Mudrunning

Yesterday was the Tough Guy and Gal Challenge at Woodhill, a 6km off-road race held every year in the middle of winter. It's a course dotted with mud traps, fences, barbed wire and cargo nets and definitely not for people who like their whites to be a brilliant white.

I got roped into it at my gym by my personal trainer, who pretty much dared me to do it. As it was on a very rare weekend when I had no league commitments, it was like nothing I'd ever done before and I'd been told "this sounds like you, though it's really hard going" there was no way I wasn't going to go!

My enforced skating holiday and dire words of the physio meant that my training for the run was somewhere between none and zero, but that didn't deter me on the day. We were blessed with some absolutely beautiful weather and it didn't actually seem cold enough to merit the polyprop longsleeve the website had advised me to wear. The mood at the start was jubilant, which was a welcome change from some 5km runs I was on last year (serious runners are serious). Lots of people in fancy dress (though nothing too restricting), lots of whooping and yelling as we got underway.

It started off fairly easily, and I was feeling pretty good (and clean) until I heard screaming ahead and saw a bottleneck of runners. There was a huge ditch filled waist-deep with freezing watery mud, and I realised that maybe my goal time of completing the course in under an hour miiiight be a little optimistic. Running on rough ground is tough, running on rough ground when you're soaked in dirty water un to your chest is harder.

Weirdly though, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Everyone on the course was so friendly and encouraging, that not once did I feel too grossed-out, disheartened or even that tired. The course got very narrow in places and there were actually queues to get into certain parts of the course, but everyone was laughing and joking the whole time and cheering on the insane brave 12km frontrunners as they went past us, leaping over filthy ditches and gazelling their way over fences. I finished up in the middle of the pack and had gas in the tank to spare (the discovery of carbo-loading may have helped a little). I completed in a time of 58.34, less than an hour, inside my goal time and I can't help but wonder what time I'd have got if there hadn't been all the queuing!

It was a fantastic day out and well worth the aching muscles and huge amount of washing. I felt like I'd really accomplished something by doing it and getting inside my goal time.

As a little side-effect, I've rediscovered running as something worth doing. My base level of fitness is much higher now than it was when I was running at the end of 2009, and there's something about running outside that treadmills can't really compete with. My gym is great for some things, but lack of air conditioning means that doing cardio in there is not the most pleasant.

So, to running! I'm going to try and start getting out of bed a bit earlier and going for a wee run in the mornings, just 20 minutes or so. I was lucky enough to bag a couple of new pairs of shorts at half price in the Warehouse (my leggings from yesterday are destroyed) and I finally got round to replacing the sports socks that had gone the way of all socks, so I don't really have an excuse beyond my own laziness. I'll let you know how I get on (as ever)

PS thank you so much for all the kind words and support after my last post. It was quite something to have so many people I care about read what I had to say and be so positive about it. Cheers!