Just Keep Moving Forward

After the beautiful sunshine of Guernsey in February, everything seems to have returned to seasonal norms this last week; cold, wet and windblown best describe me at the end of most of my runs last week.

Which makes me wonder what I was thinking when I decided on Tuesday evening to enter the Knighton 20 five days before race day, especially as the weather forecast for this weekend was not promising, with the possibility of snow, rain, sleet and hail. You really want every advantage possible when you've chosen to run 20 miles on "undulating" country lanes in March.

Knighton 20 Elevation Chart

For the Knighton 20, I was re-uniting with my long-run training buddy Julie - we've completed ultras and training runs in every type of weather but it's been a while since we've run together so I was looking forward to catching up and supporting each other to get round. Julie is running the London Marathon in April so this was an important training run for her (good luck with running and fundraising Julie, I know you will smash it - https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/JulieHolmes14) And I'm still trying to build up my miles in preparation for ultra challenges later in the year (watch this space).
So our plan was most definitely to take it steady - a long training run and not a race; we just wanted to get round. However, we both admitted to feeling unexpectedly nervous, perhaps for both of us beacuse it's a long time since we ran this far. Nervousness for me mainly involved waking up twice in the night worried about sleeping through my alarm, being completely indecisive about how many layers to wear and losing my running gloves somewhere in the house whilst getting ready.

But soon we were off and running; the forecast snow, sleet, hail and rain didn't materialise and the temperature was actually a bit warmer than expected and my optimism began to grow. We'd be ok. Somehow though, I'd been completely oblivious to the other part of the weather forecast, the part about really really strong winds.

Knighton 20 is three laps and it seemed that at all times, the wind was against us, blowing us sideways, blowing us backwards, blowing us off our feet. The wind seemed to get stronger and more of a challenge as the race continued; but the last two miles of each lap were definitely the most challenging conditions; it was almost impossible at times to stand tall and maintain forward momentum... and an abundance of muddy puddles just added to the fun!

How many words for windy?*

But keep moving forward we did…. at least it wasn't raining and the sun came out too.

Once on the final lap, we may have run out of energy for chatting but we knew we would get round, even if there was that one last hill to climb before the finish... I really hate that hill.

And we did get round.

Like every other run; you just keep moving forward one step at a time.

* Word cloud designed on Word Art