Wendover Woods 50

You know those annoying race reports where people start by saying they did "NO TRAINING" and had constant illnesses and broken legs, but still bravely fought through a race not only to finish but to break the course record, get a PB, take all the Strava segments, cure long Covid and then get dragged into bed by a prime 39 year old Monica Bellucci.

Well this is going to be a blog just like that.

Apart from of course, the finishing, the course record, the segments and the Covid curing.

I'd entered the 50 slam this year. My results were somewhat mixed. A DNS, A finish, A DNF (and last place to boot) and now this. My "training" had been patchy. Or rather, my general level of running has been patchy over the last two years. Previously, it was enough to

complete these kinds of things by constantly running 50 miles a week with the occasional long run thrown in. But now, getting to 50 seems like an uphill battle.

For nearly a decade, I've seen the familiar look of spewed intestines on Strava, the Wendover Loop. It is a crisscross of trails within a glorious forest. Like all national forests, it's laden with signs telling you to enjoy it. There has been a realisation that being outdoors is good for you.

The setup is really nice. A massive tent in a field with lots of parking and toilets.

There are times in life you need to decide what kind of man you are

There are posh toilets half a mile into the loop, which is good to know. Other than that, the only things to know about the loop are that there are lots of nasty little sharp hills but plenty of gradual downhill sections you can run on. James E mentioned before

if the route were the other way round, it would be unrunnable.

If I can get one loop of this done, I will have done better than at the last event. My vague plan was to run the loops in 2.15/2.30/2.45/3.00/3.15, at least having plenty near the end to slow down. But of course, as Mike Tyson famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they stub their toe on a bastard tree root."

The woods have been taken over by "wellness trails" and signs telling you to enjoy the moment and take it all in. Someone has clocked

that being outdoors is good for you. Makes a nice change from the Keep of the Grass signs. Let's see if I can find joy on lap 5.

I ran with my friend James, who was on for the slam, finishing the three previous 50 milers. We planned to run together until I flaked out or risked him getting under the cut-off.

The first lap went without too much incident, coming in at 10.3 miles in 2.15. 10.3 miles! Haha ha ha. Old (younger) James would have laughed that off as a rounding error, but now new (old) James is worried that's an extra half an hour when we get near the end.

Lap 2 was the same as lap 1, except they seemed to have added a few hills onto the end. I was assured they didn't; it was just my forgetting them. Lap 2 was about 2.30, so I was exactly 40% into my plan, apart from this shoe.

I had a constant stone in the show feel that I deserved for allowing Hoka's to touch my feet again.

I was starting to feel a bit ropey into the third lap. We were still on for a decent time, but I was definitely slowing and had hoped to get this one done in the daylight, but it was looking unlikely. I had run up to 10 miles for some time, and I had run in the dark on a trail this year. I used to do both of those several times a

week.

Looped races have their quirks. It seems you have to have an opinion on which one is better. I like point-to-point races and some looped races. As the third loop was unfolding, I was passing things like an awkward tree stump and the find joy sign and thinking, "It doesn't feel like five

minutes since I last saw that", and you can interpolate that maybe you don't have long left to see those things twice again. But then, as soon as you fixate on something that's to come, it takes fucking ages! Like some weird running Doppler effect.

The third lap took about 3 hours, so we were down 15 minutes on the plan. Although I had a mild timing "we are no way going to finish this" moment at the CP, I was actually feeling pretty good, having run 30 (AKKKTUALLY 31.3 miles). The longest by far since the North Downs 50. James and Drew commented that I looked better at the end of the third loop than I did after the first two, which was nice. And there were still 7 hours to run two laps. That should be possible. Necking a few cups of coke and purple stuff, we wandered out for the 4th loop. It was now completely dark; the woods would have covered any twilight anyway, but the UK were near the end of a two-week period where the sun had forsaken this ground. There was constant cloud cover for a whole fortnight.

My lack of running at night recently was really exposed now. I could not comfortably trot down the easy bits, and James was getting further and further away with each section and waiting for me at the end. I urged him to go off and leave me to it, but he seemed reluctant. It's like in Lord of the Rings, where Frodo could not bring himself to kill the little goblin

thing. That 9-hour epic could have been condensed into two hours if he had just slit his throat in the swamp near the beginning. But for some reason, James could not bring himself to slay this little grunting goblin thing that seemed to have some historical connection to these woods and the sport at a significant risk for his own wellbeing.

Don't get me started on LOTR and Gandalf's Alzheimers. "Ohhh, the eagles! I could have just flown the ring into Mount Doom on the Eagles! Rivers of blood and burned forest and a dead Sean Bean later, I have suddenly realised!"

Anyway

The loop has a checkpoint about halfway in, but you can see it two miles before you are in some twisting of the trail. The first time I saw it about 4 miles in, James was ascending the hill to start the 2-mile trip to the CP. That 2 miles took me ages, and I thought if he was still

waiting for me at the CP, he's an idiot.

Fortunately, he decided not to be an idiot, and he was long gone by the time I staggered in. Phew. At this stage, I was only doing 4 laps; this was going to be longer than 3.30 hours, and there was no way I was doing the last one faster than this. I was no longer running

anything.

I did consider the possibility of cutting the two miles out where the checkpoint was and getting a DQ. Then I could have a DNS/Finish/DNF and DQ for the year, a weird ultra flush. Ultra Flush sounds like a nasty chaffing problem; maybe I don't want to get that.

I'm going to rant about lumenwankers again. Fucking hell. There were a lot of people overtaking me while finishing their last loop. I don't like having people running behind me, so I get out of the way as soon as someone approaches, except sometimes I'd get out of the way. They are still about 100 meters behind with the sun strapped to their face. I

imagine these are the BMW drivers who blind me on country roads at night with their full beams in my face.

I think there is a kid's story somewhere; the quiet little hill goblins just want to potter about in the dark, but then the evil lumenwankers try to burn them out of the forest with their rechargeable beams of death. Whoah this got off track a bit, which is ironical as I didn't really go off track at all in the race. It's all really well signed. James messaged me to

say he was on the last loop, as I still had at least half an hour of this loop left, so it was very wise to ditch me.

I staggered in just under 12 hours. There were a lot of people gunning for the 5 loops in under 12. Near the end, I heard someone stumble and shout BASTARD, FUCK, FUCK, BASTARD or words from a similar corpus. I asked if he was ok, and he said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, I just nearly ended it there... I liked your book!" Dunno how he recognised me; perhaps it was my tiny lumens.

I arrived with Drew, waiting to see if I was up for a lap of sweeping the course markings with him since I'd be the last on the course at this stage. I declined; that loop took 4 hours, and we would not return till sunrise if I went out there. I hung around in the tent for James to finish, which he did amazingly.

Ultimately, this isn't the sort of thing you can just plod round with NO TRAINING. But I'm pleased with my effort; it's been a funny year again. I know I can get back to being able to being able to do this sort of stuff regularly. And maybe then I won't get so fucking grumpy about the fucking Lumenwankers.

RunningandStuff

Wendover Woods 50