Halfway there…

The picture I took the morning of the Kalisia Supermarathon at 04:30a.m. is a mixture of concern, sleepiness with a hint of panic. I was slightly distracted by the need to get myself some breakfast and navigate the logistics of getting to the race, hoping that the taxi I booked would actually show up. I tried not to think too hard about whether I would actually be able to complete the distance of 100km/62 miles, my first race of that distance. I also had a very painful memory of completing 50 miles twelve months previously, which rendered me somewhat unable to walk or raise my legs for a day and tried not to think about that too much, either. The 100km has been on my bucket list for almost a year, I remember reading the race reports from Kalisz and I really wanted to partake in that experience myself, not to mention the fact that in a weird way, this year my ultramarathon training took place alongside a very long and drawn-out job hunt and when I finally nabbed that longed-for position mid-September, I wanted something that would help me draw a line between the old and the new and signed on the dotted line, so to say. I did have some plan B ultras in mind just in case I wouldn’t be able to make it to Poland (as in not be able to afford it due to uncertain job situation) but the dream race all year has been the one in Kalisz. Once again, similar to my approach for Ladybower, I trained by running marathons and shorter ultras every two or three weeks combined with parkrun and loads of Les Mills classes (BodyAttack, BodyCombat and BodyPump). Somewhat unconventional but seems to be working in terms of giving me endurance and the ability to churn out miles “like a machine” as a parkrun friend says. Speed is a different story but I do plan to work on it over the winter.

I travelled to Poland on Wednesday as the race was to be interspersed with visiting family mostly in the South-West of Poland and quite conveniently, the nearest airport to Kalisz is in Wroclaw where quite a lot of my relatives happen to live. On Thursday, me and my mum who very kindly offered to provide support, travelled on the train to Kalisz, a little under three hours on the so called regional train. We stayed in a self-catering apartment at the Baba Hostel which worked out brilliantly in terms of central location and being able to cook. Whilst it turned out that there is a gastropub literally a couple of doors down from the hostel open 24/7 and serving quite decent grub, it was still nice to be able not worry about being able to prepare my pre-race breakfast from especially as Kalisz is quite a small town. Charming, though, which I could verify on Friday as we explored the Museum showcasing the past of the area and had a short walk round the park before collecting race numbers from the race HQ at the local council building. Race number in hand, we went back to the hostel to watch some rubbish TV and get some sleep – I needed to be in Blizanow for 6 a.m. the following day. Quite a few of race participants actually stayed there overnight as the race organisers offered an option of overnight stay in the primary school but I didn’t feel up to sleeping in a room full of strangers, maybe next time?

The taxi did show up on time and I made it to Blizanow by 5:45 a.m. My pre-race nerves weren’t helped by a weird cramp that suddenly gripped my legs as I was getting out of the car but thankfully, it disappeared after a couple of minutes, never to return. I went inside the school to see runners finishing off their pre-race morning rituals and chucking race provisions into the boxes that would be put at the aid stations in Blizanow, Jarantow and Brudzew (every 5k). I added my gels as well as some Cadbury’s chocolate pretzels to the box destined for Brudzew which ended up being my special treat during the race. At six, we all got on the buses that would take us to Jarantow, 5km away from the starting line which meant that the first loop was 10km taking us from Jarantow through Brudzew and then back to the starting line in Blizanow, after that we would be doing six 15km loops, with an option to retire from the race after four loops (for a 70k distance) or five loops (for 85km distance). Really dangerous option, so tempting in the later stages of the race as it is available to 100k runners as well. After we arrived to Jarantow, we had about 20 minutes to kill, fortunately the local supermarket happened to be open and the manager didn’t seem to mind having about half of the running party, fifty-odd runners huddling inside for warmth. There were a lot of bad jokes about downing a “setka” (i.e. a 100ml shot of vodka), given that the name of the race is “Kaliska Setka”, literally “Kalisz one hundred”. Needless to say, no alcohol was consumed but there was plenty of last-minute carb-loading. The start was a very unassuming affair, a quick briefing about the need to watch out for the cars as the roads were only partially closed and we just counted down from ten to one and then off we went. The first 10k were rather uneventful, I chatted briefly to a couple of people and in general enjoyed listening to other people taking about the Polish ultrascene, something completely new to me and there are some events such as the Szczecin to Kolobrzeg (147km) ultra that definitely piqued my interest.  As always, there were some interesting characters out there, for instance I chatted to a bloke who was an Ironman triathlete but entered the 100km because he saw somebody in a “Kaliska Setka” T-shirt at a race and decided to embrace a new challenge (and ended up being successful, even if his originally planned sub-10 hours time did not happen because his quads decided to give up after the fourth loop). As for me, I really had no idea what do expect, I did have a dream goal of sub-10 in the back of my head but halfway through the race that shifted to “just finishing would be great”J I did enter the race with a bit of an alphabet soup of goals – the “A” goal was the sub-10 one (the super, super dream goal is of being able to break 9:30 at some point in the future as this is the current 100km female record held by one of my fellow club runners and she is total legend, at the moment in her sixties and still running really strong). The “B”-goal was sub 11 (and I exceeded that by quite a lot), the “C”-goal was sub-12 and the “D” goal was well, just to finish within the cut-off which was 12 ½ hours (but I don’t think they were terribly strict on that as I saw some finishing times that were at around 13 hour mark). My survival method during the race was to think in terms of getting from aid station to another, sort of just another parkrun to go thing and make sure that I was eating and drinking. That bit was easy as the aid stations were manned by ever so helpful local primary school pupils and stocked with water, Coke, sweet tea and coffee and a real smorgasboard of refuelling options, some of them well, interesting. As in, there were sandwiches with fish paste and luncheon meat which felt a bit random, as did what looked like the Polish version of split pea and ham soup. There was more “regular” (whatever that means in ultrarunning context) fare as well which included an unlimited supply of Prince Polo wafers (Polish equivalent of Kitkats), raisins, chocolate, biscuits and so on. I could have done with some crisps but at least I’ll know for the future to bring some of my own provisions. Because yes, I am hoping to show up at the start of the Kalisia Supermarathon in the future.

The first two loops were a bit of a warm-up, and on the third one I really felt like I was flying and really enjoying myself, and making sure to remember the good times for when the bad times inevitably would come – something that ultras have taught me is that neither good times nor bad times will last indefinitely, so might as well enjoy the good patches while they last… And indeed, it felt like I started crashing really badly on the fourth loop which was the start of my first wobble but managed to pick myself up, changing from wet shoes into dry ones also helped as I started to feel some blisters coming on (but that was mostly my own fault, initially went with socks that were slightly too thin, a very painful lesson learnt!) due to soggy shoes as it rained intermittently. After the fourth loop, having covered 60km, I thought to myself “only a marathon to go”, funny how distance gets all relative… but having done a bunch of marathons as training runs in preparation for the 100km I knew this was a distance that felt familiar, even though I would shortly enter into a very unfamiliar territory as I had never covered more than 50 miles (about 80km) in race and was about to enter that foreign land towards the end of my fifth loop. That was also when I started hallucinating slightly, or at least mistaking lamp posts and road signs for people. Probably a by-product of the loneliness of the long-distance runner as from the third loop onwards I was mostly on my own and came in contact with other human beings only at aid stations so I am guessing my brain compensated for the need for company. At the 80km mark, as I entered the realm of previously unimaginable distances I somehow convinced myself to break the remainder of the race up into two 10ks, and just focus solely on what was ahead of me rather than the distance I had just covered as I stopped being able to comprehend how I was still capable of moving. A couple of times I felt like just letting my legs collapse and then the rest of the body would follow, but somehow knew I needed to stop entertaining those nice fantasies of ending up in an ambulance, no matter how tempting that felt at the time. The other thing I knew from all the previous ultras was that once I entered that level of pain, as long as it was only the dull pain of pounding my body against the pavement for hours on end, I was capable of going on for quite a long while. After all, I remember the pain coming on at mile 25 of the Run to the Castle ultramarathon, and somehow covering the remainder of the distance all the way to mile 42, just moving one foot in front of another, and actually mostly running as I knew from experience that the pain wouldn’t be any different if I started walking, the only difference was that walking took considerably longer (not that I am dismissing walking during ultras, I do subscribe to the principle of walking the ups to conserve energy and will definitely walk in a trail ultra). So I somehow kept going, from aid station to aid station, thinking to myself, OK, this is the last time I will see this aid station today, thinking to myself, I’m eating and drinking and moving forward and somewhere after Jarantow, 91 or so kilometres into the race, I once again thought to myself, the only thing that matters is what lies ahead and in that moment, this seemed to make some sort of profound sense. And then once I got to Brudzew and hit 95 km I knew I only had a parkrun to go and somehow knew I would be able to finish and started “speeding” up (in reality, probably going from something like over 10-minute miles to 9-minute miles or so, nothing to get too excited aboutJ) but I did overtake a bunch of people, including a pair of guys who looked at one another and I passed them, I overheard one of them going “a girl overtook us”, well, the pleasure was all mine. And then I got to the bit where you turned left to go into Blizanow, probably less than a kilometre left to the finish line, it was getting quite dark as it was after five o’clock already on a November evening and I was saying to myself “remember this, remember how it feels to finish your first 100km” and I kept running along the empty street, passing the buildings I saw many times that day, getting closer and closer to the moment where I could legitimately say I finished the race and there it was, the finish line, where my mum was waiting for me. Funnily enough, I stumbled into the aid station and grabbed some tea and bananas and the bloke there tried to encourage me to keep moving so that I didn’t stiffen up too much before my last loop to which I proudly showed him my medal and explained I wasn’t planning on any more running that day. My body wasn’t really on board with any walking either, as I quickly started stiffening up but fortunately, I wasn’t injured (I ended up at Ladybower 50 with a groin injury, something that I was really afraid of would reoccur if I ran a similar kind of distance again), just really trashed from running for over ten hours on roads. The night right after the race was quite painful and I did regret not having any painkillers with me as I found it really difficult to get comfortable and only got a couple of hours of fitful sleep. But overall, I was amazed at how quickly I bounced back and was able to move more or less normally after only two days and was back to running (only a couple of miles at a time) a week later and did my first post-race parkrun yesterday, i.e. two weeks after the race in a time that is relatively decent for me. In terms of future plans, well, that is a subject of another post but the next race is going to be a nice and short 10 mile Bloxwich Pudding Run, nothing too extreme…