I had a plan… mayhaps I should have stucked to it!
For my first Big Beach Challenge, my strategy for attacking this 32km stretch of sand from Birubi to Stockton was to run 4km then walk 1km. Then repeat over and over again until the end. Like an idiot, I threw this plan out the window as we underway, and paid for it big time down the beach.
At the outset, I was feeling pretty goshdarn good, and the sand up the northern end was nice and relatively hard underfoot, so when I got to the 4km mark I thought I’d just slog on. The other reason for not slowing up and doing my 1km walk was pure ego – I didn’t want to pull up whilst the runners around me sped on and didn’t want the slower runners (and possibly walkers) to pass me by during my ‘off’ click.
As I kept going, the sand got softer and squishier. There were two choices: run up on the soft-dry flat in the tyre tracks left by the myriad of four wheel drives zooming up and down the beach, or try and find a section of wet sand that was hard and not gluggy. Unfortunately a lot of the time the glugginess won out, and in some spots my footsies squished into the sand around 6cm or 7cm in some places. As you can imagine, this sort of sinking kind of puts the dampener on one’s forward motion. Nevertheless, I was still feeling kind of cool even though my pace had dropped immensely and thought perhaps I would hit the halfway mark before taking my first walk-break.
At the 14km mark I started feeling incredibly hungry, and as my nurples were starting to feel somewhat chafed I pulled up and grabbed a bite of an Uncle Toby’s Fruit Twist and put a couple of Band-Aids in place on my sweaty bitchtits. After a kilometre of taking it easy, I started running again, but only managed a couple of clicks before feeling the overwhelming need to pull up again. I spent the next couple of kilometres alternating between running and walking in ever-increasing discomfort until I made it to the 20km mark and realised I was going to have to walk the rest of the way.
This presented a whole new problem. My left calf and my lower back were aching by now, and as my walking pace was a little over 4km/h this meant that I would have to put up with the calf and back pain for three hours!
I made it to the shipwreck of the Sygna at the 24km mark and had a bit of a break, stretch and removed my Vibrams for the last 8km of beach. I felt okay after this little breather, so managed a 500m run before walking again, then another 200m run before feeling less-than-awesome. It was walking the rest of the way for me!
Even this was gruelling. At the 28km drink station I joked with the volunteer that I had been hallucinating for the last few kilometres and believed that I had turned into a giant talking sausage roll. I must have looked incredibly ordinary as the guy handing out the drinks suggested I stay away from the dunes as he was worried I would get lost!
I kept on putting one foot in front of the other and kept breathing in and out as the Newcastle city skyline crept ever closer. Three clicks to go, two clicks to go, one last click and I could cross the line. I staggered over at 5:46:56 and immediately dunked myself in the nice cool water of Stockton Beach before rinsing off, having a couple of sausage sandwiches, chatting to some of my fellow finishers (such as the very nice Alison who also did the event in Vibrams), and waited for my old schoolmate Todd to finish after walking the whole way instead of trying to run. Smart man, that Todd! He and several members of East Maitland personal fitness studio Targeted Fitnesss were training for some silly 100km walk down in the Blue Mountains, and did the Big Beach Challenge to get a bit of a benchmark of their event.
It was also interesting watching so many competitors waddling around sore and sorry as if they had just been subjected to a rather invasive medical procedure. Good to see I was not the only one that couldn’t walk properly!
So prior to this event, the hardest race I’d entered and completed was the Bay Adventure - also run by Paul, Hanne and the awesome crew at H-Events. Perhaps just due to my over-eagerness at the start, this blew that out of the water in terms of gruellingness! Maybe I should just take it easy and do something less taxing – like a Half Ironman!
At least I have another race number bib to hang up on the wall in the garage with the rest of my collection!
I had a plan… mayhaps I should have stucked to it!
