Day 0 - Heading north
Imogen Boddy has just set a new world record for the fastest female to run the National 3 Peaks and between them, doing over 680km in just over 6 days 5 hours - a phenomenal feat of strength and grit. I followed her challenge through Instagram and her tracker every day, and was using it as motivation and to get ideas for the training and prep I should do for my attempt.
I spotted Imo had done some longer easy flat runs and some more intense hilly runs in the weeks before her record so I thought I'd do something similar leading up to the 9th. I have tried to focus on getting enough ascent in my runs to make sure my legs can handle the hills, and set myself the task of doing 2000ft of ascent last Saturday as my last difficult run, then an easy flat 10 miles 2 days later, with my last 3 mile run on Wednesday then I can just trough as much food as possible for 3 days and I'll be good!
On the hill reps run I noticed twinges of shin splints for the first time in 2 years, changed how I was landing my foot and it went away but was unnerving. Cautiously I did the 10 mile run on Monday but felt it again 3 more times, running flat and easily. The advice if you Google it is to rest for 6-8 weeks, it's a stress of tissue around the shin from muscle/ligament tension and if ignored can lead to stress fractures of the bone which takes much longer to recover from (as someone from work had just found out!).
I didn’t know how bad it is, whether it's a show stopper, whether it will go away, if I should do my last training run to see how it feels or maximise the rest and do nothing, I was very uncertain. I spoke to a few friends and family, tried to get a physio appointment, and took to resting my legs, icing the shin, wearing a compression sock and using ibuprofen gel for a few days. If I don't do this now it'll be 2026 before I'm back and fit enough again to try so it is what it is. The next time I'm going to run will be tomorrow morning, with my kit on my back, from St Bees Head. Within a few miles I'll know whether I can run still, within the first day I should know if I can keep going, but at the moment it's fairly uncertain.
So, I've borrowed a van from some very generous friends, my dad has packed his support crew kit in and we're on our way north past the Appleby Horse Fair to see how we get on!
There may be a slight delay with the tracker link from my watch being live each day as it's a manual task a friend has agreed to do for me, the coding to automate was beyond my wit.
Next stop is St Bees Head for a pizza and catch the last sunshine for the next few days as I'll be greeted in the traditional lake district fashion from tomorrow - with rain.
