Alastair Humphreys » Marathons

Britain’s most brutal race

Al Humphreys — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:47:57 +0000

I’m fond of adventures close to home. I also enjoy gruelling challenges. There is generally a perception that the two are not compatible. Many people, myself included, have done ultramarathons around the world. But you shouldn’t need to travel far to have a miserable time!

So I was pleased to receive an email from Scott Gilmour telling me about a 268 mile ultramarathon here in Britain. Get involved!

The Spine is a non-stop, 268 mile, winter mountain marathon that encompasses the entire Pennine Way. The course features over 30,000 feet of ascent, and covers some of the most challenging terrain found in England. The Pennine Way is a notoriously challenging trail in good conditions. In winter it will test even the most disciplined.

There are 3 classes of entry Elite (6 Days), Open (7 Days) and the 100 mile Challenger (70 hours). As this is a non-stop race you are master of your own destiny. For details on the different classes visit the race website here:

www.thespinerace.com

We decided to organise the race as there was space on the UK circuit for a race such as this. Britain has one of the world’s best ultra-marathon calendars and some truly innovative and challenging events. If we can add something to this we would be very proud.

Entries for the 268 mile race close at midnight (GMT) on the 16 December 2011.

Kind regards,

Scott Gilmour

Race Director

The Spine: Britain’s most brutal race

M: +447538083177

E: email hidden; JavaScript is required

Thoughts on Running Across the Sahara

Al Humphreys — Sun, 29 May 2011 10:53:54 +0000

“But I know solitude. Three years in the desert have taught me its taste. What is frightening is not the consuming of youth out there in that mineral landscape, but the perception that far away from you the whole world is growing old. The trees have formed their fruit, the earth has brought forth its wheat, the women are already lovely. The season is moving on, you want to hurry home… The season is moving on, and you are trapped far away… And the good things of the earth are slipping between your fingers like the fine sand of the dunes.”
- Antoine St.Exupery, ‘Wind, Sand and Stars‘

It was not the normal Moroccan travel experience. I drank no mint tea, enjoyed no Moroccan cuisine, and was not even invited to look around a carpet shop. For a week I ate only British food. Food that I had carried all the way from home to eat in Morocco.
Yet I still value that brief week in Morocco as one of the most rewarding travel experiences of my life. But what was this strange cultural vacuum I was in? What was I doing?

Well, mostly, I was running. Running through the Sahara desert. I had traveled to Morocco to take part in the grueling Marathon des Sables, the Marathon of the Sands. The MdS, as it is known, boasts that it is “the toughest race on Earth.” I don’t know if that is true. I do know that it felt pretty tough to me! Roughly speaking it involves running six marathons, in six days, through the Sahara desert, carrying all your own kit.

So this madcap race across Morocco’s Sahara desert was undoubtedly a physical challenge. But why do I remember it as such a vivid travel experience?

Travel is many things to many people. It can also be many different things to one person too. There are journeys to unknown lands that help you learn to know yourself (the Eat, Pray, Love-type journey). There are journeys that teach you about different places and help you to see your own culture with fresh eyes (the End-To-Prejudice-And-Mistrust journey). And there are the forays into landscapes so staggeringly unlike anything you have ever known that you feel awestruck, humbled, and very, very privileged to be alive and in a position to travel.

The Sahara desert stoked this type of fire in belly. Reveling in the silence (for although it is a race I found myself mostly alone) I would sing loudly as I trotted across shimmering gravel wadis. I raised my arms aloft as I crested dunes and jebels and whooped at the gigantic, empty wonderfulness of it all. Steinbeck wrote, “Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, at the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet.” Surely being filled with the glory of nature is a valid, worthwhile reason to travel as well.

Daybreak in the desert is a delight. Waking in a sleeping bag as the silhouettes of the sands slowly emerge from the blackness. Stretching your legs out over the soft sand and languidly watching a faint pink blush wash across the sky. Standing up, pulling on shorts, shirts and trainers, shoving your sleeping bag into the small backpack that doubled as your pillow, and being completely ready for the day. Simplicity, minimalism, reductionism, and a landscape so basic it could have been designed by a Zen master as a perfect clinic for de-toxing and de-stressing people from the mad, hurly burly of our modern lives.

I boiled tea in a small pan over a tiny fire of desert thorns and dry roots. I re-used last night’s teabag (weight was so critical in this race that I had brought just seven tea bags for my seven days: quite a sacrifice for a tea-drinking Englishman).

And then we were off, running through the shimmering silence. It need not be running, of course. I just happened to be running. This piece is about the place, not the pace.

The midday temperature in the desert was cruel. It thumped my head, sucked every ounce of moisture and energy from my limbs, and it required every ounce of my stubbornness to keep on running. I was made very aware of how ill-suited humans are to the atavistic harshness of the desert.
This cruelness made the beauty of the desert all the more surprising. The crisp crest lines of the dunes were pristine. I loved the changing colors of the sand, so cold in the morning but untouchable -furnace hot- just a few hours later.

The setting sun burnished the dunes a beautiful molten color. As the heat ebbed from the day, so too the reds and oranges would seep from the sand. The sky darkened. The first stars began to shine. Then quickly, much more quickly than at home, it would be night. Wander away from the tiny flames of the runners’ tiny camping stoves and the night would envelop you in blackness.

Tired from running a marathon that day and inspired/daunted at the thought of ticking another one off tomorrow, I sat in the still-warm sand and stared up at the impossibly black sky. Gradually, as though rewarding patience and stillness, my eyes adjusted to take in more stars than you can imagine if you have never visited a place with no moisture, cloud or light pollution in the sky.
Occasional satellites marched steadily across the heavens, a reminder that somewhere, out there, far from the remote isolation of the desert, was the rest of the human race and the 21st Century.
As I gazed upwards, munching high-energy nuts and cereal bars carried with me from England, a shower of meteors burst above me. My legs ached, my feet hurt, and I was hungry and dirty. I made my wish upon those shooting stars and I realized how lucky I was to be out there in that desert.
Of course it would be nice to experience Moroccan culture, eat local food, maybe even meet a Moroccan person! But that is for a different trip. The desert was the slice of Morocco that I was experiencing right then. There is so much variety out there, so many new experiences. And all of them, once you have walked out your front door, count equally as ‘Travel’.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
- Louis MacNeice

This piece first appeared in the Huffington Post

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How to Train for an Ultramarathon

Al Humphreys — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 09:20:21 +0000

How to Train for an Ultramarathon (or a Marathon or a Fun Run).

I usually shirk from “how to” posts, particularly when I am not an expert. But I had a conversation recently with a fit, young guy who had run a marathon (in a respectable 4 hours) but was ridiculously awestruck that I had run the famous Marathon des Sables ultramarathon. I tried to persuade him that anyone who can finish a marathon can step up to an ultramarathon (swap, if you like, the words ‘marathon / ultramarathon’ with ‘half marathon / marathon’ or ‘5k fun run / half marathon’).

I ran the London marathon a couple of years ago in a time of 2 hours 58 minutes. I was really pleased with this. I had trained well and the race day went to plan too. If I ran it again I could probably lop a few minutes off my time, but I don’t really feel the need to do it again. I made my 3 hour target and I ran pretty much to my full genetic potential.

Unusually for me I did a lot of research into training methods, diet and so on prior to my marathon. I distilled what worked for me here. For a good summary of cheap, effective race nutrition click here. In terms of training for a marathon you need to get good at three things:

1. Running fast
2. Running far
3. Running far, fast

You can probably add two more helpful categories:

1. Remaining injury free and supple: stretching, yoga, pilates. Definitely all very helpful, but I can never be bothered with any of them
2. Learning to suffer. Being fit is easy. It’s being hard that’s hard.

When I decided to run a sub 3-hour marathon the prospect seemed daunting. The mistake in my thinking was one I am for ever banging on about on this blog: looking at the end result, not the first tiny little step I needed to move me in the right direction. All you actually need to do is put on your trainers and go for a run.

But that is easier said than done: once the initial enthusiasm of training has worn off the only way I can keep training is by having a schedule to stick to. I printed one from the internet and stuck to it religiously. It is the only way I can stop myself believing my own excuses on those dark, cold, rainy mornings, turning over for an extra snooze, and then despising my feebleness for the rest of the day.

My training schedule was roughly the same each week, though the duration and the intensity of the sessions increased steadily. You need to do three basic types of run.

1. A slow run, two or three times a week, of gradually increasing mileage. Speed doesn’t matter: it’s about getting miles in your legs and growing accustomed to spending a long time running.
2. Once or twice a week is speed work: hill-reps (yuk), intervals round the track (yuk), bleep tests (yuk) etc.
3. Once a week is a long, fast run, building up towards being able to do long distances at your race pace. This is the most important part of marathon training and the least important for ultras.

And that’s it. Repeat all this for a few months (with a blend of increasing distances and judicious resting) and you’ll nail a marathon.

So what about the enthusiastic but doubtful fellow I met at the start of this blog? He has already run his marathon. How can he turn that into his first ultramarathon?
Putting it very simply, all that is required is more of the same. You need more mental determination to train for a longer period of time. Your long runs will build up to being longer, and I would suggest doing longish runs on consecutive days, which is not traditional in normal marathon training. Speed work is less important than long hours on your feet.

Weekends yomping through the hills carrying a heavy rucksack will be invaluable- for building strength and endurance and toughening your feet, but also for teaching you to suffer, to persevere, and not only to survive but also to thrive when you are tired, hurting and miserable. For you should not underestimate the pain factor.
During one ultra my team-mate, who should remain nameless (Andy) had such terrible chafing between his buttocks that he was in agony. The only remedy we could think of involved him squashing a banana to puree and shoving it up his bum! Desperate measures for desperate times. Do not underestimate either the power of comedy. I was also having a tough time until my nameless mate (Andy) was forced to shove a banana up his bum. I laughed till I cried and my pains were temporarily forgotten.

And that’s about it. Train long and slow, get decent shoes fitted, stretch more often than you can be bothered to stretch, be prepared to suffer, and find a way to laugh about it. If you can do that you can do the Marathon des Sables.

Video: 24 hour Winter Mountain Bike Race

Al Humphreys — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:08:31 +0000

“50% icy terror, 50% fun,” was how I described my first lap of the Strathpuffer…

The Strathpuffer is a 24 hour winter mountain bike race in northern Scotland. I rode it as the first event in my year of microadventures.

I was in a team of four (team howies) and, in between laps, did a bit of filming. Trying to do “participatory video” is frustrating, but an essential compromise so long as I want to be involved in the things I am filming.

There is great scope for making a superb little Strathpuffer film. The variety of terrain and exhausted but determined riders makes for a great story. Unfortunately I was a) riding, b) limited only to filming one little bit of the course and c) knackered.

The Strathpuffer had everything that I look for in an endurance race: it is tough, it’s a bit daft, it’s in a beautiful landscape, and the organisers and competitors are all friendly.

The tannoy system at the main tent blasted out music throughout the race. The song I have used on this video -Springsteen’s ‘No Retreat, No Surrender’- was playing at the start of the race and seemed apt for 24 hours of icy, muddy, dark idiocy.

Patagonian Expedition Race

Al Humphreys — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:22:40 +0000

The Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race, the world’s “wildest and most
respected eco-adventure challenge”, starts this week – and a British team of adventurers is competing. I’m jealous!

The ‘Last Wild Race’ is a wilderness multisport event and the route will remain a secret until 24 hours before the event.

Find out more here.