12 Marathons – 12 Months

Fairlands Valley Challenge

Well yesterday was a milestone with marathon number seven. I now have less races to do than I have done, which is a great feeling. The Fairlands Valley Challenge is organised by the Fairlands Valley Spartans AC and has been running for a number of years. Similar to the Cheltenham event last month this is a trail run but whereas Cheltenham had route markers (for all the good they did me) this was a completely self-navigated route. Several distances were available, both for walkers and runners, with each being a slightly different route so following someone else was not a good idea unless they were on the 26 mile course!! The instructions however were very clearly written with enough detail for you to orient yourself with landmarks along the way. You did have to keep track of where you’d got up to though as trying to subsequently find your place in the list was quite a task. We were also given maps but apart from occasionally using it to get a rough idea of how far round I was I pretty much relied entirely on the written instructions.

As with Cheltenham, you had a route card to be stamped at each checkpoint (which were also water/feeding stations) and you could effectively turn up and start at your leisure but they did have two organised mass starts, one at 9:30 for walkers and one at 10:30 for runners, which was the preferred option to make the timekeeping easier. After a few miles everyone seemed to settle into similar paced groups, which helped with the navigation and encouragement. This time around I managed to stay on course 100% and each checkpoint distance was almost spot-on with what my Garmin was telling me. The checkpoints were almost like mini cafes with a selection of sweets, biscuits and homemade bread pudding! as well as water & squash. This time around I didn’t stop the watch for the checkpoints so my time of 4h 43m was total time out on the route which is an improvement on last month. This was mainly due to the terrain being much more “runnable” as it used a lot of byways, bridleways and tracks that allowed us to keep the pace up – with the inevitable stop-start every so often to read the map etc…

I found this to be a very well organised event and one I would certainly do again. The free barbecue at the end was definitely a welcome sight after crossing the line too!

JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge

Last week I participated in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge, an annual event in Battersea Park that is now in it’s 34th year! The race is part of a series that takes in all of the major cities of the world culminating in a championship final for all of the best teams. This year Singapore is the championship host. Teams are made up from companies all over the UK (though mainly those which have staff in London) and I have captained the team for my employer for the last 3 years. This is an all-ability and the course is only 5.6km in total so it makes for a pleasant jog in the park if you can negotiate the crowds. This year’s event attracted over 25,000 participants from over 622 companies and has for the last few years been split over two evenings to accommodate the sheer numbers but even so, the 13,000 runners we had on Thursday night were still packed in pretty tight!

This is the first year that they have also introduced a wave start, grouping runners into time pens allowing the faster ones off in advance and gradually letting each group go in intervals. This has no bearing on times since it’s a fully chip-timed race which makes life a lot easier for the team captains who originally had to collate everyone’s times as reported by the runners themselves and since this year one company fielded over 1000 runners that would have been no mean feat!

In the end I managed the course in 26:00 exactly, which is shy of the 21:00 I was hoping for but to be honest I could comfortably do with shedding about half a stone at the moment! Anyways, marathon number 7 is this coming Sunday and is another off-road trail run so hopefully I’ll sweat a few pounds off then… Other than that, training is going ok – although probably a bit lax compared to earlier in the year but the plan is to go for a PB in Berlin in September as I have a six week gap between races so I can get some quality speedwork and distance runs back under my belt. As always, marathon report will be published a day or two after the race so see you next week.