The Madness
Looking towards my main race next year - Lavaredo 120k (again).
I’ve got a place at Lavaredo 120k 2025. This blog has become a bit of a diary of that race - for me, anyway, directly and indirectly. I started it while I was training for my first attempt this year and I documented the failure and the fallout. The experience changed me in small and significant ways. The shape of next year hung on whether I would get a chance to try again. My backup plan was Ultra Trail Snowdonia 100k, but places sold out last week, so my ambitions hung on plan A.
I have plan A.
Of course, there’s no guarantee I’ll make it to the start line: training for such a thing imposes more stress on the body than the race itself, and plenty can happen in life between now and June 2025. That was unfortunately the case this year. I was quite unwell sitting at the start line: my brain was not good. I was existentially tired. I relished the escape into the mountains but my body couldn’t go with my mind, my mind couldn’t go with my body. I still don’t know which one ultimately let me down. I respect that both kept me going.
But here, now, I’m starting to do what I can in order to be ready to go again.
I’m out running loops of muddy hills in the pouring rain, slipping and clawing my way up slime, laughing at my own weirdness as I wipe my hands on leaves and willingly splash more puddles up my back.
I’m dancing through the night sky because I made it through five intervals when two reps ago, I didn’t think I could carry on, and I just feel great. It’s as simple as that. I love this album, I love this song, I love every other time I’ve put this album on to run to these songs. I am a body in the outside air, alone in my own wild movements.
I am riding high. I am earthed by the trails.
But I need grounding.
Because I know what’s coming. The madness, the obsession, running will eat you alive if you let it, the sweet agony and light and freedom and trying and struggling but sleeping and trying again. But sleep: calculating mileage, elevation, planning routes, planning meals, wash loads, where are my clothes, where do I need to be? The indefatigable mess of it all beside the sincere and uncompromising order. 6am, a bit of the news on the radio while I coffee and wake up, that’s what’s happening in the world, is it? Then out. Must look after my niggling leg. Years of niggling. Must get to the start line. Build, building, this time.
This year, I swore never to try training like that again - with a full-time job and without a coach. The buzzing was too much, there was always too much to process. As of the end of this week, I am going back to being freelance.
Who knows, who knows what will happen over the coming months. Every ultra has shown me that it is as much about the adventures the training takes you on as it is about the race itself. It is as much about having this constant, this anchor, while life whirls around you. It’s being flexible in the face of responsibilities, circumstances, demands and desires, but remaining committed.
It’s difficult to explain the madness if you haven’t felt it.
I have also learned this year that I am fine without it.
But God, do I love having it.
To shuffle home in zero degrees, my breath gathering in front of me and fogging up my head torch, then pausing in the last stretch before home, turning off the light to walk further into the park and yes, stopping, realising the sky is clear, the stars are many, letting my eyes adjust, waiting and hoping for a shooting star but it doesn’t really matter, it’s okay if not, this is enough. Is that the milky way? I think it is. Stopping to ground. Earthed.
I’m ready for the adventures.
I’m ready for the madness to begin again. We smirk at each other in the night.
Hello, old friend. Let’s just see how it goes, shall we?
