Three Peaks Race

I apologise but my very very long write up made the iphone app crash and it didn't even offer me the resume the saved draft, so please call back tomorrow to read an interesting story.

Just briefly the photo above is what I could see in front of me approaching Ingleborough and here what I left behind me

So if you don't mind read my write up tomorrow and I ll have some more photos to share. First part is here now...read below

My love for mother nature and the great outdoors is well known by everybody that knows me as well as my love for running barefoot or as minimally as I can.

I have done many mountain marathons and ultra's around the world but fell running in this country in the form of competition was something new to me. The journey for this mountain race started when Nigel told me that the entries for the Three Peaks fell race were still open. I already had a London Marathon place and I was training for the road marathon, but I would much prefer to doing the fell race and running on trails. Visiting the website the first thing I read was that entries were closed for 2012. I immediately added my name on the waiting list and hoped for the best but when I contacted the organiser so I can start planning better, he informed me that it would be highly unlikely I get a place this year. Call it fate, one morning I went on the IH forum and noticed the title Three peaks entry available, I straight away jumped on the opportunity to get a place through substitution and after a few texts with wonderful Kelly, all was sorted and I was on the list officially as a competitor.

But this was just the very beginning of the journey and as I am a warrior in life I kept things extremely quiet not because I didn't want anybody to know but I didn't want to affect the morale of my team training hard for many challenging events. I think the only time I mentioned that I wanted to be a bit cautious running, was on an evening I joined Jane for the speedwork session she organises that I ended up running barefoot as I was feeling awful running in my minimal shoes. But let me come back to that later.

The IH Three Peaks team was organising a reccie of the first two peaks on the weekend that here in the UK we were experiencing a mini summer and temperatures went up to 23 C. Gorgeous times we had during that reccie and I managed to run the 16 miles without saying anything more than that my hip and glut was still bruised after the bike accident I had on a late evening, when I was knocked off by a van - a hit & run really it was - but gladly I am still alive. That accident though changed many things and I had to work hard and fight to bring my biomechanics back to order and it initiated a serious of small injuries and imbalances. Visualising the race seemed distant many times up to the last day really. But I have never had any negative thoughts, I was asking for healing and doing what my body and soul would tell me.

Continued training, continued going over to the Dales for more reccies and biting that stick to go though the pain barrier, that would magically disappear as soon as I was connected to the earth and mother nature. Mileage was increased nicely, I started feeling good but kept the speed under control as my body seemed to have become a bit fragile. Calf and achilles, glut, hip, my knee later due to poor biomechanics were misbehaving, my physio skills helped me to diagnose and isolate all the issues and work on them and the truth is that I met a sports physio friend who advised me straight away to not even think about, but two days later I was doing the reccie with the girls and going through the pain, re mapping movements in my brain, adjusting my biomechanics. It's not that I am a stubborn person and that I don't listen to others, but I was craving to do this race and not just this race but many more. I have not competed for a long time and my super long runs were at a pace that I dictated.

......to be continued, I have so much to say about this magic race