Favourite Wainwirght Fells

Here is a article that can be seen on the Berghaus website where I list my top 10 favourite Wainwright Fells:

http://community.berghaus.com/athletes/steve-birkinshaws-favourite-wainwright-fells/

 It is a very personnel choice. Which good ones have I missed?

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 3^rd 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.

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.

Wainwrights DVD

The DVD of my Wainwrights run is now available to buy from Alistair Lee at Posing Productions who produced the film. To buy the DVD or download a copy go to http://www.posingproductions.com/homepage.php.

There are two versions:
1) The stand alone Wainwrights film. This has the longer version (45mins) plus:  What the Crew Got Up To (16mins) and Steve's post-run interview (7mins).
2) The Wainwrights film as part of the Brit Rock 2014. The has a 31min version plus 3 other long climbing and mountain biking films and two short films.

DVD's are £19.99 and downloads £14.99.

A busy weekend at the Kendal Mountain Festival and Fell Runners Association Annual Dinner

It started on Friday evening with me talking at the Endurance session of the Kendal Mountain Festival (KMF). Having never been to the KMF  before I was amazed how big it was with 1000’s of people around and the Endurance Session at the Town hall full with around 300 people present. First on were the Beeline Britain team who completed an amazing journey in a straight line from Lands End to John O’Groats. The film of their trip “As the Crow Flies” by Ian Burton won the People choice award at the festival and some great clips were shown. Alistair Lee’s film of my Wainwrights run was then shown and I did a Q&A session that seemed to go well.  There was even a collection organised for the MS charities I am raising money for – so thank you for everyone who donated a total of £473 (I have also denoted my appearance fee to these charities).

I went along to the brewery and chatted with a few people but I felt shattered so went for an early night.

I was up early and ran some hill intervals up to Kendal Castle to settle my nerves. First, was an interview with Radio Cumbria then quickly back to the leisure centre for my next talk. This was the Berghaus session and I was on after Leo Holding and Sir Chris Bonnington. Leo talked about the recent death of his climbing partner Sean ‘Stanley’ Leary. Chris then talked about his climb up the Old Man of Hoy with Leo following the recent death of his wife. It was emotional stuff brilliantly presented by these two professionals. To say I was nervous following these two was an understatement. I find it hard public speaking at the best of times but in front of 700 people at the end of such an emotional session was difficult. However, with Shane Ohly doing a great job of introducing me and helping with the Q&A at the end again it seemed to go well. 

After chatting to a few people it was time to leave and head south to Telford. It was a real shame not to have seen more films or talks but I was attending the Fell Runners Association annual dinner and was collecting the Long Distance Award for my Wainwrights run. It was a great night with my club (Borrowdale Fell Runners) ,as usual, collecting lots of trophies. But I struggled to stay with the pace and went to bed early (1am), thinking I was tired due to the stress of the talks. But over the last two days I have been a bit ill with a nasty virus, so it was not surprising I was tired. 

All these presentations about my Wainwrights run have been great and I have a few more to do. But I am looking forward to less of them and more time with my family and hopefully get back to doing some more running.

Photo credit – Stuart Holmes

Coping with the Pain

Here is a short article that can be seen on the Berghaus website where I suggest 10 tips for coping with the pain of ultra-running.

http://community.berghaus.com/athletes/running-tips-coping-pain/

OMM 2014

The Original Mountain Marathon (OMM and previously the KIMM) is a two day mountain navigation event that has taken place since 1968 (https://www.theomm.com/  and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Mountain_Marathon). This year was my 25^th event and 19^th in the prestigious Elite class. Although I have won it 7 times the last time was back in 2009 and I am running out of opportunities to break Mark Seddon’s record of 10 wins. 

Although it is 4 months since I broke the Wainwrights record I am still not back to full speed. Luckily I had got a partner than I knew would be really strong. Adam Perry nearly broke the Lake District 24 hour record (most number of Lake District peaks in 24 hours, which is currently 77) and he has just been getting back to form at the right time. 

I also decided that I would have to go super lightweight. The forecast was OK, windy but not much rain so I went for the Berghaus Vapourlight Hypersmock and Hypertherm. The waterproof trousers were the same material as the Hypersmock and like my pertex gloves were a one off build. 

We decided to drive the two hours over from the Lake District to the Cheviots hills in the morning. Clennel Hall was a great location and registration and car parking easy so we had a relaxed start. Normally the maps at the OMM are great but unfortunately the maps this year were really bad.  Not only were they reduced from 1:40,000 to 1:25,000 the printing quality seemed really bad so it was almost impossible to read the contours. They then only laminated one side so the map gradually disintegrated during the day. 

As soon as we set off I knew I was in for a hard day. Adam jogged up the first climb while I laboured behind him trying to get some shelter from the wind. On 3-4 we decided to follow the fence line and then suddenly behind us most of our main competitors appeared having gone a different route. The Estonian team of Sander Vaher  and Timo Sild gradually pulled away from Oli Johnson and Neil Northrop followed by me and Adam and then Jon Ascroft and Andy Fallas. But just as we approached checkpoint 6 Adam told me the SI dibber, which proves we have been at the checkpoint, had fallen off his wrist somewhere in the 30 minutes since the previous checkpoint. Obviously it had torn off in one of the many falls in the deep heather. This was a bit of a disaster but we carried out hoping we would not be disqualified. We punched the map using the spare pin punch to prove we had been to the checkpoints and knew that the SI boxes at the earlier checkpoints would record the fact that we had been through these. 

There was a tough 400m climb to number 7 and this finished me off. I started to move at a snail’s pace so Adam took my pack and we speeded up a bit. We were lucky to find an unmapped track for most of the way to number 8, but then I had another real bad dip soon after. Oli and Neil caught us up again at number 10, which was great as we could follow them to the last control (11) as that bit of the map was not really map anymore just mush.

At the finish they recorded our time and took our maps with the pin punch marks. They put us in the chasing start for the next day 9 minutes behind Sander and Timo, two behind Oli and Neil and 4 in front of Duncan Archer and Jim Mann who had started a bit earlier and run the whole day by themselves. However, we knew a final decision had not been made so we had the hard job of trying to put in the back of our mind the fact we might be disqualified and prepare ourselves for a hard day 2. 

Camp site selection is often crucial in the OMM. With no heavy rain forecast the key was going to be selecting somewhere away from the wind. This was really strong and forecast to get worse. We found a little gap between some other tents and a few extra stones to reduce the flapping.

We had a comfortable night – we were warm and dry. That is all you can hope for lying on some bubble wrap with a tent flapping around you on a slightly slopping pitch.

My legs felt heavy on the second day and Adam set off looking as strong as the first day. A good route choice meant we reached number 2 the same time as Oli and Neil. But an out and back to number 3 showed that Sander and Timo had extended their lead to 15 minutes. Even with Adam carrying my rucksack again, gradually Oli and Neil pulled away from us, particularly on the rough stuff. We pushed hard to the finish but came in 12 minutes after Sander and Timo and 3 minutes after Oli and Neil after 12 hours of hard racing over two days. Unfortunately Duncan and Jim had had to pull out with an injury.

After some soup, pie and chips we then had a good discussion with the event organisers (the planner and controller) about what they should do about our missing dibber. They trusted that we had been to all the check points on day 1 but could not prove it until the check points were all collected in the next day. They decided to make us non-competitive, although put us down in the results between 2^nd and 3^rd. Despite our persuasion we could not get them to change their minds as it does say in the rules that anyone who looses their dibbers will be disqualified. It is hard when you have pushed it all weekend to be told that it does not count but we accepted that they have a difficult decision to make and appreciated that they came and told us the reasons for it. 

So that is it another OMM finished (16 elite finished, 1 elite n/c finished, 1 elite abandoned due to bad weather, 1 elite retired injured after day 1). Apart from the problems with the map and our dibber I thought it was a good one. I thought Clennel Hall was a great location with a short walk to the start and the finish at the event HQ. The terrain was tough but variable ranging from deep heather and tussocks to fast grass. The elite course was at the hard end but well planned with some good route choice. The wind made the overnight camp fairly wild and hard work when you were running into it but it was mild and there was not much rain.

Congratulations to Sander and Timo and all the other winners. Also thanks to the volunteers and marshals it is great to see some of the same faces every year. Thanks also to Adam for dragging me round and being happy to carry two packs.