Petestack Blog

Having discovered a couple of weeks ago that there was an apparently unmapped local track I’d never run linking Black Corries Lodge to the Blackwater Reservoir, I’d been itching to give it a whirl and finally took myself round to Kings House to do so today. And it’s a strange track, not bad to run on despite being quite soft and earthy compared to the Black Corries ‘motorway’, having no obvious purpose (though surely there must be one!) and terminating in the middle of nowhere at the Reservoir’s edge. From where I decided to bash on ‘over’ the rough and boggy ground to the Dam (my second visit of the weekend after doing an anticlockwise circuit of the main track and Ciaran Path yesterday) and more of the same through the pass to Altnafeadh to complete a logical, if sometimes barely ‘runnable’, loop (with thanks to Colin Knox for the inadvertent inspiration!).

Today’s run was supposed to be a straightforward circuit of Loch Oich, following the Great Glen Cycle Route (new ground to me despite driving both A82 and A87 countless times) up the north-west side of Loch Oich before returning by the Great Glen Way on its south-east side (which I’ve run once before as an out-and-back from Bridge of Oich). Which might have been fine if I’d known where the (now defunct?) Cycle Route goes, but wasn’t quite so good as a spontaneous (= mapless!), follow-your-nose expedition on the way home from another trip to Lochalsh Pipes. So trusting your nose can be stupid when, after correctly following the waymarkers on a disconcerting 2km west/east diversion to Easter Mandally, it tells you to ignore the sign pointing to the main road north over the river, strike east towards the loch instead and look for a way through the grounds of Glengarry Castle Hotel. Which led via a fairly unmagical mystery tour to an unwanted couple of miles up the main road when I was probably close to getting back on the right track before stubbornly following a vestigial path through the undergrowth to avoid said road after crossing the river by the old (?) bridge. So it might yet be a good route when done as planned (need to try again some day) but wasn’t when done as done! :-O

Not much to say about yesterday’s Ben Nevis Race except that my time on a cold, wet and windy day was 3 mins 19 secs slower than my best and 3 mins 36 quicker than my worst. Think (running without a watch) I was probably on course for a PB at the top but just couldn’t find the pace to see it home over the easier ground and hated road below, so now wondering whether it’s time to call it a day when (with all my times within such a narrow band) I’m realistically never going to break two hours:

2012 2:11:41
2011 2:15:17
2010 -------
2009 -------
2008 2:08:35
2007 2:12:26
2006 2:08:22
2005 2:10:43
2004 2:13:55

With thanks to Noel Williams for the photos, invite to the LMRT barbecue and bed for the night! :-)

While the 2012 Coll Half-Marathon always promised to be special in ‘moving’ from the old village hall to the new centre at An Cridhe, it was doubly so for us with the whole ‘Glover’ family (Duffs, Duggans and McBrydes) having contributed to the fundraising and an inscription in memory of my grandparents within this wonderful building. So it was with extra excitement that Eileen, Donald and I travelled to Coll last weekend, and here’s what we wanted to see most:

Now, I do have to admit to everyone that a requested last-minute change (for which we never saw a proof) to the date format hasn’t been implemented exactly as expected. But, since the inscription’s still complete in both sense and spirit, looks great up there and most folk will never spot the difference between 1953–67 (with en dash) and 1953 – 67 (with hyphen), that’s enough (maybe already too much?) said about that. And what a fantastic building this is, with stunning use of space, orientation and light, and how good it feels to have helped (in however small a way) to make it all possible!

So (with more interior pictures to come below) how did the race go? Well, to cut a long story short, that’s three times now I’ve run Coll, three times (the only three in my half-marathon career) I’ve been over 1:40, and a new 2012 PW of 1:42:43 when (intentionally running without a watch) I was hoping/expecting to be told I’d done about 1:37 or 1:38. Or, to put it another way, I was 29 seconds slower than last year when Donald improved by 26 seconds to record 1:45:58 and should therefore be beating me a couple of years hence! So maybe time to put a more positive spin on things (for me anyway because Donald’s rightfully quite pleased) by noting that we came 25th and 35th respectively from 156, with only four runners sub-1:30…

No time/space here to talk about the ceilidh except to note that Eileen’s injured foot (so did Keith stand on it or not during the Canadian Barn Dance?) prevented her from accompanying Donald and me to Torastan to see Grandpa’s grave on Sunday, so hope she’s OK again now!

And, with the Coll Half-Marathon already a week ago and me also wanting to get in a quick word about this weekend’s Polldubh Club Ballater Meet, I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got to say about Coll right now although I hope the photos of the lovely An Cridhe largely speak for themselves.

Now, the Ballater weather was no match for Coll, but Geoff, Bob M, Mark and myself all enjoyed contrasting hill days yesterday with me taking on the meatiest challenge in running the three Munros, seven Tops and one deleted Top of the White Mounth to ‘mop up’ this mini-range of which I’d only done the Lochnagar summit (Cac Carn Beag) before and that way back in January 1983 (so, yes, it’s time I got back and climbed some routes there!). And here I rather messed up by letting myself get dysfunctionally cold in wind, rain and poor visibility before digging out my jacket, gloves and compass after a second, unintentional visit to Cuidhe Crom on the way back from Meikle Pap (never told the kind people who tried teaching me how to use the map and compass that I’m a Winter ML!) and making a much better job of the rest as I warmed up again. And you can see how much better my track looks after that (pretty clean over the rest of the White Mounth considering the cloud cover and gently rolling terrain) although I did miss the quickest way back to the Glen Muick car park (dashed blue ‘track’) with the map now packed away and the potential extra distance not enough to persuade me to stop and get it out again with my goal in sight.

So the 2012 Devil has come and gone with a personal performance more in line with realistic expectation (7½ to 8 hours given current shape and weight) than aspiration (sub-7 surely being possible on the right day). But how it hurt to find myself struggling desperately over my home patch (the hills either side of Kinlochleven, which I’ve run literally hundreds of times)…

Things started well enough, running as planned without a watch and purely by ‘feel’, with sub-7 still apparently very much on after an opportunistic time check (at 3 hours 20 mins in, my first of the race) from Marco on the way up the Devil’s Staircase. But then the wheels just fell off completely between the twin summit cairns and the top of the Lairig Mor at Tigh-na-sleubhaich as I started to feel quite sick (struggling to drink let alone eat!) with legs tying up badly, giving serious thought to pulling out at Kinlochleven, taking several uncharacteristic sit-down rests and losing (I’d guess) a good 10 places and 30 to 40 minutes over that spell. So thank goodness for that Irn Bru from the Wilderness Response Team at the top of the pass and flat Coke and jelly babies from Claire Rumgay at Lundavra in helping to drag me back to some kind of life, retrieving (I think) three of my lost places, finding the kick down Glen Nevis that’s never failed me yet no matter what my state on passing Dun Dearduil and finally recording 7:41:54 for 18th place.

So why was my race so effectively wrecked by such hell on home ground? For sure, it was hot and I struggle with the heat, but it was hot for everyone. Perhaps I could have been fitter and certainly could have been lighter after struggling to meet my target weight and going into the race a good two or three kilos heavier than I’d wanted (on which note, if only I could have started at the weight I find myself this morning!). Perhaps I set off too quickly when gradually winding up the tempo off a steady start is more my thing, but you’re not going to run a fast Devil by dawdling to Bridge of Orchy and over Rannoch Moor. And perhaps, as much as anything, I was handicapped by dehydration and gross underfuelling, with two gels (three if you count one at the start) and single-figure quantities of jelly beans and babies being literally all I ate between Tyndrum and the Fort. But that’s ultra racing for you (does it ever go entirely to plan?) and my own slight disappointment at ‘underperforming’ is certainly tempered by happiness for the achievements of my many friends on the course including Thomas and Debs (such popular winners of the men’s and women’s races) and a healthy Lochaber AC contingent all (or mostly?) running their first ultra.

Huge thanks also to Eileen for support before, during and (perhaps when needed most of all) after the race! :-)

While I’d quite fancied a trip to the western Cairngorms for the Glen Feshie Munros yesterday, I was late to bed, late to rise and the forecast wasn’t that encouraging, so headed out after lunch to mop up a couple of annoying ‘singletons’ instead. The first being Meall Chuaich above Dalwhinnie, which Irvine Butterfield described as:

A boring hill with an equally drab outlook. Its main merit is that it can be climbed quickly.

To which I can only add that his assessment’s probably about right although, with ‘boring’ (as so often) translating to ‘good for running’ and ‘quickly’ in this case proving to be 10:58 miling from van to van, there simply wasn’t time to get bored!

Now, there are Geal Charns (White Hills) everywhere, they’re typically pretty undistinguished too and the one at the west end of the Monadh Liath is typical, though I might qualify that by noting that it’s both harder work (rougher terrain) than Meall Chuaich and not at all obviously white. Choosing to attack it via Bruach nam Riodag rather than the direct ascent of Beinn Sgiath (which looked all ‘wrong’) suggested by Butterfield, my hopes of getting round at sub-15:00 mile pace were finally dashed by a tortuous clifflet-dodging descent not far south of his line taking me a good couple of minutes-per-mile over that when a little further south again would retrospectively have been far better, but I was still able to hit the remaining track down Glen Markie at a good clip to recover to 15:48 pace for the round.

All in all a good day out with clearer, drier (if also warmer) conditions than expected, and you can see in the final map why I’m glad to get those two done with the triangles, circles and squares being Munros, Tops and Deletions respectively (still stacks of uncoloured stars for Corbetts here, though). Should be my last ‘big’ day before the Devil, but think I’m in reasonable shape for that now if I can just stay sensible over the final week!