Monday 26 January 2015

Mamot Dark Mountains



The Mamot Dark Mountains (http://www.marmot-dark-mountains.com/) is a Mountain Marathon for pairs taking place overnight in January. Obviously the weather overnight in January can be really tough, but that is the beauty of the event, it is a real test of mountain ability and navigation.

Last years event was in the Peak District and I was in the winning team with Tom Gibbs. This years event was taking place in the Howgill Fells. I was running with Jim Mann and we were expecting 10 hours of hard running and navigation. With two other top teams  (Kim Collison running with Adam Perry and Tim Higginbottom running with Alex Pilkington) it was going to be hard to win again. The weather this year was actually very kind. Patches of snow, but dry and a bit windy but nothing too bad.

Kim and Adam had a storming run to easy win in a time of 8 hours 34mins for the 53 km course with 3000m of ascent. So congratulations to them. I have run with both these two at recent OMM’s and I know how talented and determined they are.

There was something strange with the map at the 3rd control on the elite course. It was in a sheepfold and although it was in the right place the contours all seemed wrong, its altitude seemed to be around 20m higher than it was meant to be. Kim and Adam found it quite quickly, Tim and Alex looked for around 10 minutes found another bit of wall and decided it was not there, whereas me and Jim eventually found it after 35 minutes searching (including going back to three different attack points and trying again). We certainly know that slope well!

After that I started to struggle and the next three hours was really bad. Jim was brilliant and just accepted I was doing my best and carried my pack up the hills. But I am really disappointed. I thought I was running well again and it is hard to realise this is not the case. I do actually wonder if I am good enough to compete at the top any more. However, I always try to look at the positive side of a race so these are:

  1. We actually finished the course with a time of 10 hours 41 minutes. I seriously felt like dropping out at times but as I have said before feeling a bit tired is not an excuse to give up (http://community.berghaus.com/athletes/running-tips-coping-pain/)
  2. After feeling absolutely awful for 3 hours I picked up a bit
  3. I am not injured and got round without doing myself an injury (which is probably surprising considering thenumber of times I fell over
  4.  It was great being out all night with Jim, navigating around the Howgills
Thinking about it I have not done a run longer than 2 hours since the OMM at the end of October. So I guess my body was just not prepared to run this far. 

Below are the before and after photos from Ian Corless (www.iancorless.net). The photos speak for themselves.



Thanks to Shane, Charlie and the team of volunteers for putting on a great event.

Monday 19 January 2015

100,000 Blog Views and Finally Running Well Again



According to the page statistics I am just about to reach 100,000 views of this blog. So thanks to everyone who has had a look, I hope you have enjoyed reading my adventures over the past year.

Here is a list of where people have viewed my blog are from:

Entry
Pageviews
United Kingdom     
81088
United States
8985
France
1353
Germany
777
Ukraine
626
Netherlands
414
Turkey
394
Sweden
378
Moldova
303
Australia
241

I have also had 476,385 views on Google+ but I am not sure how this works!

I have decided to carry on with the blog but I have changed the title as the original one does now not make any sense. So it will now be Steve Birkinshaw’s Running blog. Changing the web address is harder so I will keep this.

After my last blog about getting back to running (http://community.berghaus.com/athletes/back-to-running/) I seemed to go backwards. I did the OMM (http://stevebirkinshaw-wainwright2014.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/omm-2014.html) and a few other longer races and felt exhausted and took ages to recover. My normal resting heart rate was also around 50 beats/minute instead of its usual 40. I rested for 4 weeks and started training again towards the end of December. After 4 good weeks of training my resting heart rate is back to around 40 and I feel like I am running much better and recovering better. I now just need to loose the 7lbs of weight I have put on.