An all-day adventure!
I was up at 4:20am for this one (couldn’t sleep) and was parked at the race start soon after 6am, mainly because I was more nervous about getting a parking space than about the run itself. I’m glad I went so early because it meant I had an hour or two in the car to decompress with a magazine.
I got myself set up and warmed up and found my friend Ed at the start, and soon we were off along the banks of the Tyne. It was fairly busy for the first few miles of the run, and it mostly seemed to be locals – lots of people using it as a training run for The Wall ultra in the summer. The first few miles ticked along fairly quickly, and I was glad I knew this bit of the route from doing my recces during the last couple of months of marathon training. It didn’t feel like long before we reached the first checkpoint at Wylam, 11 miles in (though the race guide had listed this as 8 miles in – there were quite a few last-minute route changes!).
The next section felt a bit lonelier as people started to spread out, and Ed and I started taking the odd walk break as the route became trailier. I hadn’t done this bit in training, which meant that it felt longer as I didn’t really know where I was. The race guide was slightly off in distance again for the halfway checkpoint at Stocksfield – advertised as 16 miles but it was 17.5 miles in. It felt like it took a while to get there! I was really grateful for the banana and cola on arrival, but we made sure to get going again quickly.
More wooded trail sections awaited us on the south side of the river for the next stretch, including a few muddy paths that were fairly unrunnable! Again, I didn’t know this section at all and had now adjusted my mental schedule so that the checkpoints were approximately a mile behind their advertised position and the total distance was 33 miles rather than the advertised 32. In addition to the checkpoints (where we had our ‘brevet cards’ stamped) there were also pieces of information we had to find along the route and note down. By this point these were about a mile behind schedule too. At the end of this section, we briefly crossed back to the north side of the river to visit the Wylam checkpoint a second time at 23 miles in.
I knew that the east end of the Ryton golf course marked 9 miles to go, as I had recced that section on an out-and-back 18-miler a couple of weeks previously. It seemed like it took a long time to get there (the golf course is massive!) and by the time we did, it was clear that the total distance was going to be about 34 miles. I found this a bit of a challenge as I had mentally prepared for 32 – and you wouldn’t think 2 miles would make much of a difference for an ultra, but it really does in the mind. I just started counting down the miles instead of counting up, and I really appreciated having scoped out this bit of the course as I knew exactly how far it was back to the Quayside.
Ed and I did a lot of walking in the last few miles as it was getting very tiring! We picked it up again in the last couple of miles as we were approaching the Quayside bridges and knew we didn’t have far to go. Geth was waiting for us at the finish and filmed us as we came in – 34.2 miles, just over 8 hours. It had been a very long day but a good adventure, and I’m so proud that I did it and can call myself an ultra runner.
While there were some very hard parts of the run, I know from experience never to say never again when it comes to running, and I expect I will do more ultras (and probably repeat this one next year!). However, there are a few things I’ll know for next time:
- Ultra distances are not necessarily as advertised! In future, I’ll be mentally prepared to do a few more miles than expected.
- I need to add walk breaks in from the start so that my overall pace can be a bit steadier. We weren’t deathmarching in the final sections – we were still doing a good walking pace – but I would have liked my run/walk splits to be a bit more even.
- Next time, I’ll train specifically for the distance. I’ve been training for Manchester Marathon (my spring A race) and thought that adding in an extra weekly medium long run of 10 miles in addition to my weekly long run and other sessions would be enough for the ultra, especially as I’d got up to 20 miles on the long run and everyone says you don’t need to do anywhere near the actual race distance when training for an ultra. However, the extra miles felt like a lot (especially when it transpired during the run that the extra 12 were an extra 14!) and I think I would prefer to have at least run a recent marathon before tackling this distance again.
Geth asked me the minute I finished the race whether I’d do it next year. I gave a lot of ‘ifs’ similar to the above list, but I didn’t say no, so I think the likelihood is that I will.
In the meantime, though, I’ll be glad to be able to give Manchester my full attention for the next four weeks! I managed a marathon PB within the ultra (my existing marathon PB is 6:26:47 from London 2021, and I hit marathon distance in under 6 hours yesterday) but I have much bigger plans for that PB as my training has been so good lately. Fingers crossed.