A few longish walks were interspersed among only two runs this week, a short easy run on Wednesday and the Six Foot Track Marathon on Saturday.
Wednesday - short easy run. A gentle stretch out before the big day on Saturday. A slow 8km around the hilly streets of St Ives followed by a late afternoon blood test. Hoping all blood markers are normal before the treatment review next week. Fingers crossed.
Saturday - Six Foot Track Marathon, a 45km trail run. I can't believe how easy it is to run slowly. I had a ball pacing the 7-hour cutoff. I had never descended Nellies at the back of the pack. So I had no idea how slow some people would be in this section. The back end of our group took 30 minutes to get to the bottom of the stairs. Clearly if you are aiming for a good race time you would want to be close to the front of your wave. We then had to run sub 6min/k for the next 5k to get back on pacing target. I was abit nervous about missing our first milestone so probably did not enjoy the surroundings. Although the mist was limiting how far in the distance you can see anyhow. We reached Megalong Rd right on the 70min target time. Happy to meet the first pacing milestone.
The descent to Cox's was just as pretty as it the last time I ran on this section. Sound of bellbirds was surprising chirpy considering the number of runners that had gone through before us. The fog we had at the start of the run was beginning to lift and patches of blue sky were appearing. It promised to be a great day for racing. Our river crossing was also on target at 2:10. Three runners from our wave retired here, all due to injury.
The climb up MiniMini and the Pluviometer just had to get done. We spent a lot of time chatting to runners around us to distract them from negative thoughts. We left another of our runners behind when she just could not pick up pace to stay on target after the MiniMini climb. I really enjoyed this section as it was so familiar having been here in training and in a far less fit state. Had plenty of energy to run ahead and take photos. We reached Pluviometer timing mat around 5 minutes ahead of cut-off. I thought we may loose some tome in the next 10km of undulating trail along the Black Range. I probably had 5-10min along here that I was not happy. I really wanted to run just so I could get out of there. And run we did as we had no runners from our wave around us. And hoping a slightly quicker pace would help runners around us pick up a little bit. This worked and we reached the deviation in what felt like no time. The next section was the ugly short hills before the road crossing. Most runners that came though with us were moving quite well along this section. The euphoria as we reached the road crossing was palpable and they all took off. This left us to walk most of the next 4km to the cabins to lose a bit of time. Then a gentle jog on the descent to the Arch and we walked it in a minute ahead of the cut-off.
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| Morning after |
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| Morning after |
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