#mountain runner

Snowy Elidir Fell Run 07/02/2018

On Wednesday, a couple of days after the Kong Mini Mountain Marathon, I decided that I felt okay enough to get back up into the mountains. I’d been having a niggly little pulling sensation in my upper right adductor, letting me know it wasn’t happy by jabbing me with a bit of pain every now and again. Being a runner, I naturally was scouring the interwebs for ways to alleviate this. I’ve always…

A new event had arrived in North Wales. It is a breath of fresh air in fact, as most event organisers from England just want to ‘conquer’ Snowdon and exacerbate an already delicate situation on the mountain regarding erosion, litter and the thousands of people already walking up her every year. Local social media clearly shows that we are not overly happy with this. Anyway, I digress.

This was an…

Today I ran in my first mountain race, The Tromso Skyrace 20km. It was awesome.

I went into the race legitimately fearing that I would come in last place and let everyone decked out in full Salomon uniform intimidate me. Ha. But somehow I managed to finish in 3 hours 50 min, beating my goal of a 4-5 hour finish.

The first 5km were “easy” up and down hills. Then the real climbing began. The next 5km were up up up Tromsdalstinden, with the very top requiring some ungraceful scrambling. Reaching the summit was a little anti-climatic because it was SO  foggy that any views of the gorgeous Norwegian alps were totally obstructed. But still, I climbed a mountain today (:

If my scrambling on the way up was ungraceful, then my attempt at scrambling on the way down was downright ugly. Lesson learned- I need to practice technical terrain. I really lost a lot of time here.

The remainder of the race was beautiful. Rolling hills in the valley with plenty of streams to jump across (and in!). These rolling hills also kicked my ass after 15km.

Overall, I’m happy as can be. This weekend was a dream. Met people from all over the world who are as crazy about running and equally as passionate about spending time in the mountains as I am. Doesn’t get much better.

I cannot believe how anxious I am. I haven’t felt this strange since high school. 

I actually had a dream that I missed the race and watched from the airport as the runners made it to the summit.