Ballbuster Race, and "let's get serious"!

A couple of days on the lazy side, at least when it comes to postings on the blog… In terms of running I had a good Saturday… I had spent the night at Ben’s house and at 6.15am we left for the Ballbuster duathlon… Registration, one last visit to the loo, getting the bike ready, checking tires, sorting out transition bag, setting up bike and transition and soon it was time to start… Together with Paul we were waiting for the 8am start… A little bit apprehensive, ahead of me was my longest race to date, looking at my training times I would be doing this race somewhere between 3h45min and 4h. The last thing we did before going to the start of the race was to have an energy gel, I hope this would give me the energy I needed for the race!

My own goal was 3h45min, but also counting in the transition time I knew that this was going to be tough. Ben and I had said we would try to do the race together, but I also knew that it would not be easy for me to stay with Ben for something like this.

The race was off and we set off in a good pace, soon we had found a steady rhythm. This was going to be a long race, so it was important not to burn out to quickly. It felt good and after 20-25min we stepped up the pace a little and it felt good to be on the road. I could feel last weeks race in my calves, but not too bad, and I didn’t think it would be a big problem. We were definitely ahead of the times Paul and I had done two weeks earlier. After not too long the incline started towards the hill. I felt that we would have a good opportunity to come in under 60min. The hill started and we tried to balance not to push too hard and still keep moving up the field. In the end we did 57min, and then a 3min transition to the bike, including drinking a bit and having a banana.

On to the bike and Ben and I stayed together… I was just behind him and after just 3-4 minutes I drank from my water bottle. As I put the bottle back it slipped from my grip and I had lost the bottle! Now I only had 1 litre left, and that was not in the plan!! Well nothing to do but to push on. We continued to push hard and tried to climb up the field. The first lap we completed in 27min, 3min better then my first lap two weeks earlier. Mid way through the second lap I could feel my calves beginning to show signs of cramping and I told Ben to go ahead. However I stayed on his tail and through the downhill parts we both picked up places (probably more down to us not knowing what a break is on the bike, and the other riders being more cautious). The last time I saw Ben was in the beginning of the climb of the hill. I had to let him go if I should keep the cramp off my calves. The second lap I completed in 30min and now I was on for my last lap on the bike. I was not feeling great on the start of the third lap and was passed by a number of people… I came in on 33min and had done the 3 laps in 1h30min, which was 7-8 minutes better then in training. A 2 min transition and I was on the road for the last run.

My legs were dead, and I felt so rough. I could not take proper steps and for the first 20min people were passing me one after the other. I then felt a surge of energy and tried to think positive. I pushed on and thought of what Mo had said last week. When you are feeling bad, look around you and know that the people around you are feeling equally bad. I stopped at the drink station and had a couple of glasses of water. Pushing on I started to pass people and moving up the field. I felt good and before I knew it (well lets not kid anyone, I had been going for about 3h30min) I was at the start of the hill. I pushed up and felt that I could beat 3h45min! After the second turn I pushed harder and overtook more people, before long was the last turn and I knew I would beat my target! In the end I came in on 3h40min and 29sec!!

Heavy legs we went back to the car, loaded up the bikes and went home… I had planned to bike back to my house, but the way my legs felt I took the train… I think I had earned it ;-)

Ballbuster in the cupboard and to quote a now famous Governor it is now the time to get started for some real training… “Let’s get serious”… Namibia, here I come!

154th of 1,800 on the Hell Run and a tale from Ballbuster training

D-Day minus 151 days… I am not sure I can go on with starting each post with the countdown of days any longer… Already today I have 5 days less then when I started to write this blog… Stress and pressure to be able to do that 120km race - through the desert and in temperature as low as –5 Celsius and as hot as +35… At least I have started to build a positive image in my mind of how the sunrise will be like in the red desert (the race goes of at 5pm and you run through the night and into the next day). If I only can last until the sunrise I should be on good track to complete…

But before that will happen there is a training session or two that needs to be completed… Today I did two sessions in the gym here in my hotel in Bonn. First 40min on the bike this morning, and then a 35min bike ride followed by a gym session in the evening, so now I actually feel quite ok. The ache in the legs has started to settle down a bit (thank god!).

The two sessions on the bike in the gym today was needed as preparation for the Ballbuster Duathlon on Saturday… Having said this, I must tell you about my last training session for the Ballbuster. I went down to Box Hill in Surrey with my friend Paul (who is also doing the race). We said we would do one lap running and then a lap cycling. Each lap is about 8 miles, with a gruesome climb at the end that on a bike is a solid 12-15min non-stop climb!

We did the run in 1h 9min, which I think was OK, but I can definitely shave a couple of minutes off that; and then onto our bikes. When the last climb started I was ahead of Paul. Soon he overtook me and as he did so turned over and said something that I couldn’t really pick up. He pushed hard and I tried to stay with him, but soon he pulled away. I pushed on and eventually was back at the car park, but Paul was nowhere to be seen. I figured that he had gone for a second lap, so I continued quickly and tried to catch him up, but not once on my second lap cycling did I see him. I pushed up the climb and at the car park he was once again nowhere to be seen.

Paul had mentioned that the 3-hour cut off time on the Ballbuster could be difficult to make (you have to have finished the run and the 3 laps cycling to be allowed to continue for the final run). So with this in mind I thought that maybe Paul wanted to go ahead and do all the 4 laps to see his time, so I pushed ahead too. The last climb was a killer but finally I was at the car park and I had done the 3 laps in 30min / 32min and 34min, which I was really pleased about.

I spotted Paul by the car, his bike already racked and he had changed clothes and was eating a pastry and a coffee… I was impressed; this guy really had pushed the bike ride! I asked Paul for his splits and he said 32min for the first lap and 35min for the second…

Hang on, I said, 32min for the first one, but you were ahead of me! “No” he said, you were ahead of me… Turned out that the guy who passed me was not Paul and I had been chasing the wrong guy! Well, at least I know that I should be able to do the 4 laps in less than 3 hours :-)

/Joakim

Btw, the results from the Hell Run came up today… Mo finished 14th, Helen 9th and for myself I got a 154th place out of about 1,800 that had turned up! I am really pleased with that, in the top10%. Lets see if I can do that for Ballbuster, but I have my doubts… The people doing Ballbuster are more serious athletes I think, so I will probably struggle to even get in the top25%.

Hell Run 4 Nov - Done and Dusted!

D-Day minus 152… Ouch, ouch ouch… my legs hurt badly now… Yesterday was the day of The Hell Run. We couldn’t have asked for better weather for the event, sun and hardly any wind. Doing it in rain and wind would have been a different story! However I will still claim it was a pretty tough race by any standard… The length of the race was somewhere between 10 and 12 miles, all on sandy trails, and most of the race being uphill (at least that is how I remember it!)…

The race goes down as one of the tougher runs I have ever done! Me, Mo and Helen all positioned ourselves in the front of the line up, ahead of the start. Mo bravely on the front line, but since I am of more humble nature (*cough sound covering the word “bullshit”*), I stood with Helen a couple of rows back.

The race started off in a hard pace, but according to our discussion before the race, I started hard. We had discussed that that you pretty much never can catch up on a slow start. So for the first 20min I was flying, passing people left, right and centre, but then it hit me like a sledgehammer. It started to get a bit hilly and I was wondering if the hill section had started already *mental note, look at the race plan for next race*. It soon became apparent that the race was going to be going up and down a hill pretty much all the time. I had a long low between 20-60min, where I don’t think I overtook anyone and after 47min Helen passed me and soon she was way ahead. I am still pretty impressed that I managed to stay ahead of her that far into the race! The water trenches came as a blessing after about 55min… I felt fresher and could start to push ahead again and start to pass people again, rather then being passed all the time!

The hill session came towards the end of the race, and with 1h 15min in the legs, pushing up the steep banks on a training ground for tanks proved to be more then a handful. Mostly on hands and knees I pushed on and once through the hill section I reached the last water trench… Coming up from the trench I recognised where I was and I knew it was less then 5min from the end of the race!! I pushed on, passed a few people and entering the last 300m Mo was there shouting in his French accent “come on Joakim, RUN”… I pushed through and finished around 1h25min… A respectable time for me I think… Helen had finished a minute ahead of me, and Mo on 1h12min!!! Mo inside the top10 of 2,500 runners, and Helen came 7 or 8 amongst the women! Next time I’ll choose my running partners better so that I can win *smile*… No, only joking, I don’t think I could ask for better people to run with, every time I run with Mo and Helen I learn something new, a pity I cannot convince them to do the Namibian Ultramarathon with me.

The second race of the day started and I was in a hurry to catch a plane to Germany. As muddy as we were we got into the car and drove back to London and with 20min turn around time at home I was out the door with a suit on, heading for Munich and feeling very achy, but very very happy! Needless to say I slept very well on the flight…

Despite the pain I still managed to get up this morning and do 25min on the bike in the gym, just to loosen up my legs a bit and trying to loose the pain and quicken the recovery… In about 88h (or 4,5 days) it is time for Ballbuster duathlon! BRING IT ON!!!

So, exactly how long is 155 days?

D-Day minus 155 days…

I tried to do a gentle run this morning, however I could still feel my shins ache a bit… I think they got a bit of a battering 2 weekends ago when I ran from Malmö to Höllviken (I was visiting my friends and parents back in Sweden). It is about 30 – 32km and probably the furthest that I have ever run (except the time after the London Marathon, but I don’t count that, since that was just a freak incident!). I guess it didn’t help that I the day before tried to do my own little triathlon…

My own little triathlon turned out to be a bit of a problem… I ran down to the beach in the village where I grew up and with a wetsuit on I entered the water. The big mistake was to use a wetsuit that didn’t have any arms, just long legs and a tank top… The result was that for every stroke I took, I got cold, fresh water into the suit and I must say that I have very rarely been colder… It was a cold that felt more like a pain! I managed to do three x 5min, but then I had to get up… I then ran 1h15min and took my dad’s old bike and cycled the 30km into Malmö…

I guess between the two days I pushed my shins a little bit and I am paying for it now… At least I got out, ran for 20min and did about 20min trim trail in Wandsworth Common. Anyhow, this week was never going to be a heavy week on the training side anyhow, with the Hell Run coming on Sunday… I loved the way that they have worded the following lines:

“The course will be marked but DO NOT expect to see mile or kilometre markers….that’s for those softy road running types. All you need to know is that the course will be probably more than 10 and less than 12 miles in length. Hey! With what we have in store, who’s counting?”

Exactly, who is counting? :-)

Yesterday I spent some time thinking about how long 155 days is…

155 days is:
- 5.22 months
- 22.64 weeks
- 155 days (of course,)

So 5.22 months… By the time I have done Hell Run and the Ballbuster Duathlon it will less then 5 months left, and that is when the true training schedule is going to be put in place. I will try to get some help from my friend Mo, who is a really experienced 800m runner and has been running most part of his life, so he should be able to give some good input!

(Mental note: why am I asking an 800m runner for tips for a race that is 120,000m, or the equivalent of 150 800m races in a row…? Anyone’s got an idea?).

As you can see by this post, I quite like numbers, but you will get to see more of this. That is, if you will continue to read my blog! But if I am committing to running nearly every day between now and 6 April, maybe you could at least commit to reading about my challenges to get there!

Cool Runnings!

D-Day minus 156 days...

So here we go... the first posting. Today it is 156 days to go, and yesterday I decided that I would write this blog leading up to the race in Namibia on the 6 April. The idea is to keep a journal over the race preparation I do, and with that hopefully make myself take the training more serious and actually plan it!

So today I thought I should give a bit of background and the answer to these questions:
- Who am I?
- Why am I doing this?
- Why the race in Namibia?

Who am I?
Well that is a fairly ambitious question, so lets cut it back to try to give you an idea of who I am, rather then getting into a more philosophical discussion… I am 32 years old, from the southern tip of Sweden, and living in London since 8 years. I have always liked sports, and even though I went through a spell of about 10 years with very little regular sport activity, I have still always considered myself sporty.

My friends says that I have a slight problem in the way that I get a bit obsessed with different hobbies… A few of years ago it was rock climbing, a couple of years ago photography (to be fair, I still do a lot of photography), and the last year it has been running and adventure races. Typically I give 110%, get all the gear in the world, and then move on to something else 6 months later…

Why am I doing this?
I think it started two years ago when I on the day after the London Marathon went out and ran for about 3h45min without a stop. And did this with absolutely no training… I got inspired by watching the race and just went out and did it. Of course this left me totally unable to walk, but at least I did it… At the time some of my friends (Martin M. in particular) would define me as overweight, over-the-hill 30-something, so I clearly needed to change this.

The change came a year ago when I signed up for Tough Guy (http://www.toughguy.co.uk), an adventure race in January. With about a month to go I had hardly done any training, so I started to run. In the end I completed the Tough Guy race in (for me) a respectable 1h59min… This was the start to a newfound interest in running and races.

With Ben, a friend in London, I decided to do the Swedish Classic Circuit during 2008 (90km cross-country race, 300km bike ride, 3km swim, and a 30km cross-country run – not on the same day though *smile*), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Classic_Circuit. With this the bar was set to get fitter. In August I got a bike and two weeks later did the London Duathlon, signed up for another duathlon and by now the training had started to take off.

As always, I got a bit obsessed with my new interest and started to do more and more (including a nearly 4h training session with Ben, starting at 22.00 a Friday night, Dean Karnazes (http://www.ultramarathonman.com) here we come… The more I ran, cycled and exercised, the more I wanted to do tougher challenges.

So here is the real reason why I am doing this: Throughout my life people have set me challenges. My dad would time me running around the house (little did I know he just tried to tire me out a bit) / My friends dared me to drink a bottle of Tabasco in one go (thank you Jesper) / I ate a whole banana, including the peel (mental note, next time, start with the hard top bit, that one is difficult to chew on its own) etc etc. However somewhere along the line my friends grew up and stopped setting me challenges and dares.

Why the Ultramarathon in Namibia?
So there I was, on a Monday (29 Oct), looking at the Marathon de Sables website (http://www.darbaroud.com/index_uk.php). Me and Ben have decided to enter the 2010 race and the Swedish Classic circuit in 2008 will kick-start the training for the Marathon de Sables (for those of you who don’t know, the MdS is a race through Sahara, 6 days covering the distance of about 5 full marathons, by some called the toughest foot-race on earth).

I found a link to another desert race, this time in Namibia. I have for a long time wanted to go to Namibia and the race, covering 120km in 24h seem to be the perfect reason to go, so I signed up (http://www.adventure-racing.org/races/04Namibia%2024hr%20Ultra-Marathon%202008.asp). I thought it was a great idea to combine my interest for photography with the obsession of running adventure races!

So here I am, 156 days to go… The longest I have ever run in one go is about 30-32km. I am a decent shape at the moment, I run about 3-4 times a week (on a good week), and I can run for 3h straight.

However, let’s fool no one, I am in no shape to for 120km in one go… So this is going to be an interesting one for me.

Happy runnings!

/Joakim

Btw, went out yesterday and did a very slow jog for 25-30min… I am still a bit sluggish in my legs from this weekend’s exercise, and on Sunday I am doing the Hell Run (http://www.hellrunner.co.uk). This means that this week will be a quiet one on the training front. The real training starts after next weekend, when Hell Run and the Ballbuster Duathlon (http://www.humanrace.co.uk/buster/index.html) are both in the bag.