Race Day Part Four

Directly from the Aid Station, I was walking whilst enjoying the juiciest apple ever (or at least it felt like it during the heat), when I found myself walking alongside a female fellow participant.

A good chunk of about the next four miles was spent chatting to her, as one of her past achievement was doing the Marathon des Sables, a five-day multi-stage race in the Sahara desert - something I would never do due to the heat but I am always fascinated with reading about it.

As part of our chat, she mentioned she was going to walk this race and be done in 20hrs, which I responded with "that pace sounds pedestrian"......on a normal flattish path, it probably is but I struggled walking to keep up with her "pedestrian" pace, something I would referenced to her many a time during the race, particularly uphill where I would end being left behind and could only catch up when I choose to run.

Occasionally you could spot a field where the small copse of trees would have a crop circle around it.

 

These never-ending shallow inclines proved to me I am terrible at walking fast uphill - it would take until the latter half of the race to realise my best option was to run uphill as my running muscles were trained for, and my walking muscles were not trained for it.

If you merged these three photos together you would create a panoramic view - the first photo has a power station in the distance, and for sometime it would feel like all I was doing was moving a wide circular route around it.

There was a really sharp uphill directly after this short tunnel.

This sign like the other nine similar signs lie - it maybe just 1km but it always felt like the longest km in every section.....

At this point 27 miles had been covered, meaning everything from now on was a new running distance for me, and I was only 4.5 miles away from the half-way point.