Ep 25 - Northern Traverse Next up for Kev

Kev is tapering at the moment for the Northern Traverse, which is the non stop race across England from Coast to Coast. In this episode Kev gives some background as to how he got to this longest ultra run of his life. He also provide some background to the event and his training preparation for it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I can see it. Next Aid Station.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hello, and welcome once again to the Aid Station podcast. This is episode twenty-five, and it's a Northern Traverse special. It's March the 23rd, and I'm in my taper period about 10 days out from when the Northern Traverse starts on April the 1st. The Northern Traverse is the well-known Wainwrights Coast to Coast route that runs across England from St B's in Cumbria to Robin Hood's Bay in Yorkshire. It's an event that's been taken over by Ourea events. They had the first running under them in 2022. There have been two versions before that, 2016 and 2018. The route goes 190 miles across the country or 300 kilometres through the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales, and across the North Yorkshire Moors. It has 6,500 metres or 21,300 feet of elevation. The highest point on the route is Kidsey Pike in the Lake District at uh 780 metres or 2,560 feet. I know it'll be a professional operation because I've done three or ear events before and they're all really well run, very uh well-drilled, well organised uh events uh and a great bunch of volunteers that always turn up to these, so I'm really looking forward to that. The northern traverse runs in parallel with a shorter Lakes Traverse that covers this first 60 miles from Sabiz to Shap, but we carry on the ones doing the Northern Traverse, of which there are 105 entrants. So it could be a little bit lonely at times once we get beyond Shap. Um they I think they start the Lakes Traverse at 7:30 and our event at 8.30. So we're probably not going to pass too many of the people doing the shorter event. I wouldn't have thought, or I won't be. Uh, the people at the front probably will be, but I won't. The advantage of this 8.30 star is that last year it started at 10.30, so we've got two extra hours of daylight, which I'm quite pleased about. That'll reduce some of the head torch running, I hope, at night. Of course, it all depends on how long it takes me to get across there. Uh, the race has generous cutoffs and has got a total of four and a half days to get through it and get it completed. I thought I'd give you some idea of the targets that I'm gonna be aiming at. Uh, it's quite difficult to estimate this one, and it'll be my longest ever continuous uh event for distance and time, and it a lot of it will depend on hitting the support points at the right time and the refueling rest and sleep timings and how long I'm gonna take for those. There are, I think there are about four points that you can sleep at along the route, and the first of those I think it's Patterdale, uh, and then Kirkby, Stephen, Richmond, and a new uh last point which they've moved is Lord Stones. Actually, it used to be at the Lion Inn, which is a small inn high up on the North Yorkshire Moor, is very exposed, and I think the tens got blown away from there last year when they did it, so they've moved it back a bit. Um, and that means a very long last leg section. I'll give you the legs later on in the podcast. Uh, but uh this is just trying to get to a point where I can decide how far, and I'm hesitating like this because I don't know um where to pitch my targets at for this race, really. Um I've had no chance to recie any of the routes. Uh, yes, I've been to Richmond on holiday, I've been to Robin Hood's Bay and Grossmont, where the North Yorkshire Railway is, on separate holidays. Um, and I ran about two or three miles on the route past the Blacksail Pass Youth Hostel in the Lake District on the Great Lakeland 3 day last year, but that was about it. Um, and I wasn't even supposed to be running past there. I came off the mountain early with Paul Telford on that day, and we happened to be on the route I noticed that uh we're taking for this crossing or the Wainwrights route. It's gonna be I I didn't know really where to start, so um I looked through past results to see what people were doing, and fortunately, in the 2018 results, they listed in roughly 10-year age groups, and uh that gave me a bit of an indicator because I'm 65 years old, and there was a guy called Alan Jackson uh who was in the in the 60 bracket, I don't know how old he was exactly, uh, but he ran it in 78 hours and 37 minutes, which would appear on what evidence I can find to be the fastest uh that age group, and there wasn't anybody older than the M60 group, so I guess he's the fastest old geezer, if you like. Uh maybe he doesn't mind me calling him that. So that was a point to start with for me. Uh and I was thinking, well, maybe that's quite ambitious. Um, I also noted that a former member of Heart Roadrunners, my road uh running club, uh called Javid Bati, who many of you may well have heard of, um he is a serious hard man ultra runner, he's run the winter spine race. Uh not only that, he turned round and ran back, uh not in the event obviously, but under his own steam. Uh, and he completed this year the Yukon Arctic Ultra, I think it was 430 miles. So he's used to a bit of long distance stuff. Um, and it took him 84 hours and 41 minutes to uh complete the Northern Traverse last uh last year's running of the event. I mean, of course, that doesn't mean anything. Jarvid may well have just been taking it easy and trading for uh the Yukon Arctic Ultra. So, yeah, again, it's difficult to know where to pitch it without ever having run that far. Of course, a lot with these things, a lot of the stuff that's going to be difficult is you know what your body can take, where you are mentally, uh, how much sleep deprivation you can cope with, um, and all those are fairly unknowns for me. I mean, I've done a few events where I have been sleep deprived, and the longest I've been is about 31 hours without sleep. So I also, in trying to hone it down, like the simplistic figure of 72 hours or three days, which is very, very uh ambitious for me, I would say. But what I like about it is that it equates to 20 hours running or walking or movement forward movement, uh, and four hours rest each day. And three of those hours I was thinking would be in one sleep in Inverted Commons. And when I say sleep, I mean a lot of the stuff I find is the prep around actually getting to sleep, uh, getting out your bedroll, setting uh your uh sleeping bag, basically looking after your feet, getting some food down you, and actually getting some shut eye and then waking up and reversing the whole process. Uh, hopefully not on the food, you don't want to be reversing the food again. Um although you may need to get rid of some of it in in some way. So that would all amount to three hours, leaving an hour for other um uh support point stops along the way. So I quite liked 60 hours of movement time and 12 hours of refueling, rest, recovery, or sleep. So I think what I'm gonna do is go out uh with this overly ambitious target, uh, not to race it, but just to see where I get uh on that timescale. So the plan would be to go out and not sleep for about 21 hours, uh, which would then put me sleeping around about four o'clock, four thirty, and get three hours sleep when it's dark, and then get out again in the daylight and go again, and then let my body uh well, not my body, let my mind dictate how long to go before the next sleep. Um, and I say that because it'll be the mind that will dictate this whole thing. Um, the body will get told what it uh has to do. Um, of course, these uh stops or the first sleep stop may not coincide with where I'm at in relation to the support points where the sleep sleeping facilities are. So I'm gonna have to work around that one. But it's I've just found it so hard to actually schedule that in without knowing you know what the weather conditions are gonna be like, what the ground conditions are. I mean, I can guarantee it's gonna be horrible underfoot. They've not long since the snow melted, I think, certainly in the lake district and up on the North York Moors, probably. Um, and there's been rain since, a lot of rain since, so it'll be bog land up there, no doubt, so that'll be slower going. To give you a bit more idea about the race, here's some past race stats. Um, over the last three iterations of the event, there's only been 189 people that have finished the Northern Traverse, and the first two events had quite small fields, they were only had about 50 uh runners in each event, and uh but they had very small uh DNF rates. Um, I think the first one had about six DNFs, and the second one five out of fields of 51 and 54, I think. So that was only you know just over 10-11% dropout rate in those. And then when uh Ourea Events took it over in 22, they almost trebled the size of the field that started, and there was about 140 odd uh took off at the start, but um it also saw a 30% DNF rate. Now that could have been down to the weather, the fact that the 2022 event was four years after the 2018 event, so there might have been quite a build-up of people that fancied having a go at the event. Um, this year there's only 105 of us on the start sheet, so the numbers have dropped a little, and it's probably now because it's becoming an annual event this is happening. So it's difficult also to pitch how tough it is. I mean, as I said earlier, the the cutoff rates are quite generous, so I'm not expecting to have any issues with DNF other than uh with it being injury related or me going off too fast and blowing up, I guess. Uh, but I'm hoping not to do that. So I thought also another thing that I might do is give you an indication of how I get to this point uh of running a non-stop distance like this. Um I know a lot of listeners to this podcast are fairly new to Ultra or maybe just getting into it and are very happy with their runs up to 50 miles, and maybe thinking, how do I get to a point where I'd want to do something uh as long as running across England or down the uh spine, the dragon's back spine of Wales? And I guess some are uh are just I say just happy to go the hundred miles, but what makes someone go further? And I'm saying that because I've been asked a lot, you know, you get the usual stuff the people that don't run ultras uh you know, why the hell would you want to run that far and a marathon's far enough? And it's always something that's quite difficult to address, and I think it's something that's just built up over time. Um I and I definitely think it's a time-related thing in two ways. One, uh it's the amount of training background history that I have, and I think that others have that go these distances, and also for me, uh I've been retired for two or three years now, uh, and it's given me the time to put in to the extra training that you need to do to get up to these, and I'll get on to training load and what I've been doing for this uh in a minute. But I started back in 2015 with an event called Endure 24, which was based near Reading. It was a team event, and I ran in a club team, and we had we had a team of five, uh, and it was alternate, I think, five mile laps over the 24-hour period, and I ended up doing 35 miles in the first year, and through various reasons of dropout in the second year, I ended up doing 40 miles, and it was at that point uh that having done 40 miles in the 24-hour period with lots of rest in between. I started to think about how much I could do on my own and how far I could go. And then in 2016, I actually did a 12-hour event and covered 60 miles, so uh that was on a flat course, of course, but um that's really what triggered this whole very long running distance uh stuff for me, and uh so I've been doing ultras, I guess, seven years now, uh, and in that seven years I've done 17 uh ultras, including two multi-day ultras attempts at the Dragon's Back twice. Uh I don't I would only count one of those because I was only in for a day and a half on the first one, and the Great Lakeland 3 Day, which is a three-day event uh that I did last year. Uh, and out of those 17 events, I've had seven DNFs, um, but they all go into the experience box um and they all count in terms of accruing the mileage, the elevation, the learning experience that you have with ultras, and so I'm not afraid to DNF uh because I see them all as a learning experience. Um, and uh I know I don't see them as failures, I'm not a word afraid of the word failure, which is uh why I take these things on, uh not afraid to take on something that I'm not sure I can finish. So you only really fail if you stop trying, and uh even if I DNF or fail, uh I get back up and uh try again and learn from the mistakes or issues that happened and keep going with it, which is what's happened off of this one actually with the archivatrician. And with that, uh as you know, I did the archivatrician in January. I DNF'd, I did 57 miles, but they were all 57 miles that have been really useful for this next event. So from that, I'll get on to my training for this race. The Northern Traverse is my A race this year. Um, so after recovery from Dragon's Back race last September, I resumed proper training again in November. So I had uh two months off uh before I started uh lifting the hours on feet or mileage again uh in November. I have done a total of sixty-six uh run sessions. They have totaled a duration of a hundred and forty-nine hours and twenty minutes, so nearly a hundred and fifty hours uh of time on feet. I've covered one thousand one hundred and ninety-six kilometers, so nearly twelve hundred kilometres, uh, which is seven hundred and forty-three miles. I've taken on nine thousand one hundred and six metres of elevation, which is uh sixty-two thousand six hundred and eighty-three feet. These all sound like very big numbers, but uh when you listen to what some of the other people are doing at the sharper end of the race, or the younger, uh fitter ones than myself, they're doing some huge elevations each month, up to uh 10,000 metres, some of them, especially those that live abroad in the Alps. It's very difficult in Hampshire to get that sort of elevation, but I'm very happy with the totals I've done. Um my longest what was my my longest uh duration in the month was the month of February, uh, where I did 53 hours and 13 minutes of work. My highest elevation was also in that month, which was 4,047 metres. So my um longest run session uh was a 37 miler, uh, and I've done uh in that five month period, I've done about um five or six runs of 20 miles or so. So those have been my longest distance. Uh I have done no back-to-back runs. Uh I find at my age that it's much better to get recovery um before going out and doing the next longer stuff. Uh, another thing I've learned is to put a coffee stop in the middle of my runs. So all of my 20 milers would have had a coffee stop in them. Uh, well, really, some of them, even a 15 miler, sometimes I run out to a place called Farnham near where I live, have a coffee, and run back. And I found that much more relaxing. Uh, a better run the second half better because of the bit of recovery time. Um, and it's quite a good, it's not unlike you would do in an ultra anyway, in terms of I mean, not necessarily sitting down having a coffee, but you would take walking breaks a lot more than you do out on training runs, and you would take time to eat. So I think that's all good. It keeps me going anyway, and keeps me mentally much more attuned to the actual session. I don't uh do any speed work at all. I've cut out all the speed work just so that I can uh endure the sessions better on the longer runs, and I do very little threshold work in the way that you would to do uh for 10k up to marathon pace running. Um, I'm not recommending that for everybody. I've just found that um with this uh northern traverse with a long nonstop distance, I've focused much more on spending my time. uh on on feet running long uh and uh have found uh thought that'd be have little use for threshold work in terms of keeping maintaining the longer speed i'm not saying don't do threshold sessions and of course if you're at the sharper end of the race you will be doing those and you'll be doing speed sessions and you'll be running marathons as well probably some of them but uh not for me uh so all my focus as I said has been time on feet in the preparation for this I'm not going to talk much about diet because everybody has a different approach to this um aurea events are all vegan uh in terms of their catered element of the events which I'm quite happy with I can eat vegan I'm actually pescatarian if I had to pigeonhole myself I certainly don't eat any uh red meat or chicken or pork or anything like that. So no special dietary needs just uh been working out what to take as mountain food as it were what I'm taking in my pack it won't be anything different than I've always done in the past haven't found anything new that I want to do so I think once you get to that point you just stick with what you know and if anything goes wrong and it normally does I mean sometimes you can work out the best thing that you've ever tasted on a 20-30 mile run and then when it comes to the actual event for a different reason especially the longer they go the more sleep deprived you get uh you don't actually like that thing and you just have to try and get something else down but obviously the key is to keep fueling especially on a run of this distance okay on to kit requirement well I have all a kit mainly uh from the two dragons back races that I've done um again Aurea events very similar in their approach uh and what you should be carrying with you in terms of mandatory kit the only thing I've changed is I've bought a new backpack which is a Montaiggio 20 litre um I've done this so that I can take uh more gear with me because even though the Dragons back race you could be out on the mountain uh for a 16 hour day each day you are still getting back into camp at 10 o'clock and you can't start again till six so that is eight hours stop now you might no matter how you look at it you're gonna be doing all sorts of camp admin and stuff and spending some time on your feet but you are stopped you are not actually really racing although it's all part of the race obviously uh camp admin and feeding and fueling refalling and sleep but you know you're still only going to get three or four hours sleep unless you're at the front of the pack and of course as I always say this podcast for mid to backpack runners so the difference with that is that I'm not going to be getting the eight hours in any sleeping situation as I said earlier it's more likely to be three or four max in terms of stop so the important thing is getting back to the pack is that I need to carry more warm weather uh stuff I think I'm gonna be out there longer I'm certainly going to try and keep moving for 20 hours straight off the bat anyway so I want to be able to carry more with me and I had a 12 litre pack before so that extra 8 litres is going to make quite a difference obviously it's gonna be a bit heavier and I haven't even packed it up yet I haven't done any uh kit prep mainly because it's all in a box since the Dragonsback race it's all stuff ready to go but I do need to get it all packed up and weigh it and just know what it's like and I will go out on a practice session run with the pack. I actually wasn't quite sure of what the setup was going to be and um Ollie who I previously interviewed on this podcast on the uh 2021 Dragonsback race uh he suggested he's doing the Northern Traverse as well is the only there were two people in the race that I know Oliver Harrison and uh a chap who I'm going to call Fumiyaki san because I can't remember his first name but the Japanese chap that uh on day two of the Dragonsback race I ended up um meeting up uh out in the Molwins where we turned round in horrendous weather and came back uh ending that uh day two for us but I'm looking forward to see him again at the race. Anyway back to Ollie he was saying that um he's get he's going with an OMM front pouch. Now these are the types of uh pouches that you'll see people in the spine race using a lot um I should be using it as a nose bag and somewhere to put my map it's I don't know what the capacity of it is about oh I don't know two or three litres I suppose uh but I think this will be quite a useful thing again for keeping on the move over long distance and keeping moving on time so I think that's a great suggestion from Ollie I'm also meeting Ollie on from the logistics side Ollie's kindly uh offered for me to stay at his house he lives near Sheffield on the way up which will be very good so uh I'm going to do that and stay with him back to the kit in terms of the kit uh we get uh a 15 kilo drop bag uh which will have my sleeping mat sleeping bag and spare clothing and stuff in it uh and there's a 5kilo finish bag so you can put some clothing into a bag that you can meet at Robin Hood's Bay for the finish. When you get to the finish also there is more uh accommodation for sleeping or the tents will be there so if you arrive in the night you can sleep uh during out to the mornings before you have to set off and find your way back home again. I am definitely preparing for cold weather cold and wet weather it's going to be really important I do suffer with a cold um so I'm going to be getting well layered up and I think when you add in sleep deprivation and potentially being underfueled in an underfueled state because of just getting food down you and remembering to keep eating which I'm not very good at you could end up very cold very quickly so I'm quite uh uh concerned and aware about that and making sure that I've got that covered off on my feet I'll probably take two pairs of shoes I'm gonna wear the usual Lasportiva Akashas certainly for the whole of the lake district section which is about 60 miles to get across there to Shap and then I might transfer over to the Hokus Speed Goat 4s um for the Yorkshire Dales North York Moor section but we'll see how that goes I will be taking my new Lecky poles that uh had a try out at Archivetrition um definitely won't be out without going with our polls on this event uh in terms of logistics I'm going to be uh as I said seeing Ollie in Sheffield and then we're both travelling up on the Friday from there to St B's I'm staying overnight in a hotel and Ollie's camping brave man I always decide that I want a decent bed the night before a race hoping to get plenty of sleep because that could be the last of it for quite some time. At the other end on logistics coming back all depends no idea all depends when you finish I haven't bought a ticket for a return journey I've decided I'm just gonna suck it up um pay on the day and I shall probably travel back from Scarborough and get the bus from Robin Hood's Bay to Scarborough and the train home. Another thing I should mention is um I am fundraising again for free to be kids which is the charity that I raise money for on the original Dragons Bat race I did. This is a great charity based out of London that to take kids out into the countryside who come from uh difficult backgrounds uh have difficult uh lives growing up are known to the social services and free to be kids really help them get out uh to meet other children discover themselves uh and find their way in the world a bit better so if you are of a mind to help me out get across the country because all this gives me motivation to get there and uh thoughts for them because I can make these choices and they often can't so it's nice if they can uh get a chance to get out to the countryside uh and get that choice to do that uh so uh I do have a site on enthuse.com if you want to look up enthuse that's en thus eM and then look up Kevin Munt uh you'll find me there somewhere and uh there's also it'll be in the show notes below a link to that site uh if you'd like to make any small donation that would be great thanks very much I know you all do lots of running and fundraising while you're at it lots of people but uh it's uh always nice and encouraging for me and it'd be great to get to a target I've got a target of 500 pounds I'd like to raise for them so anything would be greatly received so uh in conclusion uh I have four targets for this race uh a target would be sub 72 a B target would be sub 7830 C target sub 84 and a D target would be just to get the flipping thing done and I hope to do that I hate to think that I'd uh DNF this one unless it is of course through injury I'm hoping not to have any more facial reconstruction surgery or dental surgery on this race be nice to get through an Aurea event without any type of injury for a change and also you can track me on open tracking also I'll add that into the show notes that'll be below. You can find them via the open tracking app as well and I recommend you get that if you're into dot watching or if not get them find them online. My race number is number 66 I was hoping to get 65 that'd be my age but I got 66 so that's where you can find me. So in nine days time I'll be selecting my pebble from the beach at the Irish Sea at St B's to carry across England and drop it in the North Sea at Robin Hood's Bay So until I get round to making the podcast I will be podcasting along the way on the Northern Traverse until then I'll see you at the next aid station this is Kev saying bye for now to the next bloody hate station