Pyro's Yard v2.0

I think this screenshot of a post-race WhatsApp conversation is a pretty good place to start this one. Green text is me, White is Rachel, who very graciously agreed to race with me again for this year's Open5 despite some early misgivings. I haven't had the best of starts to the year, with dental surgery and a niggling hip injury to deal with, but this race was far less of a trial for me than it was for star teammate Rachel: she broke her ankle very badly in August '21, and is still trying to get back to the sort of form she was on that summer. While she's back on a bike and in a boat, she's still struggling to run without the ankle seizing up or a fair amount of pain. On top of that, the last time we raced together three years ago, we spent a day trying not to get swept away by floodwater in the Yorkshire Dales, so didn't exactly have the best induction to the AR world even when uninjured. 1st February I was on her side of the city for a dental appointment, so...

So, finally getting round to writing up the Itera race. There's been a whirlwind couple of weeks since then to let things settle and crystallise a bit in my own head, which is probably a good thing!  When I've been asked about the race in the intervening weeks, there's been slightly different answers given each time, depending on how the question was phrased, so I'm going to slightly plagiarise a format from an Alan Affleck post about The Heb (which, incidentally, has been part of the whirlwind!): "How was the Itera?" Hard, but brilliant. Some absolutely gorgeous moments throughout the whole thing: seeing porpoises and a minke whale on the opening paddle; watching headlights on the hills and valleys around us as we bedded down for a few hours on our first night bivvy; the Via Ferrata up the Grey Mare's Tail at Kinlochleven was an awesome and (for me at least) pretty chilled-out stage; even the long, straightforward road ride from Glenuig to Fort William wa...

So, the history of this one goes back a while - a decade in fact. There's lots of little branches and tributaries that combine into this story, so it might be a bit long and rambling. Grab a brew and some biscuits if you're reading - or even if you're not. Biscuits and a brew is always a good thing. Starting with the oldest bit of backstory: Back in 2010 I went from pretty much no running at all, to completing Janathon in January, to upping my distance again in Junathon (in June, surprisingly enough), to running 50 miles with 5,000m of ascent in the Grand Raid des Pyrenees in the August - a pretty momentous change for someone who hadn't really done much running since they knackered an ankle in 2004. I kept it up for a while, but a year of niggling injuries I never got treated and a DNF on a repeat trip to the GRP ended my erswhile Ultra career at 1 out of 2. A bit more recently: Sometime in 2018 I started Orienteering again. I've discovered over the years I don...

I normally only blog about events, but there's been precious few of those happening in the past years, so I guess I have to make my own entertainment!  I've spent the last three days running/walking/jogging/shuffling the Leeds Country Way , a just-shy-of-100km lap round the outskirts of the city. This was supposed to be a shake-down for the Great Lakeland 3 Day on the May bank holiday weekend, but it's been postponed until August, so really it was just a way of using up some leave days and seeing how I coped with three solid days on my feet - no rushing, no racing, no major stress, just a way of getting out and about for a while. While the 'stay local' fit was maybe a bit tenuous, I can at least say I didn't leave the city! Day 1 - Golden Acre to Woodlesford - 37km, 6:23 https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/6484859223 Harewood House Mainly known trails, through Harewood and across the fields to Bardsey, ticking off the roads I was crossing as I meandere...

24hrs after finishing this year's Open5 and I'm still trying to mentally process some of what happened yesterday- hopefully writing it down will help with that! Despite the weather and everything going on around the UK with Storm Ciara, I'm not questioning any of the decision to go, to race, to head out into the teeth of it at all, I guess I'm just trying to get my head round the day as a whole and how it went. A very race-focussed summary would be "respectable distances, travelled a bit slow, didn't score many points" , but that summary would completely miss the point of the day and the whole gamut of experiences had during it, so we'll ignore times, distances and points for now and just get on with the writing. First things first - I was racing in a pair for once, rather than soloing like I usually do. Psychologically that usually makes it a little bit easier, having someone else to share the day with. The wrinkle this time was that it was my teamm...