Postcards from a tired man

I have had a score to settle with the 100 mile distance since June last year when I was forced to pull out of the Enduroman 100 at mile 84 with cellulitis in the leg. this year was to be my revenge. I will skip the usual preamble and sandbagging by simply saying that I have run quite a lot his year and not ridden my bike at all. I have had a definite training plan and stuck to it, and I have learned to if not quite love running, tolerate it better. I've done a couple of marathons, and a brace of ultras and I think I would probably now think of myself as a back of the pack runner, rather than a back of the pack triathlete. It's all a bit strange, but I'm getting used to it. I travelled down to Streatley on the Friday before the race and had an enjoyable pub meal with Martin P and family before heading back to Streatley youth hostel were I was staying for the night. At £20 for a room to myself this was pretty good value and I managed to leave the next day u...

I started writing this report two days after the finish of the race. Yesterday I went to work in a suit, sports sandals and socks -which is a great look - and I was able to walk at about 0.3 miles an hour. Today I have progressed to desert boots and I'm fairly sprinting along at 0.5 miles an hour. Let's just say that my blisters are talking a long time to heal...I will put up with that legacy though, as the price of finishing this epic race. The Ring of Fire is a 3 day running race around the coastal path in Anglesey. You start in Holyhead and run 135 miles clockwise around the island until you get back to where you started. Easy eh? No. This new race came on to my horizon some time in 2012 and as I looked at the website and subsequent race reports I became intrigued. At the inaugural running of the race lats year there were 100 entries, 68 starters and 28 finishers and even the DNF race reports read like epic victories. It was quite clear that anyone contemp...

About a year ago we decided to cash in our Avios/Airmiles (accrued after years of consumer slavery to Tesco, and converted from Clubcard points) on a trip to New York. The rough plan was to spend a few days in NYC at each end of a 2 week holiday and do "something else" in the middle period. That someothing else formed into a plan for Mrs.Repo and I to each do a race somewhere within reasonable driving distance of NY. With a pretty free itinerary and a minimal understanding of the geography of the US I spent a few hours intensively Googling US running sites and came up with the On The Rocks 30k trail run in York, Pennsylvania for Mrs.R and the Cheat Mountain Moonshine Madness in West Virginia for me the following weekend. CMMR is a 50 mile overnight trail race and it started on August 24th, my 50th birthday, so it seemed like a neat coincidence. Our eldest kids are both at uni and consequently disbarred from family holidays on the be grounds that they are ...

hen you’ve done ten single IM distance races and one Double and you realise that there is now a Triple on offer there’s only one place to go right? Yes, the bar for a nice pint and a sit down.  Well, I tried but I must have got lost because somehow I found myself in the endurance tri mecca that is Lichfield once again this year for the Enduroman Triple Iron UK  I should be reporting massive training, unbelievable feats of endurance and monkish self denial. And maybe if I was I would have finished a bit quicker but hey ho, where’s the fun in that. Without me being rubbish, no one would look good.  In fact compared to the Double in 2009 my total training hours weren’t massively up. A couple of ultras (Jurassic Coast Challenge and 24 hour challenge) earlier in the year meant that my run mileage was quite a bit up but the lack of an early season IM (I did Lanza in 09) meant that my bike mileage was up, but not by much. Once again I did Bala Half and A Day in the Lakes in June...