Where was Bertie? Thursday & Sunday: Church House Inn, a 5-van campsite in Torver, £20 without electricity. Friday & Saturday: in a field on Lake Road in Coniston (included in Lakeland 100 entry fee).
Weather: Sunshine and showers. Hot in the sunshine, warm enough in the showers. Windy from Saturday afternoon on.
Thursday
Two years ago we spent the night before the Lakeland weekend by Lancaster Services. Last year we stayed near Milnthorpe. This year, even though we didn’t get around to phoning a campsite until the night before, we got ourselves a pitch at Torver, just a couple of miles along the road from Coniston.
We weren’t the only people to have the same idea, and of the 12 units on the 5-pitch site, at least five contained Lakeland competitors – including the two vans immediately next to us. More were inside the Inn.
Due to our late booking, we were in the car park, rather than in the field, and there wasn’t an electric hook up available, which was fine by us, especially when they knocked a fiver off the quoted price.
We chatted to our neighbours, poured a few containers of water into Bertie’s tank, then had a quiet night.
Friday
By a few minutes past nine, Bertie had driven the five minutes up the road and was settled on the ‘overflow and large vehicles’ camping field. Soon after, Mick went off to registration and kit check. It didn’t take long at that time of day, giving him plenty of time to repack his bag, have lunch, have a little kip, and get ready for the race briefing at 4.30pm.
A period of loitering and chatting followed, before he took himself off to the starting pen. Per tradition, and rather appropriately, Nessun Dorma was sung and at 6pm on the dot off they went, all hoping to complete the 105-mile course (6000m of ascent) within the 40-hour time limit.
My period of intense dot-watching then commenced and I soon learnt that, for me, dot watching 105 miles is much more involved than watching the 50. I was a woman obsessed.
Saturday
Not the best night’s sleep ever, but I managed 3 hours more than the runners out on the course, so I figured that was good enough to put into practice my distraction plan: I was going up a hill. In hindsight, it wasn’t a good plan, as 3km in I decided that I couldn’t bear being out of mobile phone signal at the time when Mick was most likely to phone me, so I hotfooted it back to Coniston, just about making it back into a signal area before he called.
I won’t disclose how much of the day I then spent staring at screens as it’s an embarrassing and obscene statistic. All the things I’d taken with me to do whilst I was waiting went completely untouched.
Alas, Mick’s day didn’t go to plan, and at Dalemain (59 miles and 3600m of ascent through the route) he called it a day*. A two hour minibus ride got him back to Coniston. I’m sorry to say, but watching the honed athletes climb down off that bus was the funniest thing I saw all weekend (remember a time that you’ve finished a long day walk, got in the car then driven an hour or more home, and how stiff you felt getting out the car. These chaps had been moving for 20+ hours, were mainly injured in some way, and had just spent two hours setting into the shape of a minibus seat (they took a scenic route back)).
From my selfish point of view, at least my eyes could have a rest from my phones screens and I was going to get a good night’s sleep. I could even nip up my hill on Sunday morning.
A small glitch with Bertie’s hot water system**, delayed Mick’s shower, but he was still in bed at a reasonable hour.
Sunday
I wasn’t done with dot-watching yet. We had a friend doing the L50, and the moment I woke up at 5am I needed to know how she’d fared overnight. As delighted as I was to see that she was still going, I didn’t think Mick would appreciate me sharing the news quite that early. I snuggled back down and slept some more.
Having decided against my hill, I opted for a simple circuit up to the car park on the Walna Scar Road, before looping around back to Coniston. Thanks to racing five young chaps up the (incredibly steep!) road up to the car park (I won, albeit I accept they didn’t know they were in a race), I managed to arrive at the Miners’ Bridge at almost the exact moment that Vicky (the very person who we can blame for egging us on to enter the Lakeland 50 in 2019) got there, 49 miles into her 50-mile race. I stayed with her down to the road end, before going on ahead. There’s no support allowed in either the 50 or the 100, and I wasn’t going to risk her being disqualified for me ‘supporting’ her with my company (although, in all honesty, if it had been a random stranger 50 runner that I’d met, I’d have still chatted with them down to the road purely because we were going the same way and I was interested in what they’d been doing).
With Bertie packed away, we tried to attend the awards presentations at noon, but there were just too many people to fit in the Marquee, with crowds outside too. So, we gave it up as a bad job, returned to Bertie, and ten minutes later we were back at the campsite in Torver.
Monday
With Mick’s protesting thighs no longer protesting so much, his body decided it was time to let him know that he’d been bitten to pieces by midges on Friday night – a fact about which he had previously been completely unaware. His first request this morning wasn’t painkillers (as yesterday morning), but anti-itch cream.
Not much to report from the rest of the day. Our journey home was first via a roadside café where Mick had an excellent breakfast and I had something a bit more modest (although, oddly, bits from Mick’s plate kept landing on mine; I didn’t object), then via Halifax.
A slow journey home from Halifax (road works, breakdowns and just too much traffic), but we got here in the end, although the complete emptying of Bertie will wait for tomorrow. It had been a long day and other things took priority – like having tea and SORNing Bertie, who won’t be going back on a public road until at least September.
(*One of his problems was his right knee, about which he was concerned before he set off. His training went really well, without any significant injury, this year. Then last Wednesday he did his final run pre-race – just a little 8k, for which he decided to not risk anything by tackling the mud and roots on his usual routes, but to stay on tarmac around the village. He was 8.1km through his 8k, and a couple of hundred metres from home, when he tripped on a manhole cover. He came home with a bloody elbow and a bloody, bashed knee. It could have been a whole lot worse (in that he didn’t do anything that would prevent him from starting the race), but it wasn’t ideal and he was mightily cross with himself. Incidentally, it was the only time he fell over in just shy of 1000 miles of training this year.
**I did the Virtual Lakeland 100 in 2022, most of which I achieved in my 24-hour race. The Virtual t-shirts had a typo on them, so whereas people who did the real event were ‘Finishers’, the virtual runners were ‘Finsishers’. I love the t-shirt for that feature.
***The hot water glitch was related to me changing Bertie's failing pump a few weeks ago to one of a different design, not having a suitable jubilee clip and hoping that the barbed fitting would be adequate to hold pipe onto pump. It became detached on Friday morning, was soon reseated, but I’d not twigged that disconnection from the non-return valve had allowed the whole contents of the hot water tank (cold at that time) to drain back into the main tank. I thus heated an empty tank, and Mick turned on the shower to find no water coming out.)
Sorry you didn't finish Mick but what you did was a great achievement I its own right and something to be truly proud of.
ReplyDeleteI agree, it was still a great achievement, with lots of positives (I may pen another post on the subject), in particular that he enjoyed (almost all of) what he did - even the challenging overnight weather and underfoot conditions. We've just penned a list of lessons learnt and things to work on for next year.
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