Where was Bertie? He spent two nights in a field on Lake Road in Coniston. Camping was included in Mick’s race fee and included Portaloos, Portashowers and a non-mains water supply.
Weather: Friday: Far drier and sunnier than forecast. Saturday: far wetter than forecast, in that it rained much of Friday night, all day Saturday and most of Saturday night. Fortunately warm (18 degrees daytime and 15 degrees overnight). Sunday started wet then finally dried up just as we were leaving at 0845.
It was Lakeland 50 weekend, the same race as we both did last year, when it didn’t go well for me and, because he stuck with me, for Mick either. Mick was back this year to do a better job of it.
A brief recap: there are three races on the same weekend. The Lakeland 100 is 105 miles with 6300m of ascent, with a route that forms a circuit of the Lake District. It starts at 6pm on the Friday and has a 40-hour time limit. The Lakeland 50 is 50 miles with 3000m of ascent, with a generous 24-hour time limit. It’s linear, sharing the Lakeland 100 route for its last 50 miles. The weekend is far more than the races, having a real festival/family feel to it, with the most important event of the weekend being the kids’ Lakeland 1 race on the Friday evening.
Lakeland 50 route (Dalemain to Coniston)
We’d arrived in Coniston just after 9 on Friday, Mick was soon through kit check and registration, then we set about relaxing for the rest of the day, which turned out to be far drier and sunnier than forecast. The only spanner in the works in terms of relaxation was the issue of the missing zinc oxide tape (a brand new roll only bought two days earlier). A trip into Coniston finally turned up some alternative rolls of tape, but they weren’t ideal. (Fast forward: at 2am on Sunday morning, far too late to be of any use, I went to get the headtorch out of Bertie’s box of charging plugs and wires and there was Mick’s missing tape. No idea how he managed to put it there. Bit of an aberration.)
If we ignore the weather, which apparently hadn’t read the forecast and didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be raining*, race day started better for Mick than it did last year. He was on one of the first coaches to leave after the race briefing, so he arrived at the start with over an hour to spare (at which point, fortunately, it wasn’t raining, not starting until 3 minutes before the gun). Having not been delayed by a broken down coach, as we were last year, he didn’t have to start right at the back of the field of 1500 runners, but placed himself appropriately in the pen, which equated to him starting in the second wave of runners, being set off at 2 minute intervals.
Every competitor in both the 100 and 50 is fitted with a gps tracker, so once Mick was on the move my day involved hundreds of checks of the tracking map to see how he was doing.
He reached the second checkpoint at 1642 and knowing we had arrived there at 1800 last year led me to look in detail at last year’s times. Dot-watching then became even more stressful as I willed him on from afar to keep and widen the gap, but with no knowledge as to how he was doing or what was going on out on the course.
I went to bed at 2230, setting my alarm for 0130, and managed to sleep for all of half an hour before people chatting outside woke me up again**. That was it; I was then awake for the duration, obsessively checking the tracker.
Then Mick’s tracker stopped moving at the end of the Langdale Valley. This wasn’t unexpected, as it had done so at a number of places on the course, where mobile signal is lost. The problem this time is that it didn’t recover when he re-entered a signal area, nor when he passed the next checkpoint. Only half a percent of me worried that he was dead in a ditch, but it did leave me with a guessing game as to the earliest possible time he would arrive, as there was no way I wanted to miss being at the finish to greet him. I was just about to head out to the finish marquee when his tracker finally sprang back into life.
I looked at the time. I pulled out my laptop and interrogated my gpx file from last year’s event. To come in under 16 hours, he needed to cover the final stretch in 1hr20. Last year that section had taken us 1hr16, including one heck of a sprint finish, but that had been in daylight, on dry terrain and in good visibility, none of which Mick had on this occasion.
Mick reports that his energy deserted him on that last climb and he came over all wobbly, but from where I was sitting all I could see was that he was still moving forward and seemed to be on target.
Over to the marquee I went, constantly checking Mick’s progress. He tells that he got caught behind eight barely-moving people on the final descent, who seemed determined not to let him pass and who clearly didn’t have the same sub-16 objective as him. He did finally get by, and ran like the wind down to the mine road, thence to Coniston and the school.
It looked, on arrival, like he’d met his 16-hour objective by the skin of his teeth, although I didn’t know exactly when he had crossed the line (competitors cross the line, get met by a greeter, who walks them to the marquee, tells them to turn off their headtorch, and presents them to the crowd for a big cheer and whoop. If several people finish together, a bit of a queue can form for presentation, hence I didn’t know his exact finish time). Once he’d finished, the start time on his tracker changed from 1130 (as it had read all day) to his actual start time of 1132 and confirmed his finish time as 0326. Take the seconds into account and his official time was 15hrs53.
What’s the significance of a sub-16 finish? It qualifies him to enter next year’s Lakeland 100. He was adamant at the finish that he was *never* doing so much as the 50 again, and certainly not entertaining any thought of the 100. I reckon he’ll be coming around to the idea by the end of the week…
As it goes, considering that after injury and poorliness earlier in the year he did this on the back of a ‘Couch to 80k in 8 weeks’ programme, I thought he was in pretty good condition at the finish. After a day of sodden feet and walking along paths masquerading as streams, it was incredible that he only had a couple of small blisters, and whilst he is understandably muscularly sore, the bits of him that hurt the most are those he bashed when he fell. (#ridiculouslyproudwife)
He managed half a bowl of chilli at the finish, then it was back to Bertie for a shower, having me apply a dressing to his knee so he didn’t bleed over the sheets, and bed at 4.30am.
(*All the way through to Saturday morning, the forecast had been giving a high chance of dry conditions for the entirety of the race, with perhaps just a few light showers. In reality, it rained in Coniston without cease all through Saturday and overnight into Sunday, with a cloud base almost skimming the top of the trees in the valley. Every time I checked the forecasts, they told me that it would dry up in an hour’s time, but that hour kept rolling forward, until it finally did stop at around 0830 on Sunday morning. The weather in the northern Lakes was a little better, but Mick still endured rain for almost the entirety of the race. Fortunately, mainly light or mizzly, and without any notable breeze.
**The camping and parking fields had become so waterlogged and churned up that they’d had no choice but to stop cars entering, which meant anyone arriving to pick up finishers had to park on the road. Bertie was the other side of the wall from the road, so I could clearly hear people both returning to the camping field, and returning to cars on the road. Understandably, finishers had a lot to tell their friends and family, and had little concept of the time of day, so I couldn’t blame them for the late night chatter.)
A few snaps from Mick's phone:
Well done Mick. Impressive. And a good team effort overall.
ReplyDeleteThank you! A successful couple of weekends have been had.
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