In which I sign up for a stupidly long race because, let's face it, I have had far too few running distractions of late.
Welcome to the first installment of what will hopefully become a 'longer than one installment'-blog, following my attempt to deal with the, quite frankly ridiculous decision I made to try and run across England next year (2022).
“...quite frankly ridiculous decision I made to try and run across England next year”
I will be using this blog to record how my training and preparation goes for The Northern Traverse race in April 2022. I will attempt to detail how my training is going, as well as perhaps some things about nutrition (not because I am by any means an expert, but because I love talking about food) and anything else that happens to distract me along the way.
So, let's start from the beginning. It is, after all, the very best place to start...
Northern Traverse
The Northern Traverse is a 190-mile race following Wainwright's coast-to-coast route across Northern England. It begins in St Bees on the west coast and ends on the east coast in Robin Hood's Bay anywhere from 2 to 5 days later, crossing three National Parks on the way.
It should be noted that this is not one of the numerous running decisions I have made on the spur of the moment. In fact, I have spent a couple of months pondering over this and trying to decide whether I stand a hope of completing it. However, over those couple of months I have become more and more certain that I want to give it a try, at the very least. Sometimes with these things, when you know it's the one for you, you just know.
It all started, as I say, a couple of months ago. Just back from the end of the long summer holidays (in Thailand they run through March and April) I was feeling a bit meh about the (not exactly a) lockdown we were facing. Faced with a mix of lack of motivation and post-holiday wanting to plan the next one, I began thinking about a return to the UK. Realistically, due to the global pandemic's travel restrictions, and the school holidays March/April 2022 is likely to be the first time I'll stand a chance of making it back. Perusing the old interwebs, looking for potential races to sign up for I stumbled across this one. It is safe to say I was hooked on the idea immediately.
Since then I have bought a guidebook about the route, watched as many videos on YouTube as I could find, and spend many long runs thinking about it. Now, faced with the prospect of two weeks of self-isolation due to one of my partner's co-workers testing positive for Covid, seems like as good a time as any to start taking this seriously. So while I may not have much actual training to talk about for the next couple of weeks, I should have some time to get this up and running and figure out how everything is going to work.
Adios for now. I will be back next week with some more insights (ha) into my (vague) training plan and/or a summary of past endeavours/mistakes I wish to learn from.
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