LONG ROAD OUT OF EDEN – JURBY (PART SEVEN)

Now the dust is settling (literally) from an exciting T.T. fortnight, it is time to turn our collective attentions to the ‘P. W.’, the event being now only 10 days distant. Training should be starting to taper off now, and personally I have one more six miles night walk and an eleven miles circuit of Maughold planned before the end of the weekend.

A sortie up from Rushen to the Round Table and back last weekend brought up my mileage total so far to just over my planned 300 miles. However, this figure barely registers compared to some of the figures being recorded on Strava by those training solo like Paulo Atherton and Dean Morgan, or the regular group containing Richard Gerrard, James Quirk, David Walker, Josh Knights et al.

This all points to a fascinating battle at the front of the field, which  looks to contain no less than eight of last year’s top ten (unless Liam Parker or Patrick Bregazzi turns out to be Raymond the Raven…). No less a battle for supremacy is expected in the Women’s Race, with the recent posting by last year’s winner and fellow blogger Sammy Bowden that her aim this year is to get two friends from ‘across’ round the full circuit rather than look for personal glory having opened up the field, which can only benefit the likes of Louise Gimson, Lorna Gleave and 2018 winner Bernie Johnson.

Unfortunately, I will need to await the footage on YouTube to see the outcome of the various strategies and tactics, as once the leaders exit the NSC it will be last I see of them on the day!

The majority of next week should be spent resting, though keeping supple and getting as good a night’s sleep as the hot weather and early sun rises allow. The main focus for the last few days should be to ‘get packing’…

WHAT TO WEAR / PACK FOR THE DAY

       The picture below gives a good impression as to what many halls across the Island will look like in a week’s time, and is reproduced courtesy of Anne-Marie Clucas, who will unfortunately be having to miss this year’s event and is wished well for the surgery pencilled in for August to enable her to resume her wonderful fund-raising activities in 2024.

       I’ve started making a list of items needed to be worn on the day / packed for later so that there is not a mad panic on Friday evening! The food variation might look sparce at the moment, though there will be adequate bananas and mars bars etc available en route, whilst in recent years I have determined that the slices of orange at Santon and slices of pineapple (wherever you can locate them) are very refreshing, though sticky on the hands!  

* Either ‘shades’ for ‘cool’ competitors like Andrew Titley and Dick Callin, or alternatively spectacles for those like myself who would otherwise trip up when it starts getting dark on the way up to Bride…

**   Eddie Convery, who was fourth in the 1980 event regularly advises me that he got round that year on ’16 pints of milk’.

*** Please consider carefully whether to take aspirin/paracetamol when the ‘going gets tough’, especially in hot weather. There is much good commentary online, with the overriding advice being that ‘pain is temporary, kidney damage might be permanent’.

**** The phone has both positive and negative benefits: It will be useful to let your support crew know of your requirements before you reach them to save precious time. On the other hand, it was too handy for me to ring up prematurely from around Glen Maye In 2016 to tell my backup I was retiring at Peel due to the heat. If you are bringing a phone, wrap it in a small plastic bag as , in the same year’s End to End Walk, I got caught in an absolute deluge going over the Howe and when I switched on the phone the next morning it was well and truly deceased…

Clothing	Food & drink	Electrical	Additional
Trainers	Water	Watch	Zinc tape
Socks	Energy  ** drinks	Head torch	Vaseline
Base layer trunks	Energy bars	Batteries	Insect repellent
Shorts	Energy gels	Lights for back	Plasters
T-Shirt	Crisps	Phone****	Blister plasters
Sweat band	Biscuits		Scissors
Racing vest	Wine gums		Safety pins
Race number			Wet wipes
Cap			Bags for rubbish
Race belt			Sun cream
Water bottle			Cooling spray
			Knee support
Leggings			Electrolyte tablets
Base layer torso			(Sun) glasses *
Rain jacket
Gloves
Woolly hat
Jumper			Paracetamol?***

ON THE DAY

       The following is taken (with kind permission from Tim Erickson, Secretary of Australian Centurion Racewalkers) from their excellent website. It is specific to the 100 miles event, though has much relevance for our own feat of endurance, although after all these years I still need someone to explain how the ingestion of x numbers of grammes of carbohydrate / protein per hour is calculated!

• Judge the pace in the opening hours.
• Keep the action going through the inevitable bad spots.
• Prevent the pace from dropping drastically in inclement weather and the unbelievably tiring later stages.
• Eating and drinking play a large part in success in endurance events and can quickly bring you through the bad stretches that inevitably hit you. This is discussed in depth further down.
• Particular care must be taken to use Vaseline very liberally (for obvious reasons). Spare clothes and shoes (but never brand-new ones) should always be available, as well as foul-weather gear, even if the day seems promising when the race starts.

All in all, the ultra-long-distance aspirant must

• be a good judge of pace.
• not get panicked.
• be able to take a hard jolt and come out of it.
• never seriously consider the thought of retirement.

Hints for the actual race

• Make sure that your take precautions against blisters – tape feet/toes if necessary, etc. Experiment in this matter beforehand.
• Have your initial pace worked out so that you are not heading off to fast.
• Do not forgo your race plan in the early stages when you feel good and want to speed up.
• Have your stops well planned in advance and take them even if you still feel ok.
• Feed regularly – when you feel the need for nourishment, it is generally too late already.
• Have changes of shoes, clothes, wet weather gear, whatever medical gear you might need, plenty of Vaseline or equivalent, etc.
• Have someone experienced looking after you and making sure that you adhere to your plan. That person should be able to calculate what breaks to take, how much time remains, etc. You might not be in a fit state to make these sorts of decisions for yourself.
• Come into the race with the conviction that you will finish.

Eating and drinking in the race

Eating and drinking play a large part in success in endurance events and can quickly bring you through the bad stretches that inevitably hit you. In races of 24 hours of less, it is better to stick to highly digestible foods – tinned fruit, high energy drinks, barley sugar, etc. However, everyone has their own favourite recipe be it Coca Cola or rice pudding or porridge (yes, seriously, I remember someone who used to have it during a 50 km event). Warm tea is helpful on warm days and soft drinks should never be taken too cold. In races of more than 24 hours, more substantial food is needed in addition to the above. Omelettes, warm soup (with bread mixed in) and roast chicken are all used successfully in Europe. Obviously that is one you must work out for yourself through practice.

Now the paragraph above was written many years ago and sounds rather simplistic nowadays so let’s tease it out a bit.

• You must carbohydrate load in the last few days leading up to such an event. Amongst other things, this reduces the probability that hypoglycaemia will develop during the race. But this alone is not sufficient.
• You must also eat a pre-race breakfast (e.g., cereal and fruit) In fact, you should ensure that you ingest adequate carbohydrate in the 12 hours before the race (i.e., at dinner the night before and at breakfast on the day of the race). Note that you should practice this before hand – the last thing you want is to have breakfast when you have not tested it out before and then get sick during the early hours of the race. But this is still not enough.
• You must also ingest carbohydrate during all races of further than 4 hours or 50km. The evidence suggests that the greatest performance benefit is seen with an ingestion rate of 1gm/kg/hr of carbohydrate (ideally consisting of glucose: fructose in a 2:1 ratio). So, a 60kg walker should aim for around 60gm/hr of carbohydrate. But this is harder than it sounds as the gut will not tolerate such high doses of carbohydrate over long race periods unless it has been trained beforehand – or else you risk the dreaded GI issues (dizziness, nausea, stomach or intestinal cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea).
• You must also drink regularly during such an event as it is vitally important that you avoid dehydration.

So, what to do. I work on a mixture of gels and drinks and solid food. For gels, I prefer PowerBar PowerGel Sachets with Caffeine or High5 IsoGel with Caffeine. Both are easy to take and don’t seem to cause me any issues. For food, I take bananas, fruit, honey sandwiches, etc. For drinks, I use PowerBar Isoactive Drink Mix. This comes in powder form, and you mix your own sports drink to your own satisfaction. Your job is to experiment to see which combination suits you.

Tim Erickson

 

 With 10 days remaining, it is unlikely that we will need as many layers as were worn for the 2012 event!