in the wake of the Red Kite

and many Red Kites we did see on Saturday afternoon at Nant-Y-Arian, I would guess in excess of 70 at around mid-afternoon.

Monday : Late afternoon/early evening run 8 miles(ish) and 2000ft(ish) over some new hills and some I have not been over for some years around Anglers Retreat. Needless to say we saw no one else.

Tuesday : 2000ft 4 reps of from hill fort to bus stop and back including a sub 13 minute rep which broke new ground in terms of time and probably heart rate

Wednesday : In London

Thursday : In London (did plan a run on the way home, but I did not leave Canary Warf until after 6pm).

Friday : Rest in preparation for weekend

Saturday : 11 miles and 2000ft over very local ground for me in the Red Kite Challange. A bit over a minute faster than 2 years ago which given the amount of puffing up hills I have done in the last 9 months is a bit disappointing, but I got round in just over 9 minute miles. The sections I lost places on were the more gentle hills which in round training you would walk up. You get what you train for, but I did note in contrast to 2 years ago it was my legs rather my cardio-vascular system which was the limiting factor and at the finish I felt I could have continued rather than being a heap at the finish. I did give this race my all, the legs went faster than they had for at least 6 months and just would not go any faster.

Sunday : 18 miles and 2600ft over mainly forestry tracks for the Devil's Race - Ras Y Diafol which starts and finishes at Devils Bridge. Dic, the race organiser, mentioned at the start something about the Devil and a Cow, but I did not get the whole story. I had planned a slower race and my legs were tired. I had not planned to be quite so slow finishing in 3 hours and 15. I did struggle for about 4 miles between 8 and 12 miles, but got back into my stride again for the last 4 miles. 30 miles in 24 hours did make this race feel like an Ultra and despite 6 water stations equipped with Jelly Beens, I probably needed to eat a bit more. I found the steeper hills like a rest(up or down), but would slow down on the gentle hills, something which has been almost 100% absent from my winter training.

As I already know, if you are doing BGR type training, it does not help you much on shorter races with smaller amount of climb (AM, BM, BL), but you do recover much quicker. As a training week it was not ideal for the BGR, a bit faster, too little climb, but I enjoyed both races, over 8k feet of climb and over 40 relatively fast miles. A theme of the last 3 weeks or so has been to get a bit quicker on my feet before going back to slogging up the steepest hills I can find and long slow-ish days out over rough ground.

Pleased to report that I am a little less of a fat bastard than reported here. Still some work to be done in this area.