Friday - Sunday 22-24 July: Catton Park/24hr Trail Race

Where was Bertie? He spent Friday and Saturday nights at Catton Park in Derbyshire. If camping hadn’t been included in my race entry, it would have cost £24 for the weekend, including a water point and use of Portaloos and Portashowers.

Weather: Some sunshine. Some showers (worst on Friday evening and overnight into Saturday). 21 degrees on Saturday, 18 degrees overnight into Sunday, and getting back to around 21 by noon on Sunday.

Long Short Story: I took part in a 24-hour trail race, on a 10km lapped (and not easy!) course, and managed to cover 130km (81 miles), placing me as 6^th female! Even if I’d been male my result would have come in the top 10.  I’m delighted!

 The course. An undulating 10km route through woodland and across pasture, with 150m of ascent per lap. I've drawn a blue arrow roughly pointing to the start/finish point.

Long Story Not So Short:

Friday

One of my measures as to how hard a long endeavour has been is: “If someone told me I had to go another ‘X distance’, would I cry?”. After Lakeland 50 last year (50 miles, 3000m ascent; it didn’t go well – you can read about it in the set of posts starting here), I said to Mick that if someone had told me I had to go another 10 miles, I wouldn’t have cried. From that statement, I quickly leapt to the conclusion that it would be entirely sensible to do a 100km race. The only problem was that there are too many things about the logistics of long races that I don’t like.

The solution, I concluded, was to enter a 24-hour lapped event, setting myself the target of 100km. After attending Equinox24 last September (as a volunteer and spectator – you can read about that here), I wasn’t put off and entered Thunder Run 24.

After six months of training, only briefly derailed by Covid (1750km covered in 132 activities versus a plan of 1900km – not bad, I’d say), the race weekend finally came around and at just gone 11 on Friday morning Bertie found himself queuing to get into Catton Park.

The race didn’t start until noon on Saturday, but we chose to arrive as soon as the gates opened, so as to nab an advantageous spot in the ‘solo competitors’ camping field, thus minimising the distance I’d have to detour from the course to go back to Bertie for support. 

This opening in the railings was the only point at which soloists were permitted to leave the course. We got an excellent spot for Bertie.

Another view, showing the start/finish area in relation to Bertie (he's far left of shot).

Saturday/Sunday

At Lakeland 50 last year I barely slept on the Friday night, struggled to eat on the Saturday morning and was dehydrated before the event even kicked off. Thunder Run started better: I got a decent night of sleep, ate my breakfast without any problem, and had no issue with having my lunch at just gone 10am. A cup of tea, a pint of sports drink and a coffee saw me start hydrated.

 On the start line (kinda: I opted to start at the back of the field) with Michelle, whose van was parked next to Bertie.

Things continued well – from noon until around 3am, I ate and drank well, both out on the course and between laps and I felt really good. The eating didn’t go so well after 3am, but I was so close to my target by then that I figured it didn’t matter. The something-behind-the-knee niggled a bit from the start, then on Lap 6 it *really* made its presence felt on the first hill, such that I feared the next 40km would be unpleasant. Then, incredibly, it stopped hurting and I heard not a single peep out of it for the rest of the race. I’m sure the use of the massage gun on the calf between laps helped its remarkable recovery.

I was 70km in before blisters started appearing. About the same time various muscles also started feeling the effort, with more and more parts of my body adding their protests as the kilometres racked up. However, I wasn’t injured and there was nothing to make me think that meeting my target wasn’t achievable.

It’s a trail race. This was one of the more friendly rooty sections. The bits that weren’t on rooty woodland trails were on rough grass, with just two short sections (totalling about 500m) of rough track on the whole course.

Even though I’d been told that setting a target was a really bad idea, as when you meet it your mind will convince you that you can’t possibly go a step further, by the time I was on Lap 10 I was sure that I was going on to Lap 11. There were still over 6 hours of the race to go and I felt great, so why stop?

I did, however, reward myself after Lap 10 with a 20-minute lie down. Maybe not a good idea, as getting back up took some will and the first 2km of Lap 11 were hard. I started perking up as time went on, but at the Drinks Station (at 5.5km), I stopped to thank the volunteers and to tell them that this would be my last lap. On Lap 12 they reminded me of what I’d said on my previous lap. “It turns out” I said “that I was entirely wrong. I felt great for the rest of that lap so it seemed silly to stop.”

At 118km, Mick phoned me to remind me to let him know when I was a kilometre away, so he could be sure to be on the finish line to snap a photo. “Well” I said a little sheepishly “I’m thinking of going out again”, going on to rationalise that the only thing wrong with me was some blisters and they didn’t constitute a good reason to stop. By my calculation, I would finish lap 12 at around 10am and if I could get myself back out by 10.15, then even if I walked every step, I could finish by noon (not that I needed to finish by then; any lap started before noon still counts, but my own desire was to finish within the 24 hours). I didn’t *need* a 13^th lap, but would I kick myself afterwards if I didn’t go for it? Yes, I decided, I would.

Unfortunately, only a few moments later the lack of food over the last few hours (and maybe the effort and lack of sleep) caught up with me. The final 1.5km of lap 12 were a slog and took me until 1004.

It was the only time I didn’t enter Bertie. I collapsed into a deck chair, probably grunted and grimaced at Mick as he tried to pour food and drink into me and my will to get back out of that chair ebbed away from the moment I sat down, although I do remember questioning Mick at length as to what one last lap would mean to my final standing.

Top marks go to Mick for managing to prise me out of the chair by 1020. He walked me back to the course, pointed me in the right direction and agreed that if I still felt so awful at 2.5km through (when I would pass within 50m behind Bertie), I could stop. I did still feel dreadful, but (whether it makes sense or not) this was my thinking: it’s only another 2k to the 4.5km point; from there it’s an easy 1km to the Drinks Station; from there it’s only 4.5km to go and surely I can manage 4.5km? So on I slowly plodded, feeling really quite horrific and knowing that any chance of a noon finish was gone.

Even at 5km through, it was touch-and-go as to whether I would finish that lap*. I attribute my success to the team at the drinks station who raided their car boot and gave me a tube of salted Pringles from their personal food supply when I asked them if they had anything salty I could possibly have.

It was thanks to the same team who cheered me at great volume just outside of the finish area such that I managed to muster a sprint finish, crossing the line at 1213, having covered 130km, securing 6^th place of the solo women.  

What a fun weekend! Genuinely – of the first 120km there were 5km (split across two laps) that I didn’t positively enjoy, and whilst the final 10km were grim, considering the distance involved and how well my body and mind held up to the first 120km, I can’t really complain about that.

Thanks, of course, go to my one-man support crew who also spent 24 hours awake tending to my every need. I should write a separate post about what it was like being support to a diva like me...

(*At 124.5km I realised that: a) I wasn’t sweating much at all, even though it was hot and humid and I’m a sweaty sort of a person;  b) my heart rate was far too high for the pace I was doing. I put these facts together with a few others, such as: a) I’d not added any salt to my second bowl of pasta over night; b) I’d forgotten to have any salt tablets in the previous few hours; c) it had been really sweaty weather on Saturday and overnight such that I’d paused between Laps 8 & 9 to shower the coating of salt granules away; d) I’d been weeing excessively for the previous few hours, out of proportion with my liquid intake. All of these facts I put together to realise that I was potentially in a dangerous state. On the one hand, my assessment may have been wrong and surely I could manage another 5.5km; on the other hand, I didn’t want to be the cause of a medical emergency and would have been prepared to stop rather than having that happen.)