Well who'd have thought it?

I am officially an Ultra-Runner :-)

Saturday 16th July I successfully completed the 40mile (65km) yes 40 miles, Clyde Stride

I haven't mentioned this before as I wasn't 100% sure I'd be able to complete it and didn't want to set myself up for a fall, but I am happy to tell you all about it now, any time you want, and over and over if necessary :-) Poor John he must be fed up of me coming out with random thoughts, memories or anecdotes...
Seriously though I couldn't have done it without his support, he was there at every checkpoint for me with nutrition, fluids, changes of shoes & clothes, kind words and even an ice spray at the last one :-)

40miles is an awful long way to try and retell so have a look at the website and have a look at the route maps etc there. The route goes from Partick Station in Glasgow city centre to New Lanark visitor's centre, with some fabulous but varied and challenging terrain in between. The Race Director - the wonderful Lee McLean states that the course undulates in parts - she tells lies!!! There are a couple of nasty hills and some really steep steps along the way.

We follow the Clyde Walkway for the whole race, it's worth doing as a walk even in manageable chunks if you don't fancy it all in one day, but the last half especially is quite stunning. If you want to know a bit more about the trail look at my previous blog post about my Long Run that turned into an epic adventure :-) This was the day that I ran the second half of the route as a recce...

Fortunately the temporary bridge had been opened in time for the race so I didn't have the extra 5 mile detour this time, although the two big fallen trees are still lying across the farm road near Carbarns Farm. Guess the farmer will get round to moving them when he needs access to the road.

I was very tired when I was finished, but on such a high I couldn't stop chattering on about it =:-0
Didn't sleep particularly well and then we'd another early start on Sunday morning to go to Dundee as John was running in the Half marathon. I managed to get a brisk 3-4miles walking in which helped my recovery and today I managed to get to the gym and do 3 miles on the bike, 1 mile walking on the treadmill and 5mins at the end jogging :-)
I'm not going to say anymore about it there's too much... oh and BTW it was supposed to rain all day and instead we had roasting sunshine!

I've included a few photos but there are more on the Clyde walkway site which do it better justice :-)