A few months back, a few of us entered the Dorset leg of the Endurancelife Coastal Trail Series. The idea of intermittently entering for this sort of masochistic thing every year or two, is that it provides an incentive to get off the sofa and lose a few excess pounds in the training. Unfortunately…circumstances, workload and general laziness meant that I actually didn’t do anything resembling training until under two weeks ago. The few last minute short hill runs I squeezed in, only managed to strain my under-used legs. So…just rocking up yesterday to randomly attempt a 15 mile offroad race with c2300 feet of climb, graded ‘severe’ in trail race parlance…what could go wrong?
Actually it all went surprisingly well. I managed to complete the race and even vaguely enjoyed it. The course was muddy and rather gruelling with some insanely steep hills, but was made very bearable by the surroundings; the route went along the tops of the fabulous cliffs between Weymouth and Lulworth Cove. With the waves crashing into the shore far below and the sea breeze in your lungs, it wasn’t too hard to blot out what your legs were trying to tell you.* I am lucky to live in such an incredible area, the half marathon was a useful reminder of this.
Fellow sufferers Andy, Ian and Alice also survived the experience. Alice entered the ’10k’ race, which amusingly turned out to be over 14km in length. The race organisation was very impressive and professional; I think there might have been as many as a thousand runners in different distance categories.
Photos by Alice, Heather and myself.
*But I’m hearing them now…
