Ultra Running & Reviews

Just got to England after driving to Slovakia to see my son Alex get married to Vladka. It was an epic drive through France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Slovakia & Austria all in a week. We drove a total of 3,500 miles which was a bit of a driving ultra! We really noticed the difference between driving in the UK and driving on the continent. Most of Europe we drove at 70-90MPH on some great roads & only got stopped by one traffic jam for 10 minutes in around 2,200 miles! Back in England the traffic crawled along at 50MPH through endless cones & roadworks with nobody working on them. 

We drove to Lossiemouth beach today and collected shells with the children. It’s a fantastic beach which is popular with the local surfing community. It’s been really warm and sunny & I’m sure looking back on some of the nice things we did today will help me stay strong when things get tough over the jogle fortnight.
It’s been another very long day and it’s not over yet, I’m writing this blog post at 2:30am. Earlier on today we had a large box of goodies delivered from my sponsors Buff UK, they did a fantastic job getting the parcel delivered to my hotel room in Scotland and a day early. They sent me some shorts, t-shirt, loads of great Buff head wear, socks, tattoo’s, stickers etc. The new designs are really nice, I love the new peak Buff’s which are a lot more comfortable than a cap & pack very small. I’ll do a review on all this gear once it’s had a thorough test over 870 miles in all weathers. I’ll also be testing some gear I got from Brooks. Some of the clothing you see getting good reviews falls to bits during ultra runs, it’s a great test bed for gear as it gets the kind of wear most runners would take weeks or even months to do in a day or two. I recently tested a North Face base layer which almost wore out on a single 90 mile run, yet a well known running magazine gave this top 5 out of 5 in a review. Sometimes I think they must just run round the block in the gear they get to test & if it feels OK give it a good review!
We’ll be meeting Rory later today to join the other runners on the bus to head up to John O’Groats for the start of the race on Friday 30th at 6am.
That’s all for now my next post will be from the bus tomorrow night.

Happy running!

Well it’s been a busy old day today. We went to visit sponsors Soreen this morning for a factory tour, we had a really good time. The kids loved it seeing how their favourite snack was made. The process which they use has been more or less the same for 50 years! Like most parents these days we try not to feed the children any junk food & it was good to see Soreen using proper wholesome ingredients to make the famous loaves. They really are a passionate bunch & really believe in the product.
We left the factory around dinner time with the car loaded with boxes of Soreen, boxes of the new Go bars, t-shirts for us all, running vests for me, cups etc to drive up to Premier inn at Elgin, Scotland. It was fine when we set off but the further north we drove the wetter it got. The mountains look stunning with the snow still covering the majority of the higher peaks.
We’ll stay at the hotel for two nights before meeting Rory on the bus to drive the rest of the way up to John’O Groats for the 870 mile run down to Lands End.
It’s been a bit touch n go for me over the past three weeks after damaging my knee. I went to visit Amjad Butt who used to be the physio for the Indian cricket team. He’s been kind enough to sponsor me and he told me I had patella femoral syndrome which basically means my knee cap is rubbing on my femur bone, a common over use injury in runners. He said with 6 weeks complete rest I’d make a full recovery. I said I have 2 weeks then a 870 mile race. To cut a long story slightly shorter he made the knee much better in the very short time available by using ultrasound, manipulation, taping & TENS plus an intensive exercise plan for me at home which took 4 hours a day to do. I can honestly say without Amjad’s help I probably would have to pull out of the race. Maybe it was asking too much of my body to run months of 180pw. The good news was I have zero wear in the knee joint itself which considering the miles run since Christmas is remarkable.
The problem now is I’ve not run at all for 3 weeks so I don’t know if I can run at all until Saturday when the race starts. I’m either going to be out on the first day which is a run of 63 miles or I may be ok. I’m hoping not to have lost too much fitness over the last three weeks, gym work on my upper body & loads of core exercise has kept me reasonably fit. I’m hoping to get some training effect kicking in for the first couple of days before my body starts to break down, this should spur me on a bit.
I’ll try to keep this blog up to date for as long as I can but it’s difficult writing the updates on my iPhone & it has a limited spell checker so some of the spelling will be a bit random!

Happy running!

Welcome to my new website, over the next few weeks I’ll be adding loads of new kit reviews & race reports.