All the mud in Wales

I know,

I know.

It's been a while.

But you guys are busy. You got things to do. I don't want to impose myself on that unless it's pretty important, right? Right.

So. We moved to London (Kew), and went biking in Majorca with mom and dad, and Charlie got and started a new job (Shazam!) and I got and started a new job (BSU!) and then

we ran three trail marathons in three days.

That was last weekend. In Wales. The Pembrokeshire Coast Challenge, all around, up and down and then up again and then, oh, down, then up, then actually up a bit more, then down again and then fording a stream or two.

It was, not surprisingly, a trail event. Three trail marathons strung together over three days, taking us along the coastline from Dale to Dina's Head. Here, that's this:

What was surprising was what trail running actually entails. We'd done most of our training in Richmond park, running along the trails between the trees and deer and tourists on rental bikes and locals in family-wide matching fleece; that was trail running, we thought. But, no, no. Of course, it wasn't. The metaphor we used to amuse and comfort ourselves while slogging though shin-deep mud, up endless rock-climb cliffs, down splintering shale drops and across bouldered streambeds was that this was like mountain biking, and all the running we'd done before was road biking. A totally different sport, really. And, sadly, we only had our road bikes with us. That is to say, our regular running shoes (in my case, my 3mm soled barefoot shoes. Basically ballet slippers). 

So. There was a lot of walking and scrambling required, to keep from slipping and tumbling down massive cliffs in to the cold, waiting ocean. Every morning after breakfast but before all the runners piled into vans to be carted to the day's starting point, the race organizers made of point of emphasizing, one more time, how easy it was to die out there. Death this, death that. We were all made to carry packs with whistles, compasses, water-proof maps, warm clothes in zip locked bags, chocolate,  etc etc, but really, they're not much good once you've tumbled down and in. Although I suppose the clothes in the ziplock would stay dry, should anyone find them bobbing along and fancy a change.

So. We ran when we could. All the field bits, the short bits across coastal towns or campsites, and when we were running, properly running, we were fast! We were faster than lots of the others! But, mostly, we did a lot of scrambling and slogging through bits where the other runners would bound happily past.

One of the rare, runnable stretches. Lotsa rain.

But that was okay! Because it was a small race (96 enrolled, total) and everyone recognized everyone and everyone was nice and friendly and stopped to chat for a bit before bouncing past on their mountain-bike legs-and-shoes. 

And it was beautiful! A beautiful place. There were seals (baby ones, even!) on the beaches below us and shaggy-haired calves on the path in front of us and breath-taking flocks of swooping lapwings above us. 

It was super. And super hard. Super duper hard. A whole new kind of tiredness, pain, hunger, all that. One of the best things about being into this kind of stuff, though, is that you actually like that. I know marathon pain already. Collecting and comparing the kinds of tired, sore, hungry are one of the reasons I do these things. Our times were: 7hr-ish the first day, 8hrs20min-ish the second, and 8hrs30min-ish the third. We were never very last, on any of those days. But, of the 96 entrants, only 56 actually finished the whole thing. Of these remaining 56, Charlie and I came in:

Last.

Exactly. 

Tied to the second, Last.

Which I love. For lots of reasons. If nothing else, an excuse to do it again, someday.

Sue runs away from us on the third day, blissful in trail boots.