powderach

Transgrancanaria Advanced is an 89km trail race from Puerto de las Nieves in the north of Gran Canaria, to Maspalomas in the south. It's part of a festival of trail running with races from a vertical km up to the 126km Classic, which is the headline race. The Advanced took in some of the trails that Lindsay and I followed on a multi-day run across the island at the end of 2016. I had some lovely memories from this trip and was excited to race on the trails! It was my first big international race since 2019 and I had a dream goal of finishing in the top 10. I also wanted to finish before dark, and ideally in time for the 19:30 bus back, but mostly I wanted to finish feeling strong and happy.

I got to the start line of the Devil o' the Highlands Footrace feeling fit and strong. In fact this was probably the strongest I've ever felt running uphill. Training had gone well — no heroics, just lots of easy running, weekly hill reps, lots of tempo intervals. I signed up for coaching with Pyllon at the start of the year and have been working with John Connolly. I love it. I don't have to think about what training to do. I have a plan that I trust and that makes my life simpler, which in turn makes it easier to get out the door to train! Going into the race I felt better uphill than I've ever felt. I surprised myself on long runs by being able to add in tempo surges late on and still finish feeling good. I ran on the West Highland Way a lot to let my legs remember the terrain. I was confident in my fuelling plan (alternating between a gel and a bar every 45 minutes). I hadn't run for much over 4 hours in training so going the distance was certainly an unknown, but I hoped all the running I'd done before meant my body would remember. I wasn't feeling very confident downhill, especially on technical terrain. I blame this on all the postpartum hormones as I'm still breastfeeding, but I wasn't too worried as there aren't too many technical descents in the Devil. Overall I believed I could be competitive in the race!

I've read lots of stories of people who tried to return to running too quickly after having a baby, and had problems later. I hope not to have a story like this and have been erring on the side of caution. I started the NHS Couch to 5k program at 17 weeks post-partum. I'm currently in the middle of week 4. I'm finding it slow going, but it's giving me a good structure to avoid rushing back into running, and helping me work out where I can fit running in to life with a small baby!

After two years of being stuck at home over Easter I was excited to be able to have a four-day adventure again this year! At 30 weeks pregnant I was still running regularly but very slowly and only short distances, so going by foot wouldn't get me very far. I decided to cycle the Five Ferries route. People usually aim to cycle this in a single day. This sounds fun but quite stressful as you have to time it well for each ferry! I used Fiona Outdoors' excellent blog post to plan my route. My plan was to ride it over four days, which would give me plenty of time to explore, take the occasional detour, and not have to rush for ferries! The distances I planned were very unambitious: only around 20 miles a day. This was deliberate; I know I am prone to overdo it, which means I'm then very tired on subsequent days. I knew I would be able to ride 20 miles over a whole day even if I was super tired.