Education... (Running)

Wednesday 26 September 2007 11:35PM

I’d been wanting to do one of these skyrunning races in Europe for a good few years, and finally I got my act together and headed out to Italy for the Sentiero delle Grigne Skymarathon. The stats said it all really, 42km (a marathon) with 3300m of ascent. I hoped that some fitness I might have gained in the Defi de l’Oisans, six weeks earlier, might have stayed with me, since I hadn’t managed to do much training in between.

The morning of the race I woke from a bad dream, I was back at my old school in Derbyshire, and I was sitting in an exam for which I had done no studying. You don’t need to be a dream analyst to work that one out…

And so it proved. I ran well to about half way, but the relentless climbs and very rough terrain took their toll and I dropped from about 10th to 21st at the finish. The last half of the race was a steady and depressing stream of people passing me. The whole experience was amazing though, despite being a bit dissapointed with my run. The terrain was varied throughout, from fast, sweeping singletrack in forests to precipitous rocky mountain ridges. There were sections on the course where you had to pull on in-situ ropes and cables, and scramble up very steep ground.

Amazingly, the race was won, and the previous record beaten, by over a quarter of an hour. What is even more amazing is that the winner was only 19 years old. Conventional endurance running wisdom says an athlete’s peak for a race of this length is mid to late thirties. The prospect of Kilian Jornet, Skyrunning’s new superstar, continuing to improve for the next fifteen years is truly mind boggling! A proper education to me – go home and don’t come back till you’re fitter!

The following week I started a Masters course in Sustainable Architecture. Perhaps that’s what my dream was really about…