Petestack Blog

So… with a week already slipping by since the big race to mull things over and post-mortems apparently all the rage (well, John Kynaston’s got two big blog posts of them!), I thought I’d try one too. But there’s really not that much to say apart from the one thing I was reluctant to highlight too strongly before, with me now thinking my performance was impacted (and possibly significantly) by the cold/infection I picked up the week before the race and still haven’t fully shaken off yet. (more…)

Another West Highland Way Race (my third and last as a competitor!), another mixed experience and another style of report to set alongside 2007’s dual-perspective runner’s/support crew narratives and 2010’s bullet-point summary… (more…)

Too many ‘what if’s in this all-your-eggs-in-one-basket, big-ultra game! So you’ve trained sensibly but (necessarily) obsessively for seven months to hit your best ultra shape ever and tapered conscientiously to be strong and fresh for the big day. But what if, you jokingly muse, it all goes belly-up through factors outwith your control? (more…)

Tapering for a big effort can be so hard to judge, being theoretically simple but practically affected by other (external/immutable) factors. So how do you score that two-day D of E expedition (Wednesday/Thursday) from Corrour to Kinloch in a ‘tapering’ context, being low-intensity but significant time-on-feet when tapering should maybe be more about maintaining the intensity and reducing the volume? (more…)