Mick's ups-and-downs

Mick W combined some good solid bike training with an entry into last month’s National Cycle Challenge – a scheme designed to encourage bike-commuting to work. Mick’s impressively dedicated 23 days and 300 miles of commute was enough put him in 4^th position in the challenge for the whole of his home county of West Yorkshire.

Not content with hammering the bike, he’s also been putting in some really impressive runs and a 5K PB at York’s parkrun bears testimony to his form. This was his first sub-19 minute 5K but very probably won’t be his last.

Mick has been working hard on both disciplines with a view to making an impression in cross duathlon this Autumn and indeed, on the15^th October, he made this season’s multi-sport debut at Clumber Park in One Step Beyond’s 5K run / 17K MTB / 2.5K run Sprint event.

Unfortunately, in spite of his proven bike and run form, this particular foray into ended in frustration and disappointment after slack course signage management saw him – and several other leading racers – directed off the bike course: thereby rendering the whole event something of a farce.

The follow up cross-duathlon event is in a couple of week’s time and Mick is angry…

Lakes in a Day Ultra

Steve C has been up to his usual tricks with a completely crazy assault on the Lakes in a Day Ultra Run... walk... crawl.

Starting on Saturday 8th October (but not necessarily finishing on the same day) it's pretty clear from the Lakes in a Day website and accompanying fly-through that this is one of the more difficult ways to spend a weekend. In spite of stunning weather (always something of a gratefully received treat in the Lake District) the event still proved to be as tough as they come. Steve himself taps into just how much of a physical and mental challenge such things are:

"The real kicker was the descent to the tarn from Helvellyn and subsequent re-ascent of Fairfield. We could see Ambleside from there but it was like someone was towing it away at the same speed as we were moving towards it: it just never got any closer. Like many a newbie - I gather - I'd expected to be a half marathon further on by nightfall but was instead only just leaving the Ambleside checkpoint, which of course meant even more navigating in the dark and sections that you just couldn't run - even if you felt like it - due to rocks, tree roots etc in the woods alongside Windermere. (Incidentally, the owls were on great form scaring the hell out of you with their calls and occasional half seen wing rushes.) The last real low of the event was leaving Windermere to go to the final checkpoint at Finisthwaite, which looked nothing on the map but was largely uphill and took an hour. I eventually arrived at Cartmel at gone 3.00am on Sunday morning."

Steve's time of just over nineteen hours betrays the severity. Just awesome!

Recent round-up

Though not a formal Cani-X event, Steve C and Len had a crack at the Delamere 10K trail race on 11^th September, a sometimes-tricky-underfoot race through Cheshire’s largest (and very beautiful) Delamere Forest. Steve and Len finished in the top half of the field and were the first man / canine team home – a fitting result given that the main motivation was to celebrate the almost-to-the-day seventh-year anniversary of the Steve / Len running partnership.

Jamie L continued with the general 2016 theme of Go Veggies taking on some very tough challenges with an assault on the Worcestershire Beacon Race held on 8^th October. This 7 mile multi-terrain event in the heart of the Malvern Hills includes tarmacked road, woodland paths, exposed tracks, grass and rocks. As if the change in terrain isn’t tiring enough, competitors are also expected to take in approximately 500m of ascent: including a real lung-busting effort up Worcestershire Beacon itself (pic). Impressively Jamie beat the hour mark for this grueller and finished a highly credible 60/219 overall.

Parkruns have again featured quite a bit in GV activities this past few weeks with members making appearances at Bradford, Nostell Priory, Doncaster and Stratford-upon-Avon. A good number of age-group wins and top-10 overall positions have been recorded with the stand-out performance being that of Mick W, who achieved a course best of 19:22 at Nostell: a cracking time on this very pretty but difficult and ‘lumpy’ course.

In multisport news, the 18^th of September saw Emma S back in sprint-triathlon mode at the Nottinghamshire-based Southwell Last Minute event. Emma reports having had a pretty average swim followed by her best ever bike performance on this particular course (a two minute PB) and then a half-decent run to finish 7/24 in age group.

Meanwhile, Steve W also made a surprising end-of-season appearance at the Epworth Sprint Tri on 9^th October and showed his speed hasn’t been tainted too much by this year’s Ironman effort by finishing an impressive 2^nd overall. Steve reports he would have taken the event win but for making the irrational error of trying to put socks on in Transition 1. A particularly cold autumnal morning inspired the thought process that rather than wrestle with numb feet and waste vital seconds in T2, if socks were worn through the bike leg then T2 would be a super-slick affair – and so it proved to be: the downside was that trying to wrestle socks on to wet-from-the-swim feet meant our…ahem… ‘most experienced’ triathlete wasted a good 30 seconds stubbornly persisting in the folly whilst his ultimate rival-for-the-win was gifted a 250m head start on the bike…

In spite of some very cold events Steve has never tried the sock’s experiment before: he won’t be trying it again! We live, we learn.

Finally, for any who fancy it, quite a few Go Veggies are now using Strava, which is a pretty effective training aid and a good place to keep abreast of fellow members’ activities. The KOM / QOM / CR accolade that can be won by beating fellow Strava users over named ‘segments’ is definitely a real motivator for those occasional otherwise-far-too-easy-to-put-off maximal efforts – just resist the temptation to try one every day…