Happy New Year lovely internet people! Hope you had a wonderfully indulgent festive period! I’m not generally a New Year’s Resolution kind of person… mostly because I’m a rebel and sack it off after a few weeks!
However, I have made a promise to myself to fully embrace blogging this year and hopefully build a bigger network of running pals who can help me through the running challenges of 2016!
You may have noticed from my twitter feed that I decided to enter the ballot for the West Highland Way Race (95 miles) in June with the hope of completing the ‘Triple Crown’ which consists of the Highland Fling in April, West Highland Way in June and Devil O The Highlands in August. At the beginning of December I received the long-awaited emailed and discovered that unfortunately I had missed out on this occasion and wouldn’t be offered a place in the 2016 WHW.
I was hugely disappointed, more than I expected as I was still unsure if I’m ready to run 95 miles. But the disappointment I felt let me know I’m more than ready to give it a try. With that I set about devising a new race calendar for 2016.
By the end of 2015 I had come up with a pretty decent race calendar and started to push the WHW hopes to the back of my mind. And then yesterday something amazing happened… I received an offer of a place to do the WHW Race!!!!!
Not everyone had taken up their places after the ballot so that meant the organisers started to work through those who had missed out. I felt absolutely ecstatic! And then came the nerves, which will no doubt develop into uncontrollable, unreasonable panic in the months leading up to the race.
However, for now I will adapt my training plan and get those legs back into building the mileage and embracing the good old back to back runs! I’ve also started CrossFit… for those of you not familiar with this torture it is a strength and conditioning programme based on constantly varied, functional movements executed at high intensity building stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, co-ordination, accuracy, agility and balance. All of which I hope will make me a stronger, more efficient endurance runner. Having completed only a few sessions, I think it might kill me! I have a serious lack of upper body strength and you can look forward to some hilarity at my expense when I blog about my progress.
Anyhow, please give me a shout, let me know all about your 2016 goals and please share any advice you have for running 95 miles!
Bye for now 🙂
Trail Tales 