knowledge that we were in, we were then able to sit back and do nothing specific for the best part of six months. Come February it was time to start training, whereupon the reality of what we had committed to belatedly struck me, along with the knowledge that last time we did anything even vaguely comparable to this was in 2006 when, it now occurred to me, we were 15 years younger.
Happily, training went better than expected. I managed 115 outings amounting to over 1600km, over the course of which I went from “Oh my, what in the world was I thinking in entering this?” to “I can do this!”. Mick’s plan was always much more conservative than mine, with the main focus being for him not to get injured. He did miss a few sessions due to niggles, but incredibly (given his history) managed to avoid any significant injury. He completed 81 outings covering just over 1000km.
When we headed north last Thursday ready for race weekend, we felt well prepared for what was ahead.
To be continued...
That is most interesting. I look forward to the continuation.
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