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