As a youngster, I would get home from School, get changed and go out to play with my pals.
Now I'm older, I get home from work, get changed and go out to play with my pals, but now I call it training.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Brampton to Carlisle race. Recent History (2011 - 2012)

2011. 23rd place 56 min 52 secs.
A full year of injury free running and I was in decent nick once again. I can remember this being a real race between several of us with myself, Chris Neil, Harry Earl, Josh Hebson, Ste Hebb' Plucky, George Thompson etc all being in an early group together. One by one we were spat out with Hebb, Harry and Geo leaving me, Neil and Josh behind. Plucky had fell off the pace much earlier, and then me and Josh traded blows until I eventually got the better of him and narrowly edged Neil to the line.
A great race and surely much to do with a decent result.

Jared Hagos won in 47.51. The fastest winning time since I began running this race in 1998.

2011 result CLICK

2012. 32nd place in 58mins 50 secs.
A good year pre- Brampton. In June I won the Karrimor Trail Marathon then also won the Lakes 50 in July. But at  the end of the summer I suffered an injury, which, didn't stop me running but which hurt an awful lot. Both Achilles tendons suffered after I ran a silly and uncharacteristic  speed session whilst on holiday in August. Back home, one day in September they hurt so much that I stopped running and walked 7 miles home, taking two hours. Handily, it was a nice day weather wise if not in terms of my mood by the time I got home.
I never had to stop running/training, and handily I was ok when running slower and on soft ground so I even won a 50k trail event in October.
I be honest now and say that I have no recollection of the race merely 50 weeks ago. Yet I can remember almost every mile of the 2004 Derwentwater 10.

2012 result CLICK

2013. ??nd place in ??mins ?? secs.
This has been a good year so far, one of the best actually. I completed the Bob Graham Round in June and a couple of marathon under my belt too. Track mile times and my 10 mile training route have been recorded as the fastest I've managed for a year or two so fingers crossed for a good Brampton.
As things stand right now, with 14 days to go to the Brampton to Carlisle race 2013, I think I am in decent shape and I have every confidence of being at least a couple of minutes, and hopefully 3 or 4 inside the hour.

#WeContinue

Brampton to Carlisle race. The Wilderness Years (2005-2010)

2005. 21st place 56 minutes 27 secs.
A proper injury finally stopped me in my tracks in 2005. The glory days were behind me and I would never run as fast again. But that didn't stop me trying.....

The injury was with me in March, but I didn't know what it was until May. Until then I had simply been missing lots of running and enduring pain when I did run. The 8 week layoff I was then advised to take to let my injury clear up was at least partly helped by the fact it was by then summertime and I could ride my bike to try to keep fit. The day the 8 weeks was over I had entered 25 mile Time Trial and managed to slip inside the hour by a handful of seconds. Immediately afterwards I ran up Skiddaw in celebration (and painfully hobbled back down as it was really still quite sore).

Once I was back into full running and training mode it was a case of damage limitation and a 56 was a fair result given the previous 6 months of interrupted training. Plucky beat me this year, by two seconds!

Mike Scott took a second victory with 52.22 and in 7th place was a certain Mr R Lightfoot with  53:42. Very good Ricky, but not quite up to my standard yet.

2005 result CLICK


2006. 30th place 57 minutes 08 secs.
My overriding memory of the 2006 race was the competition with Plucky. In the end he beat me by 2 seconds (yes, again).
It's obvious from the result that neither of us was fighting fit at that stage, but we were certainly well matched and ran the entire 10 miles together. In the 2007 London Marathon magazine there is a superb full page colour photo of the two of us running past the pub in Crosby on Eden. We didn't know the photo was to be used and were both delighted to discover it, in London, as we were flicking through the mag' after we had picked it up with our number at the Expo.
Its perhaps no surprise that Plucky outsprinted me. He is a year younger after all. Not so much more to say about 2006.

2006 result CLICK

2007. 35th place 58 minutes 32 secs.
I'm not sure why I didn't do better in 2007 really. It was , after all, the year I ran a 2:43 Dublin marathon and won Langdale marathon. Perhaps those both being in Autumn meant I then eased right off training, or perhaps I had had more illness. Whatever. It was a nondescript result  and would immediately be glossed over if not for the fact that I can also remember this being the year young Graham Milly was keen to do well.....

I said I would do everything I could to help him to a fast time. I remember front running as hard as I could manage whilst ensuring Milly was safely tucked into the group. This was a tactic I knew would see me blow apart and get dropped. That is exactly what happened but Milly got his pb (58.16), so all was good.

Plucky remained very consistent with 56.08 and a certain Mr Marcus Scotney popped up in 10th place with 54.59. Ricky matched exactly my pb of 53.07 this year. So in 2007 the now World Champion was only as fast as Steve Angus (had been 3 years earlier)

2007 result CLICK

2008. 81st place 1hour 4 minutes 5 seconds.
WHAT ON EARTH WAS I PLAYING AT?!
I know exactly what happened in 2008..... I didn't do any training!
Well, I didn't do any training in the week and on a weekend I usually ran about 20 miles.
So when in the April I ran 3hrs and seconds in the London Marathon and decided that if I could run 3hr marathons without training properly I would just settle for that and enjoy all the extra free time not training provided me with.
But then in New York, (2 weeks prior to B2C) I ran to halfway in 1:29:59 but then took 2HOURS to complete the rest of the marathon.

"No Steve, you can't be a 3hr hour marathoner unless you train a bit harder than 20 miles once per week"

It was too late to do anything decent at Brampton and that's why I took so long to run it. I think it must also have been a really slow day for the race because only 33 people beat the hour (its usually about 60-70) and Ricky won in 53:29, which still put him after me in the all time list.
Plucky ran a 57 and Milly a 59

2008 result CLICK


2009. 29th place 53 minutes 3 seconds.

What a year! everyone ran fast. 145 under the hour!
The course was short due to flooding.
The results say it was 0.7 miles short of 10. If this is correct then Plucky and George Thompson ran times equal to sub 55 minutes. With respect to those two - that seems unlikely, so maybe it was actually shorter than 9.3.
In no doubt though is that I ran about 2 mins slower than Plucky, so not a very good run by me.
I had spent the year since B2C 2008 training hard and most importantly, training regularly and had then been pleased to run well inside 3 hours at Boston Marathon. Things were slowly picking back up and I have Milly to thank for training with me almost daily throughout this time.

2009 result CLICK

2010. 103rd place 1hour 4 minute 40 secs
It is probably unfair to include 2010 in a chapter entitled Wilderness Years, because I sustained another injury which saw me forced out for 8 weeks (stress fracture, same injury as 2005 but in other leg this time). And in the same vein it might also be unfair to have included 2005 too. But only the recorded times will be my judge and jury when I am 90 and by then looking back on 60 Bramptons.
I suppose I have actually been very lucky with injury and illness in relation to the B2C in that none of the problems shave stopped me running it.
This years race fell about two weeks after my 8 week layoff had ended. I had resumed running only very gradually and on grass mainly. I'd probably ran 5 times and got up to about 6 miles. Running 10 on tarmac was therefore quite inadvisable really and more than a little bit risky. But by this time I had long since noticed my appearance n the result sheet was a very long consecutive one and I wanted that to continue.
The first 5 miles of the race were fine - running at about 61/62 pace. But then things got tough and I dropped off the pace and struggled home. The injury wasn't exacerbated and I was able to continue my mini comeback.

In 2010 Ricky Lightfoot finally got that monkey off his back and moved ahead of me in the all time list with his 52.08 (3rd). And Graham Milly recorded a superb new pb of 56.53 (17th)

2010 result CLICK

Friday, November 1, 2013

Brampton To Carlisle Race. The Glory years (2002 - 2004)



2002. 18th position in 55mins 05 secs
The 2002 race was another 10 mile pb -thats 5 in a row. Only a little faster than in 2001 but a small nibble off a pb is the best way to do it - leaves you thinking you can take another small nibble off again in the future. Writing this in 2013 I can't recollect anything in particular about the race day itself but I do know that 2002 was the year I really began to make inroads with my running, when I started to get plenty of third and second places in races. And, as Plucky said one day when he saw me outsprinted by a 17yr old... "blimey! if that lad hadn't entered this race YOU would have won!!" Winning races wasn't something I had any experience of. I think I might have been about 8th in a cycle road race in 1996.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the 2002 event was THREE lads running inside 50 minutes.
2002 result CLICK

2003. 14th position in 55mins 46 secs
It had to happen. Nobody can continue getting faster every year, as I had done for the previous 5. The annoying thing was I SHOULD really have done. I was fitter than ever and on target to run a 54 minute Brampton. This is based  on my 56:39 result in the  hilly Derwentwater 10 which always falls 2 weeks prior to Brampton. The DW10 can be reliably considered to be 2 minutes slower than Brampton, so a 54 something seemed reasonable to me - it was 2 mins quicker and would also be a shaving off my pb. But disaster struck. After the DW10 I got a bout of sickness. V & D.  It had all cleared up by the time Brampton came round, but I hadn't trained, had hardly ran really, and had been severely depleted of fluids, bodyweight, and morale during the bad spell.
Although a long 55 was disappointing to me at the time, it was still a 55. Still 5:34 per mile pace. Well up the finishing order.

Notably, and certainly worth more of a mention than in the footnote, Mike Pluckrose ran 57:03!

Plucky had listened to me banging on about minutes per mile pace for several years. He'd seen the success I was enjoying, and had also taken up running a year or two earlier. I had paced him to beat the hour on  a lumpy course based out of Abbeytown and now here he was following in my footsteps, literally!

A few weeks after the 2003 B2C I decided that perhaps I would run a marathon the following year. Scotty had been doing them for a few years and would be training specifically for a marathon. And as we trained together I may as well too. I thought I'd enter one quite close to the London Marathon, but couldn't actually do London, because this was now November and its full by the summer.

Then at Christmas I found out that Border Harriers get given club numbers for their athletes to run London. They had three and only two people wanted one so I got the third....

BLOODY HELL!
I was going to run a marathon!!
In London!!!
The London Marathon!!!!
BLOODY HELL!!!!!

I could easily become side-tracked and spout on ad infinitum about the highs and lows of my 9 years of marathon running. But that would be to digress from this Brampton to Carlisle blog. Suffice to say  that the London Marathon (or more specifically the training I completed in preparation for it) defined the whole of the following year and certainly helped me achieve what I believe  was my ultimate potential, in 2004.

2003 result CLICK

2004. 9th position in 53mins  07secs
Theres a lot to write about the 2004 race - pull up a chair....

53.07
53.07
53.07!

Unlike some of the previous (now 15) years of running Brampton to Carlisle 10 mile race, I can remember quite a lot about the 2004 version. The story of 53.07 can be traced back to a winter of marathon training which then culminated in a superb (in my opinion) debut performance exceeding every expectation. After the marathon I found racing to be much harder work than before it. Legs had nothing to offer - even a month afterwards! The summer came and went, and the ideal, cooler running conditions returned and so did the big 2 autumn 10 milers.

Despite feeling off form I had still been trying to race, and certainly training hard. Even so I never imagined I was in shape to run  a short 55 minutes at Derwentwater. But I did. 55:13! I only had to knock 9 seconds off that time on the proven-to-be-2-mins-quicker Brampton course to record a new pb.

I actually ran quite poorly. I set off TOO fast and really struggled the final 2 or 3 miles. The toughest part of the B2C is the 8th mile which includes the long drag up to the the filling station,  but at 7 miles the average pace was still indicating  a sub 52 minute result was on the cards, so to lose over a minute on that pace in the final 3 miles is a sign of poor pace judgement, despite that drag to come.
If any proof were needed to support my statement that this was a poor run by me - Eddie Simpson of Preston beat me by 3 seconds in the DW10, and by about 70 seconds this day.

But hey, they only take your time at the end of the race and that was 53.07. I'm really proud to have ran that time. it was an astonishing amount of time to knock off my pb and its a pb which still stands up very well against some of the top local runners nowadays. In fact, in the B2C since 2004 my time has been beaten by Border Harriers just four times, by two men....
Mike Scott 52.22  (2005)
Mike Scott 52.28 (2006)
James Douglas 50:33 (2010)
James Douglas 51:04 (2011)

In the era of the running boom my time would not have featured anywhere, but I can't help when I was born or that I only took up running after those glory days were over. 53.07 is a very good time for 10 miles. I can't see how I could ever run as fast as that again so I'm milking it for all its worth.

2004 result CLICK