Ultra Concerns

This week I have been in a state of slightly raised anxiety.

My fingers have been automatically making internet enquiries of the forecast, every day, several times a day, for that area of Berkshire and Wiltshire where I’ll be doing my run this Sunday. 

The wind speed (quite gentle); the direction (headwind nearly all the way); the gusts (not quite enough to fling me over) and the humidity (very drippy). This is the information that  I’m obsessed with, let alone the overall temperature (high teens to early twenties) and the precipitation probability (unlikely). I can’t change them and so, at the end of my taper period when nothing else can be done with ‘me’, I have free rein to fret over those uncontrollables, and I have been fretting.

I’ve also been having those dreams where I’ve forgotten everything; where I’m knee deep in the ‘slough of despond’ having brought the wrong type of shoes; where I’m lost, and the mists have descended; where the place we’re staying in, the oddly named Crown And Horns, turns into a scene from An American Werewolf In London; where … oh you get the picture.

I did a small three-mile run today, my first since last Saturday. My legs had felt achy and twitchy before and I felt sluggish during it. I had to keep telling myself that all my runs after a few days’ break feel awful, and it had no bearing on how I would do on Sunday. Now, sitting here, my legs feel fine, ironically more relaxed than before the run.

I am excited too of course. I wouldn’t have put all this work in if I didn’t want to do it after all. Or is that really the case? Did I want to do it? Or did I just want to say that I’ve done it? Two very different things. 

The thing that slower runners like me have to think about, is that we’re rarely looking for ‘times’. It’s a case of completion. Can we get to the end without dying of exhaustion? There are no bells and whistles about speed and pace and in-race strategy. It’s a pure battle of the will to keep those legs moving somehow, that tortoise shell shifted slowly along to reach the finish line.

The reality is that I’ll enjoy parts of it, and I’ll hate parts of it, and I’ll surprise myself by suddenly enjoying it again after being in the hatred zone. I’ve had a look at the start list and, for my Day 2: 50K section, there are only three hundred odd starters. Surprisingly there are well over a thousand takers for the 100K option and a wide range of age categories. I’m very impressed, and not at all tempted. 

I think, given the numbers, that I will be running most of it by myself. Fellow blogger and runner, the old man in lycra, will meet me en route to keep me going for the final fifteen kilometres. That’s assuming nothing untoward has happened to him because he’s helping another friend to get to the end of her 100K effort the day (or the night) before. I’ve been following his blog for a while, and it was his descriptions of this race that made me want to give it a go in the first place. It will be so lovely to catch up with him in person.

I’ve just called the Crown and Horns to book dinner for the Saturday night, and she didn’t sound strange at all. On top of that, she said she’d make sure that I get a room with a bath.

It’s all going to be okay.