The dragon well and truly chewed me up and spat me out. Dragon’s Back Race is a 315km (200mile) multi-day ultramarathon involving 15,500metres of ascent (twice Everest) over 5 days. It starts at Conwy Castle in North Wales and finishes in Llandeilo in the South, traversing all the mountains en route. It is self-navigated and…
Tag: race
November/December Off Season
November After New York Marathon, the plan was a bit of unstructured, fairly low mileage, but basically do what I fancy recovery. I had 3 days of complete rest then the rest of the week went sports massage + yoga, yoga, parkrun + yoga, body pump + yoga. My body was stuffed after New York…
NYC Marathon Training & UK Parkrun Tourism
Returning from South Africa, and following the big build up and hype of Comrades; I had to work on settling back into UK life and regaining some speed. After a week or two fairly chilled and with no structure to training (although from a personal life perspective not remotely chilled!), I returned to UK general…
Prague, Bedfordshire Tri & 6 month summary
26th June – 2nd July Monday: AM – 2160 metre early morning non-wetsuit sea swim. I met a couple of people from a local open water swimming Facebook page at the harbour in Porthcawl. I got myself all togged up in my wetsuit and arrived early. When they turned up, they weren’t wearing wetsuits so…
London Marathon 2017
Sunday, 6 days after the Boston marathon, and after 5 days of no exercise whatsoever, I ran the London marathon for the third time. It wasn’t going to be my first back to back Marathon, and I’ve done them on consecutive days before in multiday ultras so I wasn’t daunted by the prospect but didn’t…
6 weeks out / Finchley 20
Monday: PM – Running club – flat efforts. 2-4-6-6-4-2 min efforts with 30-60 sec recoveries plus warm up and cool down. Painful! 6 miles total. We were told recoveries could be jog, walk, or bend over and puke. So I stood still, allowing max speed on the efforts but no extra mileage given as soon…
Athens Marathon
Most marathon runners vaguely know the story of Pheidippides, the messenger who, as legend would have it ran to Athens to deliver news of the victory at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, and promptly dropped down dead. The Athens Marathon “The Authentic” runs a route from Marathon to Athens. This year, the 34th…
Ironman Wales
First thing, bit of news: since my last blog, I’ve made a bit of a U-turn and I’m going to South Africa after all! More on that to come. But now, race report from Ironman Wales and the weeks before and since. After my last blog and very sensible DNF at the Ridgeway 86 miler,…
Long Course Weekend 2016
This was my 4th time at the Long Course Weekend, and why? Because I love it! It’s one of the highlights of my annual racing calendar, but really really damned hard. This year, I set off alone, the three people I was booked to go with all flaking last minute. I wasn’t surprised and actually…
Greenman Ultra 2015 & 2016
The Greenman Challenge is an ultramarathon of approximately 45 miles around the outskirts of Bristol organised by Ultrarunning Ltd. There’s lots of folklore around Greenman which some runners embrace with dyed green hair – I didn’t notice any this year, but there were a few last year. Instead of pacers, they introduced Time Lords last…
The Unnamed – My first foray into ultraracing
By this point, I had a solid running foundation and was running regular marathons. Once you’ve run a marathon there are a two main stages to go through: the first is “never again”, the second is usually “what next?”, more specifically “do I go further or faster?”. For me, this thought came before I’d even run my first…
Dr G Personal Training 