North Downs Way 50
The North Downs Way 50 is a 50 mile point to point run along the North Downs Way national trail from Farnham to Knockholt Pound.
As you can probably tell from the name of this blog I am pretty familiar with the North Downs Way and knew all but the first 2 miles of the NDW50 route. With this in mind I was targeting a finish time between 10 hours and 10 hours 30 minutes. To achieve this I had planned to hit the notorious Box Hill at about the 4 hour mark or an average of 10 min per mile pacing for the first 24 miles. After that I would give myself enough of a lead to drop a couple of minutes per mile over the hillier section of the course.
The race started at 8am and everything was going to plan for the first 12 miles until I started to hit a bad patch, this I think was caused by the fact apart from one slow marathon, I have not ran beyond 14 miles for the last 2 months so my current fitness is severely lacking and also the fact having not ran it for a while I forgot how steep a climb it is from this point up to St Martha’s. This meant I was really struggling along and as well as being down to a bit of a run/walk strategy I was feeling physically sick. Being able to visualise the entire route and realise just how far it was to go and some of the hill climbs to come made the situation even worse, sometimes ignorance is bliss!
By the time I got past this section I had also got a lot of sand in my shoes from the area around St Martha’s, now I suffer from blisters at the best of times but coupled with the sand it just made the situation worse, which was a bit of a shame as I was using the Injinji socks sent out to me by Sam Robson (@stupid_runner) to try out, but they can’t be blamed when you have a load of shite inside your shoes.
So after struggling along and a pitstop at Ranmore Common with my crew for the day Max (@maximisemylife) to wash and dry my feet and a change into the usual Hilly X-Trail socks I hit Box Hill way behind my 4 hour target and was more towards 5 hours. I continued on but after the second climb at Colley Hill I was ready to quit, the only good point on the horizon was the run down to Reigate Hill and a bit of banter with regular training partner Lee (@leebriggs9).
By the time I reached Reigate my stomach had stopped doing cartwheels and I was able to eat a bit more, the problem with the aid stations is there is a lot of nice food there but I never feel like I can eat any of it so I had plenty of fruit and a bit of a pork pie that Lee had ordered in especially.
The next aid station I would hit would be Caterham, which I was really looking forward to as I knew Zoe and the kids would be there waiting, by this time I knew there was no way I would finish anywhere under 11 hours so decided to take it a bit easier with a few more walking breaks and a quick picnic at Caterham with the kids which is one of the benefits of ultras, you can’t do things like that when running a 10k! I was also pleased to see the Caterham aid station had been upgraded from the water only pit stop I volunteered at last year to a full on aid station with food, balloons and jelly & ice cream (which went down really well).
Once I left Caterham all that was left to do was take a slow run/walk the 12 miles to the finish line for a finish time of 11 hours 48 minutes. A disappointing time but I think I had over estimated what I was capable of doing after not running much since the Thames Path 100.