Pyro's Yard v2.0

So this was an interesting one, in quite a lot of ways. The basic premise is a 50km Ultra, split down into 10 'circles', themed loosely on Dante's Inferno. Starting from 9am, run a 5km trail loop with a touch over 100m of ascent/descent, on the hour, every hour, for 10 hours. You can miss a lap by choice or if you are over the time for a lap, but if you do so you can't run the final 'Centre of Hell' lap, which unlike the previous nine, is an actual race (at least if you want it to be). Steve had spotted the event online, and sent me a the entry link in early February with a message saying "Fancy a laugh?" I decided that I did, so we both put entries in. Unfortunately, 6 weeks later he sent me a picture from a foreign hospital of his leg in a splint/moon boot, which meant I was probably flying this one solo... I'm never going to be one to say that I'm now a pro and Ultras come easy, but I wasn't overly nervous about this one - and I probably...

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...