Five in a day!

I think this may be some kind of record. On Saturday, I am going to do five different races in five different places, starting with a 5k parkrun in Ilford and finishing with the British Heart Foundation Midnight Half-Marathon in Brighton. In between, I’m going to do the Brentwood Running Festival 10k, South London Harriers’ five-mile Gibb cross country and the 8.5k Night Fright event over the Surrey Hills. All this will be bookended by the Woolwich Tunnel marathon on Friday and a return to Brentwood for Go Beyond’s marathon there on Sunday – which I’m sure will be absolute torture.

 

Return to Orgreave

Three races in five days took me under the psychological 400-mile barrier last week, and although I wasn't fast in any of them there was more life in the legs than I've felt for a good few weeks. The 30th Rowbotham's Round Rotherham 50 (actually, it's 81.1km and I'm claiming the extra km) found every niggle, ache, injury and weakness from my bunioned toe to my arthritic neck. But I got round in a little over 11 hours, making it back for cottage pie and peas before it got dark - something I wouldn't have managed to do before 2009, when they ran this event in December, everyone but the regular diehards got lost at least once and the mud was legendary. I've done it three times now; this one was in pleasant sunshine and the mud was nothing compared with what I've seen on other events during this sodden summer that don't have reputation of Rotherham.

The circuit takes you through the opencast wasteland that is Orgreave, scene of the biggest confrontation between miners and police during the 1984-85 miners' strike. The same police force that fabricated statements, lied and tried to cover up the truth about Hillsborough was involved in exactly the same activities over Orgreave. I remember interviewing miners at the time who had been beaten senseless by the police and subsequently charged with riot and other offences (one joked bitterly about 'criminal damage to a truncheon'). They were all acquitted because the police evidence was found to be, at best, 'unreliable'.

The other two races were both 10-milers: the RAF Henlow road race, celebrating its 60th anniversary, and the Daventry Road Runners inaugural event. Given the way I've felt lately, times of 77.38 and 84.31 respectively felt positively pacy.

Three-quarters there

With the Lakeland 100, the Trans Britain stage race, the Run24 24-hour event, the LDWA 100 and the Great Barrow Challenge all out of the way, things should have been getting easier. Instead, I'm struggling to find the physical and mental stamina to keep going at the moment. Apart from anything else, this is all so damn time-consuming!

I've learnt that it's a lot less difficult motivating yourself for the big ones than it is to keep on going, clocking up the miles week after week - particularly when, instead of getting fitter and faster, I'm getting more fatigued and slower because there's not enough rest and recuperation time. Yesterday's LDWA Founders Challenge, on a beautiful autumn day in the Surrey Hills, was a case in point. I'd tried to run a fast parkrun the day before - in an attempt to prove to myself that I still can, as much as anything else - and I paid for it in my legs and overall weariness levels. By the time I reached the first checkpoint after eight miles, I felt shattered.

My mental tiredness was reflected in the fact that I'd managed to forget both my watch and my phone. The phone at least would have come in handy to let people know that I was running late when it took me more than two hours to drive the 16 miles across London from Sutton to Holloway on my way back. I could have run it in less time.

Still, I have knocked another 95 miles off the 2012 since I last wrote here: the Round Ripon 35, the Nottingham Ultra 50k, Saturday's parkrun and the Founders Challenge. More than three-quarters of the way there: 460 miles to go.

2012 miles done, 555 still to go

I blame my cousin, Jean Philip. As well as being faster than me at the Paris marathon in April – his first – he asked me if the 2012 miles I was planning on running in 2012 was just in events. In a sudden rush of blood to the head (this was in Paris, after all) I said yes. If I’d answered no, I’d have hit my target on Sunday, on the penultimate mile of the Ealing half marathon, the day after my birthday and with three months to spare. As it is, I still have 555 miles worth of events to go.

At the moment, these comprise four ultras, nine marathons, one 25-miler, two half marathons, three 10-milers, one 10k, one 6k (dressed as Santa Claus) and 12 5ks. That still leaves me almost a marathon short of the full distance despite taking up every weekend (both days) and a fair sprinkling of weekdays besides between now and 2013. 

And if that isn’t worth a couple of quid in my charity collecting tin, I don’t know what is.

http://www.justgiving.com/StevePlattTeachAfrica

http://www.virginmoneygiving.com/StevePlatt

Many thanks to everyone who has donated already.

Please don't piss in the showers

The second two days of the Great Barrow Challenge were no quicker than the first two but my legs felt less tired each day and today I managed a more respectable 1hr 46mins half marathon on Hackney Marshes. They've got smart new changing rooms to go with the world's largest assemblage of football pitches (80-odd at the last count) on the Marshes, so it's all very different from the cold showers and spartan changing rooms of days gone by. Sunday league football will never be the same again.

They seem to have skimped on the toilets, though, unless they've hidden them somewhere. The men's toilets to which all the signs pointed had spaces for just two standing and two sitting. I suspect the showers are being used for more than washing.

1,437 miles done; 575 to go.

Kilometre 2012

I've just finished the second of four marathons in four days in the Great Barrow Challenge. This is Barrow in Suffolk, so a kerbstone counts as a climb round here. Not that you'd know it from the way I've laboured up the slightest incline. The legs that carried me up and down mountains last week could barely manage to walk the final few miles of the course yesterday, when I took five and a half hours to finish and was seriously doubting my ability to complete this week's event.

A good night's sleep (lights out before the football had finished) made today's marathon more bearable but an easy five hours on the flat still took more out of me than five hours over Pen-y-Ghent this time last week. I've made a mental note to factor in a lot more recovery time when I've got this 2012 miles in 2012 thing out of the way.

Speaking of which, I've now done 1,371 miles. I passed 2,012 kilometres somewhere around Kendal on day four of the Trans Britain last week. I've a feeling that it was probably in that slurry-filled farmyard where the farmer had parked his trailer so tightly against the stile that the only way to get over the fence was by clambering onto the trailer and jumping off it into the field on the other side. When I landed, the ground was so wet and churned up by cows that I sank halfway up to my knees. That place will forever hold a fond spot in my memory as Kilometre 2012.

Third in the Trans Britain

This year was my second entry to the Trans Britain stage race, and since there were a couple of other competitors returning for a second time, including twice winner Paul Oliver, the organisers must be doing something right. That ‘something’ includes some of the finest off-road running you can find in the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales and Clwyd hills, along with great food from Nick the resident chef and always-excellent facilities at the overnight campsites. This year’s special treat was a bathroom, no less, with seemingly limitless hot water, at the day two campsite overlooking Ullswater.

There weren’t the hurricanes blowing in from the Atlantic of the previous two years, although the descent from a cloud-shrouded Pen-y-Ghent got a bit hairy with some of the gusting winds. But there was plenty of rain, swollen rivers and mud (along with the occasional shot of sunshine and a glorious double rainbow) to remind you that this is a long way from a boring urban run. The race covers 156 miles in six days, carrying all your own gear (apart from a tent) and taking in half a dozen substantial peaks along the way.

Favourite moment? Storming down from Rydal fell like a kamikaze mountain goat for a ridiculous sprint finish that saw three of us separated by just 10 seconds after five hours of mountain running.

That leg had special significance for me because I had to cut it short two years ago to lead an injured fellow runner off Helvellyn. With visibility down to a few metres and the temperature having plummeted likewise, it was no time to take chances. I got a time penalty for my pains, which certainly cost me third place overall in that year’s event and probably cost me second. This year, in a much faster field, I held on for third in an overall time of 34 hours 13 minutes 04 seconds. To say I’m chuffed would be one hell of an understatement.