Race to the Stones
Hellishly hot shuffle down the part of the Ridgeway from Lewknor to Avebury. Tremendously well organised and provisioned.
The course was really well marked with little arrows, "Not this way" signs and even kilometer markers all the way, I think: I missed spotting a few. I didn't once look at a map, although I'd spent ages setting up OS Maps on my phone with offline maps for the whole route. Apparently, it IS possible to get lost - a few people have done so in the past.
The Ridgeway picks its way through a lot of beautiful countryside, not much of which I saw because I was watching my feet: its surface is, in many places, horribly rutted⁽¹⁾ and was terrifically hard over the weekend. A lady fell just in front of me: she managed to cut her forehead with her specs and bash her nose on the ground. A few of us stopped to see what we could do but her friends had a first aid kit and insisted they were all fine and she was getting tidied up. I didn't want to join the League of the Fallen, so determined to be careful where I was going.
The ruts got spectacularly, foul-language-inducingly bad for a few miles near the end, descending to Avebury. Darkness didn't help. Earlier on, though―when it was spectacularly hot and sunny―in one place the track had been improved by covering it with glaring white, reflect-all-the-heat-up-at-you chalk, which levelled the surface off nicely but added to the appallingly high temperatures.
The 9 "pit stops" (every 7 to 13 km, the furthest apart being at the end, alas) sometimes had splash buckets, which were great for soaking the (everso trendy) floppy, red, cotton hat that went SO well with my pink shirt and purple hydration vest and mitigated the shocking heat. The pit stops all had toilets⁽²⁾ and plenty of food, including fresh fruit such as melon and watermelon; plenty of savoury options; the ubiquitous "flat coke"⁽³⁾; High 5 energy + electrolyte drink and, bizarrely, High 5 Zero, which comes sugar-free and calorie-free. I guess they hadn't thought about their target market.
Eating much other than fruit (the watermelon was especially good) wasn't possible until things cooled down, so I was relying on the energy drink and occasional gels to keep fuelled. I got it spectacularly wrong over the first two legs, only having water with me and not wanting any of the pork pies I'd brought, nor even the jelly babies, which was a first for me. At pit stop 2 I was pretty distressed but started loading one 500ml bottle with energy fluid of some sort and the other with water. Things got markedly better after that. It probably helped that I made an effort to drink more and got up to about a litre an hour, whereas it was probably only half that over the first 10km.
The horrendous heat forced me into walking an awful lot more than I'd have liked: particularly in full sunshine, I just started overheating and had to give up on the ultrarunner zombie shuffle. That meant that it would be a close-run (no pun intended) thing to beat last year's time, even though I'd stayed with a lady who'd stopped being able to run at all from about 50 miles.
The target seemed to be unreachable by the time I got to Avebury's stones with a mile or so left to the finish. Except that, when I got to within 1km of the finish and looked at my watch, I realised that it might just be on: as long as I could pull out about 5 or 10 minutes of implausibly hard running. Well, a decent shuffle would be the best I could do, so I gave it a shot and found a bit of a run up a grassy field to the end of a long, straight, tarmac drive. With the finish area in sight, I gave it my best and managed to do what felt like a sprint but probably looked like a drunken stagger, knocking about 5 minutes off last year's time.
What a great day! It was too hot, too humid, too hard underfoot and I was disappointed to find, amongst all the great things at the pit stops, Mark, who'd raced off with an ambitious but achievable target, only to struggle with the heat and finally put himself out of his misery by dropping out at "the devil's pit stop" at 66.6km. Of course, he'd been there for hours by the time I got there. Been there, done that (often): when the fun goes out of the run, put your feet up and look forward to the next one.
[tl;dr Quite warm jog along the Ridgeway]
⁽¹⁾ it's largely byway or restricted byway
⁽²⁾ Hurrah! Though I hadn't used them much - the heat was extracting all the fluids I could put in.
⁽³⁾ it was a minor surprise when I discovered that the coke wasn't so flat and ended up with a mouth full of CO₂
hellish