The trouble with fulfilling your dreams is that it leaves you with no dreams to fulfil. You have to pluck wildly for a new ambition, possibly something you very sensibly decided long ago that you never wanted to do. In my case, an ultra marathon. And not just any ultra marathon. I didn’t feel that 50k was significantly further than a marathon but I didn’t think it a good idea to go straight for 50 miles either, so I chose the most difficult 50k covered by my RunThrough season pass. It wasn’t just that I was too cheap to pay for a non-RunThrough event, I figured that if I hadn’t paid out for it then I wouldn’t feel all that crushing pressure to complete it – if training went wrong I could simply fuck the whole thing off, cancel my Travelodge and go to parkrun instead. Really I just wanted the fun of doing 30+km training runs all through the heatwave that would finish up in a place where I could buy ice cream. This is what passes for fun for me these days.
Box Hill, for the unfamiliar, is a summit in the North Downs. It is popular with the type of cyclists who like to cycle up big hills and with hikers. It is not terribly popular with runners because it is too hard to run up. The 50k features 1450m of elevation and tricky terrain. Some kilometres have over 100m of up or down all to themselves. It is incredibly steep and technical. It was hard enough that just finishing it would be an achievement, and that was what I wanted – not to worry about time or position, to do a race where completion itself was a feat.
The first kilometre or two was on relatively easy ground and it seemed quite surreal to think that there were fifty kilometres of this coming up. I wondered how they could actually fit a 50km race in such a small area – after all, if I set of from Box Hill and ran in a straight line, I could end up at home or in Worthing having an ice cream, both of which seemed like a better idea than running up and down Box Hill at various angles and still ending up on Box Hill at the end of it.
After 3km we hit The Steps. Obviously I had researched the route and I knew that Box Hill had stairs. I had been diligently training on the stair stepper thing at the gym, possibly one of the most boring pastimes known to man. But what I hadn’t prepared for (and I am not sure how I could, either) was going DOWN the stairs. Box Hill’s stairs aren’t like normal stairs. Each step feels like a five metre drop, though some are taller than others and some are wider and some are longer, so you can never get an even stride going. If you look closely they aren’t actually stairs at all, someone has just helpfully stuck bits of wood in the mud on a very steep slope, and I think the only purpose they serve is stopping people just curling into a ball and rolling to the bottom. The descent is 123 metres over 275 steps covering half a kilometre and it took me ten minutes to get down, during which it seemed that pretty much everyone who had been behind me overtook me. Seeing me faltering, stumbling and gingerly lowering myself down doing my best not to lose my balance people offered to help me, which was very nice, but what could they actually do? And besides I was supposed to be an ultra runner, not someone who needs help to get down some steps! I almost cried with relief when I got to the bottom in one piece and thought the saving grace was that they’d come early on when I still had my wits about me.
The next 27km was challenging, but not as bad as The Stairs. My plan had been to walk the ups and run the downs but I hadn’t bargained on the downs being so steep that I had to teeter precariously, making sure I had my footing before taking each step. I’m not even sure it counts as walking. I then had to run all the ups except the ones which were too steep to run otherwise I wouldn’t be running anything at all. The course took me up and down some hills, some of which I recognised as being near Mole Valley parkrun and the route we took on day Rob made me walk for four hours to get to an unremarkable vegan cafe. The views were lovely but I felt I couldn’t get a full appreciation out of them because I was too busy worrying about where to put my feet. Then just before 30k, oh joy, it was the stairs again. Going up was easy compared with going down, but then swimming the channel is probably easy compared with going down. The height of the steps made it extremely hard on the quads and I was quite puffed when I got to the top, which was lucky for the man who, thinking I was doing the 31k, cheerily told me “not far to go” as I got to the top. I’VE GOT ANOTHER 20 KILOMETRES!
Except for the steps, the steep downhills and the fact that I’d been running/walking/climbing/crawling for four and a half hours and barely broken the back of the race I still felt pretty good, so good in fact that I might have got a bit complacent going along a flattish trail path and crunch, suddenly I’d tripped over my own feet, but it was okay because I was landing in a bush and that would break my… oh fuck this is a blackberry bush…
I fished myself out of the bush and then fished out my sunglasses and headphones which had parted way with my head when I fell. The thorns had ripped my arm and my face and one had come about an inch from piercing my eyeball. There was blood running down my head from where I had bashed it on a branch and several thorns sticking out of my arm which I would spend the next few kilometres picking out. I could tell my brain was starting to go a bit funny after this, possibly due to the bang on the head. I felt very near to the edge of the path, which ran along a ridge, and scared I would trip again and fall down a ravine and have to blow the whistle that I’d complained about having to put in my mandatory kit to summon help. Or die. I kept mistaking leaves and twigs for things that they couldn’t possibly be, like Giant African Land Snails, and I realised that on the whole I wasn’t beating Box Hill, it was starting to beat me.
I hoped the last 10k would be kind. Surely they wouldn’t expect too much from us at the end? A nice little victory lap, I reckon. My friend Jo was kindly waiting to cheer me on at the marathon mark and she very nicely said I looked fresh and in good spirits. I think she might have meant to say “delerious and on the verge of collapse”. It was so nice to see her and I was very grateful to see a friendly face. But obviously I couldn’t stick around and chat for long as it was already pretty late and I had no idea if I was last and preventing all the marshals from going home. It’s very hard to get a sense of where you are in relation to the other runners as you almost never see them.
Kilometres 42 to 50 were like some kind of sick Escher drawing. We didn’t go back to The Stairs but it turns out Box Hill has about 50 other flights of stairs which go up and down and off sheer drops and spiral around and make no sense. At one point I recall just sitting down on the steps and trying to shuffle down on my bum, then when this didn’t work standing on the steps close to tears muttering “I can’t do it! They are too steep!” But I knew that I had no option, because even if I decided to DNF at 45k (the shame) I would STILL need to get off the stairs somehow, as presumably there is no sweep up coach at the Box Hill stairlifting ultra failures to safety.
I was nearly at the end when suddenly out of nowhere Cassie’s offspring Kat appeared out of the woods, coming from completely the wrong direction for anything. I was very confused to see her as I thought she would have finished hours ago and considered that she might be a hallucination, or doing a victory lap for fun. The rather more mundane explanation was that Kat’s knee had packed in and she’d been walking for a very long time, then got lost in the woods, and eventually I’d caught up. It was very nice to have company for the finish and I listened to Kat talking enthusiastically about the ultras she was doing and which ultra I should do next and I tried very hard not to say “this bloody race has nearly killed the pair of us, and you’re talking about the NEXT ONE??”
We finally crossed the line in 8 hours and 19 minutes which seemed like a ridiculously long time to be doing anything but also not very long considering what a complete ordeal the terrain had been. It turned out I was actually quite a long way from being last so I bought an ice cream to celebrate, even though it was freezing.
My final thoughts:
- I wanted it to be hard and hilly but I think I underestimated just how potentially dangerous the course was, at least when you let someone as clumsy as me loose on it. I wanted the hills to feel like a huge physical effort, I did not want them to make me fear for my life.
- The low stakes of “I’ll just be happy to finish” takes away the pressure and the worry of training injuries but it also robs you of some of the sense of accomplishment. I was pleased to finish alive, but it didn’t compare to the feeling of crossing the finish line in Hamburg with under 5 hours on the clock.
- So next year I’ve signed up for the Frankfurt Marathon. And I’ll do an ultra or two as my training runs. But they will be ultras with NO STAIRS.
