Snatched opportunities (General news)

Thursday 19 January 2012 08:41PM

I’ve been rushed off my feet since my last post with family Christmas madness. We decided to go back to the UK for much longer than usual, three weeks, to allow the grandparents plenty of time with Aaron, and to introduce him to both his remaining great-grandparents (my gran, and Hil’s granddad). It was lovely to surround him with so many familiar faces (you could imagine him thinking “this one looks a little bit like dad…” sometimes), and to show him around where both Hil and I grew up in Derbyshire. For me it was also an opportunity to get some training on proper hills, something that is nearly impossible while living in Brussels.

As a junior fell runner I used to think Derbyshire wasn’t that great for training for proper fell running, lacking the really long and steep hills of the Lakes races I aspired to do well in. The situation is even more extreme now – I now aspire to do well in races where a single climb can exceed 1500m of ascent, and I live in one of the flattest countries in Europe, so I wasn’t complaining about the lack of hills when we got back to Derbyshire this time, I just got a lot more creative than I used to be! From the start, in addition to cycling between mine and Hil’s families (a hilly 15 miles) with Aaron in the trailer, I pursued steep hills with a vengeance – ten times up the steepest side of Thorpe Cloud in Dovedale (1400m total ascent), morning reps from the Edale valley to the moorland rim while we were staying there for a few days, plus a few longer runs with old friends. By the end of the trip I felt I’d achieved a double whammy of visiting lots of family and attending my own personal training camp.

Within a few days of getting back to Brussels an opportunity cropped up to go skiing in the Vosges for the weekend. The Vosges are the closest mountains to Brussels, five hours drive away, and have good skiing when the conditions allow. They are a bit like a forested version of the Cairngorms, with similarly capricious weather. There was one small problem; I had thrown away the liner boots for my ski boots at the end of last season as they were rapidly becoming a threadbare biohazard, and the new ones I had ordered had not yet arrived. Still, an opportunity to get some time in on proper snow before the race season starts in earnest was too good to miss, so again I had to get creative. Three pairs of woollen socks, a pair of “granny knit” slippers, some sections of old foam sleep-mat and a lot of duct tape and I had something that looked like it might work. I’m usually useless at making things, so I was surprised when my Blue-Peter creation stood up to 5000m of ascent and descent over the weekend, with only minor bruising to my feet and one sizeable blister. Yet more ascent in the training bank and hopefully a bit of endurance from which to build some race form.

The bruising and blister healed in time for this weekend, and a cross-country running race in Châtelet, to the south of Brussels. I’ve found it difficult to find details of cross-country races here, the runners I meet seem to race much less frequently than I’m used to, so despite Belgium being a country with a fine cross-country pedigree I’ve only started to do races this season. Frustrating! The one previous race I had done was an international race at the end of November where I ended up running in no-man’s land, somewhere between the elite peloton and the joggers who’d made an even bigger mistake than me in entering the race. I finished up five minutes behind the winner, Atelaw Bekele, which at first I was disappointed with, but watching him run away from the field at the European championships two weeks later I realised that perhaps five minutes wasn’t too bad after all.

This weekend’s race was a nice change, a grass-roots race on a pleasant course with a friendly atmosphere. After an over-enthusiastic start (I led for the first two laps of six), I ended up third, forty seconds behind the winner, which I was pretty pleased with – cross country has never been a great forte of mine, but it’s a good way to keep entertained, and fit, in between trips to do the races that really matter to me; in the mountains!