VLM13

Just a quick post to express my gratitude to everyone that helped a last minute fundraising spree go from £0 to £602.60 in the space of ten days for Macmillan Cancer Support at the Virgin London Marathon! THANK YOU!

I don't have much to say on the race - you know the score. London, masses of runners, music, samba bands, costumes galore, streets lined with cheering spectators and of course a very rowdy bunch of screamers, whistlers, long-plastickything-banging nutters, clappers, shouters and big smilers, all waving the Macmillan flag. AWESOME.

I came over the finish with a 3:01:56 time, a few minutes off target pace after some issues at mile 24 - but a great day out in the capital and the sun came out too!

Thank you everyone for your continued support at VLM over the years. Same time, same place next year! Come join me on the course or for some 'refreshments' afterwards! x

Gurgh Jagud!

I know I can't quite believe it myself - time to add a post to The Nipple, a rare thing indeed!

Since writing last there have, of course, been many things happening in The Nipple office. Training ramped up in january again, this time with Canadian mountain man, fearless climber and ultra runner, Toby Froschauer. If our text message arrangements were to be monitored by CID, they would probably cause a full scale ambush on the corner of Hackney Marshes, being misinterpreted as cunning underworld code: 

6:45 lckd bild, wait15 goifno / TuesBring4mud / Thurs?6:45 15go speedsess / Sat?Long?Mud!EppFor 10 usual. 

Rather undramatically, they would find two skinny guys warming up for a pre work 15 miler.

So as the year starts again, miles get clocked, plans hatch and the January/Februaury elements are fully enjoyed for all their random plot changes. The dark mornings offer beautiful sunrise, foggy fields, misted building tops and the chance to start the day with birdsong. Gradually the year starts to warm up, mornings become brighter, head-torch, gloves and beanie left in the drawer and layers stripped back. Well thats what usually happens, this year, however, winter has clung on with every ounce of its might and continues to force runners into leggings, glow in the dark hats, base layers and thermal gloves. Slapping faces with horizontal rain, numbing finger tips in sub-zero temperatures it has unashamedly forced me to wear merino wool and Gore-Tex... in London! (Oh the shame!)

 

[Photo taken from Hardmoors Facebook Page, posted by Laurence Cuinu]

This weather thing, that apparently we so often talk about, became a dominating factor in March at my first race of this year - Hardmoors 55. Both myself and Toby ran the route together and if you hear words like 'epic', 'brutal' and 'WTF?' being used on various race reports, they are well deserved. To cut a long story short, -20C temperatures, knee deep snow drifts, 6,800 ft of ascent, wrong turns, ups, downs, extreme marshaling, snow drift sculptures (very weird, beautiful and eery), magical snow covered forests and stunning views across the moors, saw us place joint 11th of 135 in 9:48 with 10 minutes to spare before we caught our prebooked taxi to York station. Sheesh. A quick change in the toilets, then bar snacks and beer for our return journey home! Tidy! 

March also brought another exciting day out in the form of the TORQ Trail Team assessment day. TORQ have decided to form a trail team from an application process posted up some time ago through various social networking sites. From a stack of applications they managed to choose a group of people to attend the two assessment days. (Find out more at their Fb page here). It turned out to be more of a meet and greet than what you would imagine an assessment to be with talks, gel tasting (rhubarb and custard!!!), a spot of light lunch and a short run together. Extraordinarily, I also bumped into someone I was in school with! Taking a double take I couldn't quite believe it at first - what are the odds on that? Pretty slim I think! It was great to catch up with someone I hadn't seen for the best part of sixteen years and no doubt our paths will be crossing more often in this small and knitted community of ours.

Another highlight to the day was listening to Stuart Mills aka Ultra Stu, talk about the power of positive thinking (winner of Lakeland 100 and many many other races: www.ultrastu.blogspot.co.uk). An inspirational demonstration on the power of your mind during training and racing was pretty much summed up in "Its not pain, it's a challenge!". I would have loved to have been able to have had a post TORQ day pint with Ultra Stu and the rest of the gang, but I had to go directly to Heathrow airport to catch a work flight to Sao Paulo! Where, I might add, it was a balmy if a little humid 26C.

So as we head into April it seems winters long claws are losing their grip, just in time for my second race - Virgin London Marathon. I'm doing some last minute fund raising this week, so if I know you, expect an email in your inbox shortly! I'm also hoping to show my support for an initiative set up by an old work colleague - The Good Gym. An inspirational team of volunteer runners doing good through their running you can visit their website at www.goodgym.org. I'll be getting a vest printed up and hope to be running their colours for the race. More to come on that shortly!

Before you know it the last signs of winter will have melted away and we'll be wiping dead midges from our sweaty brows. I think though, even when the BBQ is lit, the beers are being fetched from the cooler and shoulders peel from the suns ferocity, there will still be a part of my brain that will hark back to the sight and sound of Toby Froschauer trying to tell me to get the jacket off his backpack. With his jaw frozen solid in -20C winds and knee deep in ever changing snow drifts, it went something like: 

T  - "Gurgh jagud"
M - "What?!"
T  - "Gurgh jagud!"
M - "What??!!"
T  - "Ag!"
M - "Bag?"
T  - "Urr, rag!"
M - "Your bag"
T  - "Gurgh jagud un bag"
M - "Oh, your jacket, your bag?"
T  - "Urrrr!!!"

Ahh the joy! Bring on next winter. Happy running!