When your head says ‘no’
When you are a personal trainer or a wellbeing professional or a nutritionist, people think you practice what you preach 100% of the time and are ‘perfect’. Well, I’m here to tell you that we don’t always do what we tell you to do. We aren’t perfect. And sometimes our head says ‘NO’.
A couple of weeks ago, I travelled to Exmoor with a close friend to take part in the Trail Events Company’s Exmoor half marathon. The weather wasn’t great – we drove down in persistent rain and the forecast for Saturday was pretty atrocious. On top of that, it had already been a wet Autumn and the ground was sodden, so all this rain wasn’t going to make for great running conditions. However, we had paid our entry, and ‘a bit of rain never hurt anyone’ as my mother would have said, so we continued on our way in our lovely borrowed campervan in plenty of time to get a good night’s sleep before the race the following day.
Preparation was good – we had nutrient dense food already prepped for our evening meal and breakfast. We snacked on nuts and fruit and drank plenty of water on the way and I’d made protein energy bars to carry with us on the run. I had Synergy e9 and ProArgi9+ for an extra energy boost in the morning and plenty of Body Prime - magnesium to stop the cramps I inevitably get after a race like this. I had also done Synergy’s Pure 21 programme a month before, to get my body back into balance and improve energy levels etc so the theory said nutritionally things were pretty good.
My kit was sorted – I invested in Hoka One One Challengers a couple of months ago which had already proved to be a game changer, preventing a recurring knee problem and providing comfort for my feet I’d never experienced before. I had a choice of shorts or tights, long sleeved merino top and Goretex jacket, hat, gloves and a buff, water bladder and Malvern spring water, and all the emergency supplies we had to carry to take part in the race.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, I guess the fact that although I’d run just over 10 miles the previous weekend, I hadn’t done the necessary hills. My training had been on the pretty tame paths, tracks and trails of the Malvern Hills, and I hadn’t run the distance or close to it since the Black Mountain event in June - Crikey, when you actually see that in words it seems crazy that I was even considering running this event!! Not only that, but circumstances had dictated that my weekly mileage had steadily decreased over the previous couple of months, rather than doing what any training programme for a client would have done and steadily increased to two weeks before, then tapered for the last week or so. And on top of that, a busy couple of months meant I hadn’t done enough stretching and my generally haphazard yoga schedule had dropped from haphazard to non-existent. Not perfect preparation by any means, and if a client was this ill-prepared and unfit, I would have been telling he or she to not run!
I didn’t sleep brilliantly. The torrential rain battered the roof of the camper all night and we both woke early, disturbed by the cars passing by the small village carpark where we had to camp because we couldn’t get onto the waterlogged camping field. We wondered if we were crazy to even set off, and my head was not in the right place, but we were here, and it seemed like a waste of an opportunity, so I told myself I could walk the hills and take it slow and it was all about the enjoyment of the event and the scenery and got into my kit.
Plan B had to be put into action for breakfast, when we discovered we had run out of gas and hadn’t got the necessary spanner to change the gas bottle. I began to think circumstances were plotting against me. A breakfast of oats, grated apple, berries and Greek yoghurt was not the warm, high protein nutrient rich breakfast I’d planned and not the breakfast which I know I run well on. I could feel my head going down.
We made our way to the start line in fine drizzle and I was still fighting my head, but I was buoyed by the briefing. The Trail Events Company are a great bunch of people who organise superb events country-wide in some fantastic locations and the buzz at the start of an event is always great, so when the horn sounded, we set off with a spring in our step, ready for anything the route was going to throw at us, which it turned out was a pretty big hill right from the off!
Puddles, mud, slippery rocks and roots, up and down through woodland. A great start to the trail, but Susie had left me for dead after about 500 yards! She is always faster than me, but nevertheless, my head went down again and I had to force myself to keep going when I had to slow to a walk early on. My mood was like the trail, although generally up when I was going downhill and vice versa! The going was tough, slip-sliding down the steep sections, the rain incessant. I made it to checkpoint 1 with Susie still in my sights, but by the time I’d rehydrated she had disappeared into the next wooded section and I didn’t see her again. I plodded on, running mostly on my own, with the odd word to someone as they passed me by or as we met at gates or stiles but the thoughts running through my head were on the negative side of middling, despite the lovely scenery, even in the wet.
A little further on, I got into my stride and enjoyed the technical muddy descents, knowing I was attacking them better than I’d hoped and getting a boost mentally as we reached the coast path. But within 10 minutes, I was faced with the hill of death - not technically its name, but really?!?!?! I’ve walked up some pretty steep hills in my time and this really was up there with them and it went on and on, and on. My calves started screaming and by the time I came out of the wood onto the moor and set off, still up hill, in a howling gale as well as driving rain, cold, wet and miserable, I had decided I was going to hit the checkpoint then straightline it over the moor back to the start. This was just not my race.
But there, at checkpoint 2 was a lady in a red waterproof, on her own, hood up, battered by wind and rain and greeting us with enthusiasm, kindness and a beautiful smile. She must have been nithered, but her warmth and positivity completely floored me. If she could stand there out in the open, soaked and beaten by the weather just so we could run for fun, then I was damned if I was going to give up! I downed two cups of coke and a couple of Jaffa cakes (not the clean eating I tell my clients to partake in!) and set off into the elements. The track turned into a stream with a cross-wind which blew you almost off your feet. As I battled with the weather I also battled with my head, saying over and over that I couldn’t give up and let the lady in red down. That stretch of track over the moor went on for ever. On a beautiful day it would have been glorious – purple heather, views out to sea, rocky headlands. Today the cloud was down and my head was down and only occasional glimpses of grey sea told us we were on the coast and lightened my mood fractionally.
Then there was the loop. Now those of you who know me know I don’t do loops. They make my head say ‘No’! Well this wasn’t a loop of the type I don’t do (multiple loops to make a distance) but it was nevertheless a loop which took us steeply down a rocky outcrop, past an old tin mine, almost to sea-level then up another ridiculously steep path back to where I was now standing. At this stage in a long and arduous race, it would have been so easy to just miss is out, but although I was sorely tempted, the lady at checkpoint 2 was still overriding the ‘No’ in my head, so off I set.
Three of us dragged ourselves back up the hill. I could feel my energy levels dropping any threads of humour were quickly disappearing. But as I trudged upward, I remembered the lovely lady at checkpoint 2 and decided, when I got to the top, I would pay it forward. I still had my three homemade protein bars in my pack, so as I stopped to eat one, I gave the other two to the first people who arrived, as the mist descended, and we set off, a little more cheerful, to run the last couple of miles together.
Settling in behind a lovely chap from near Amsterdam, who set a perfect pace along the narrow path back into the woods, we dropped once again to the flooded stream which we’d first crossed over three hours before, to find Susie who’d been waiting for me for 20 minutes at the finish line! No, this wasn’t my best running experience, but it was an education in preparation and mindset, and how one kind volunteer (some coke and jaffa cakes) can make a whole lot of difference! Thank you to all the volunteers, marshalls, first aiders and organisers of The Trail Events Company’s Exmoor event, for battling the elements for us, but particularly to Annie Stamford, who in my eyes is a legend!