D+1 – Finished the OMM, sore, aching but happy…

Well I’m back from this year’s Mountain Marathon and still in one piece albeit, with sore legs and an aching back. Probably due to running/walking for almost 11 hours and covering a distance of 50-55k over the 2 days!

Saturday morning – 9:58am start from Oakhampton Camp. Nearly missed the start due to a mix up over where the start line was but got there with a few minutes to spare. Set off in good spirits and quickly formulated a planned route that would take us up to Yes Tor and pick up some good points without going too far out. All was going pretty well but as we got more tired we realised that our fitness was going to mean a lot more ‘speed walking’ than running which meant our route was dangerously close to being too far for the 6 hours.

Still, we persevered and kept to our original plan which was still looking ‘doable’ even at the half way point which happened to be at our furthest distance from the finish. Unfortunately what we hadn’t allowed for was a particularly bad slog of about 4k across some pretty boggy moor with very few paths. This took us twice as long as we’d hoped and ultimately cost us 20 minutes which we never made up. All continued to plan but the going was quite slow in places and some of the ‘slopes’ were quite hard on our aching limbs.

We eventually got in sight of the finish and managed to jog in quite strongly but still came in at 6:21 which meant 42 penalty points – This was to cost us about 45 places as it turned out by the end of day 2. We still thought we stood a good chance of getting inside the top 100 but were horrified to discover we were 194th after day 1 – our moral took a bit of a hit!

So we decided to go out on Sunday and enjoy the day without putting too much pressure on ourselves. This proved to be a good tactic as we stayed within our limits and managed to pick up 240 points and even finish with 35 minutes to spare! Probably just as well as Mike was in quite a bit of pain due to pulling a muscle on the outside of his thigh after about 30 minutes of running on day 2. For once I was feeling really good and apart from having generally sore leg muscles I had no real injuries to complain about – yes I know it seems hard to believe!

So we jogged in cold and wet as the weather had been pretty bad in some parts during the previous 5 hours (luckily Mike had lent me his waterproof as I had somehow managed to leave mine out of the rucksack even though we went through the kit list the day before!) but even this didn’t dent our spirit. We later found out that we had came in 64th on day 2 which is pretty amazing considering our day 1 position. Final position was 128th but would have been 85 if we hadn’t been late on he Saturday. Still, we were really satisfied with the weekend and happy that we couldn’t have done any better.

I should mention our overnight accommodation – The Drew Arms in Drewstaignton, what a lovely little pub/guest house and the food was absolutely superb. I would recommend it to anyone in that area.

Best tip for anyone reading this thinking of doing a Mountain Marathon – take a Pot Noodle. It’s light, tasty and doubles up as a great mug afterwards. Thanks to the person that gave me the idea – whoever you are.

Oh well, time to relax now for a while – now, where’s those golf clubs…