Three Peaks Yacht Race training weekend

The multicoloured cliffs of Alum Bay
March 28th saw Martin Indge and I down on the Isle of Wight for a Three Peaks Yacht Race training weekend.

We met the sailors at 1am on Lightning Reflex (the team yacht!) in Cowes and proceeded to talk and catch up over a few cold ones. Getting to sleep at 2:30am was probably not the best preparation for a long Saturday.

After a cold night aboard, I was kicked out of my berth at 7am. I dreamt of bacon butties (as promised by Gary, one of the sailors), but they were not forthcoming (although there seemed to be a lot of activity around the galley). Breakfast consisted of some nice Original Crunchy for me, but Martin mistook my description of us having muesli for breakfast to mean that we were going to eat cold Quaker porridge oats. He chomped valiantly. It didn't look appetising.

We were doing the Junior Offshore Group Nab Tower race. This is a race for offshore yachts from Cowes, round the Nab Tower and back. The Nab Tower is an old fort that was sunk onto the Nab Rock in 1920, lying some 5 miles off the east tip of the Isle of Wight. They built the tower on land, floated it out into position and then sank it. Maybe their marine surveying was not up to today's standards, but the Nab Tower leans at an angle of 3 degrees and hence has the air of a nautical Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The yacht race down to the Nab Tower was fantastic. We were powering along under spinnaker with the boat humming nicely (Lightning Reflex seems to hum when she's going well). Going downwind, everything's calm and you feel like you are going really quickly. Things changed as we turned around the Nab Tower and tacked back to the finish line. We were now going upwind and hanging off the weather rail of the yacht (the rail is the edge of the yacht and the weather rail is the top rail when you're sailing upwind, as opposed to the lee rail which will be the one dipping into the water on the other side), with Lightning Reflex heeling over at 40 degrees. Going upwind is traditionally considered to be harder on the crew than downwind sailing and I was pleased that Martin and I still felt good after a 4 hour pounding in the boat.

Martin and I left the sailors in Cowes and drove over to Yarmouth in the west of the island for a run. By the afternoon, the skies had cleared, though there was still a brisk wind. The running into the wind was hard, but we seemed to be greeted by fantastic views around every corner: the beaches around Totland, the multi-coloured cliffs of Alum Bay, the distant hills of the Isle of Purbeck, The Needles, the south coast of the Isle of Wight sweeping off into the distance. I think we were running pretty well, trotting up all the hills at a nice pace. We covered nearly 20 hills miles in just under 3 hours. The skipper, Geoff, decided this wasn't good enough and told us we'd have to run faster up Snowdon. I think this is good: no room for complacency and he obviously wants to be competitive. For me, it was a training run: getting used to sailing and then running, so I was pleased with how we went (and we actually did OK). We'll get some harder training in before the big event though.


Martin Indge running on the western tip of the Isle of Wight with The Needles behind
A gruesome drive back to Wiltshire and Bristol followed and, feeling somewhat tired on the Sunday, it struck me that a good short sharp little run would be a good way of simulating the Three Peaks Yacht Race. I thus put in 9 miles along the Portishead coast path. It was another beatiful evening, with the sun setting over the Holm Islands with Exmoor in the distance. It's going to be nice getting out to sea again. The Bristol Channel is going to be a good Three Peaks training ground for us. We'll be able to sail to Cardiff and do the South Glamorgan coast path or go running in the Portishead / Clevedon areas after a day out at sea in my yacht. First things first though, there's some more hill training to be done.....

Lake District training weekend

March 22nd saw Tom and I out on our inaugral Old County Tops training weekend of the year (this might be my only Old County Tops recce this year depending on how things work out). Tom is my Old County Tops running partner. We've won the race two years on the trot and we're going to do our best for the hat trick.

The goal of the day was to recce some of the alternative lines of the race route and to cement our knowledge of the rest of the route. We were out for seven and a half hours and we probably found one better line. However there were four or five places where we decided that we weren't executing the known route very well, so we'll work on that before race day.

For me, it wasn't just about the out and out recce of the Old County Tops race route that was important: it was also important to have a good training session out on some big hills and to enjoy the Lakes again (almost every Lake District pimple is a better training venue than Bencroft Hill: the closest you'll get to a mountain in Chippenham - my workplace). Funnily enough, we did find some big hills and I was pleased by how we powered up them, especially the ones late in the day.

We ran most of the day into a headwind (how can that happen on a circular course?). When we were on top of Helvellyn in a howling gale, the dark views over to Scafell Pike looked really forboding. The weather never really did go that nasty (certainly not as nasty as the 2007 Old County Tops race when we ran over Greenup Edge into a horizontal ice storm) and I think it was good training to run into the wind as we did.

We got 28 miles and 7 and a half hours running in which I was pleased with. This clearly isn't race pace, but I don't think that's what recce-ing is about.

Before my running career, I was (and still am) well into rock climbing. Saturday was a beautiful sunny day and so we headed up to Pavey Ark for a day climbing some of the classics. I was a bit nervous about how things would go, but as soon as I was delicately crimping my way up the first pitch of Arcturus I knew that the old magic was still there. We were really enthused by the first climb and were up and at it until the sun went down (and the clouds came over). We walked back down to the Old Dungeon Ghyll using our headtorches, well pleased with a great Lake District weekend.

Team Running at Wuthering Hike

I ran Wuthering Hike with my Three Peaks Yacht Race partner, Martin Indge, and we were well pleased to win the team event (6th runners across the line).

I think it was really good for us to run this as a team. It was Martin's first ultra and the first time we've run that sort of distance together (which is a sort of obvious statement, but there you go!). What seems to help when running as a team is to keep each other motivated. That is especially important on the Wuthering Hike as the first half of the race is invariably very fast and you tend to suffer from Hebden Bridge back to the finish. We kept going well on this latter stage by breaking the hills up into stages, agreeing to run set distances ("the bent tree", "the third lampost") and then having little walks to recover. Another aspect that seems to be really important is to make sure you're both eating and drinking well (Martin perked up particularly well after being fed some Shot Blox by Todmorden golf course).

One of the hardest aspects of the early portion of the race was the headwind. This was something in the region of 25mph from the west (and you're running west): Force 6 to us sailors. It was in some ways natural to gauge the wind on the Beaufort scale as there were white horses on the Widdop reservoir and more than the odd competitor will have been drenched by a wave coming over the top of the dam wall! The way we tried to get round the wind problem was to run in the lee of someone else. The best plan here is to run behind another competitor, but when Martin and I were on our own, we'd take turns at the front to keep the pressure off

Navigation went well. In fact the map never came out of the bag! It was my third time round the Wuthering Hike and I seem to have committed it to memory. I even got the section over Penistone Hill correct: go in what seems like the wrong direction round the left side and you take a sweeping arc back round to Howarth.

The start of our Three Peaks Yacht Race training seems to have gone well. Next stop the Welsh 3000ers (some time in April).

Wuthering Hike here we come

I've spent the week since the High Peak Marathon thinking about the Wuthering Hike. It's always been difficult to prepare for this race with it being so close to HPM. I think I'm doing quite well this year, taking it easy and then going for a 6 mile run north of Chippenham this lunchtime. The lunchtime run felt good: I was pleasantly surprised with how I was running.

This lunchtime I was running with Martin Indge. I'm running with him as a team in Wuthering Hike. We have ulterior motives here as Martin is going to be running the Three Peaks Yacht Race with me this summer and we want to see how we can run together effectively as a team. Martin is also hoping to have a crack at the Vasque series this year, so running with him should be a good way of easing him into the scene (and showing him the way!).

I keep visualising the course in my head. This will be my third time in the race and I think I know it quite well now. I'm hoping to navigate well. The section round the back of Todmorden golf course is a particular concern as there are loads of little alleyways and ginnels round there. I'm also looking at navigating the very last section better than last year. In 2008 I had to ask the local dogwalkers where Howarth was: not my best navigational effort to date, but at least I showed resourcefulness!

Whether Wuthering Hike will make a big impact on my final position in the Vasque series is not my greatest concern (but we'll be giving it everything). I'm going to be running several team races with the other Martin this year and Wuthering Hike should be a good learning curve for us.

Good luck to everyone else racing this weekend!