Coventry Way 40 mile Ultra

Coventry Way 40 mile Trail Run
Needless to say, the past weeks weather gave me some major concerns for an off road trail run that circumnavigates Coventry. On Saturday, the day before the race, the weather was horrendous with torrential rain and strong winds. It didn't look good....
Race morning came and the tring from the alarm got me out of bed quickly. A quick look out of the window confirmed the rain had eased but not stopped. A good breakfast of about 600 cals and 750 ml of electrolyte set me up for the 8 am start.
The journey to Coventry saw me drive through some real heavy rain storms and I was diverted twice because of flooding. Not a good sign....
I arrived at the Village Hall at Meriden a little later than I would have liked but I had about 20 min to spare. Walkers had set out on the course as early as 06:00. The cut off for the event is 21:00. So as you can imagine, the course is challenging. They operate a rolling start, so basically you may leave at any time. You have a card that needs to be marked at checkpoints on route; 8 in total.
I started at 8 am in a group of approximately 12. We started in heavy rain wearing waterproofs, however, it soon became apparent that a waterproof wasn't needed. Temperatures were mild and basically a jacket just made you hot. I however was running with a 'Raidlight' sac to get some practice for multi-stage racing. I therefore needed to wait till the first checkpoint before removing my jacket.
The first couple of miles ticked over but then a group of 4 of us upped the pace. Navigation on the course was quite tricky and 2 of the guys I was with were old hands... basically, they new the course back to front. I made a decision to stay with them as long as possible. They clicked out a pretty hard pace considering the terrain.
Muddy? no... imagine the worst cow field you possibly can and then imagine it water logged... add to that gates, hills, turnstiles, corn fields, forests etc... and you have a rough idea on how hard the course was. At several points we were wading above knee height in water.
We made checkpoint 2, 14 miles in 2 hours. We had a break at each checkpoint, refill bottles, get some calories and basically just break the running up. Checkpoint 3 came at 18.5 miles and by now we were in the lead. We had dropped one guy and the three of us pushed on. Checkpoint 4 cam at 24 miles and we were feeling good. I expressed concern about our pace. I felt we were running too quickly... the terrain was so sapping and when you have 40 miles to go you know at some point you are going to pay for your efforts.
The distance between point 4 and 5 was the longest at 7 miles, so it was important to make sure you had drink and food to sustain you for an hour. At 28 miles, Mitch, one of the locals started to get cramp... he pulled through it well but it dictated a slower pace for the remainder of the race. At checkpoint 5 we had a slightly longer break, plenty of liquid and food and then moved on. How painful.... getting the legs going after a few minutes break really is sore.
Two more checkpoints left, 6 at 34.4 miles and 7 at 37 miles. We kept pushing and although our pace had dropped we kept running. All the turnstiles and gates were pretty painful, particularly for Mitch, he was really frightened of his legs going 'ping'.
In this section we had to 'wade' a couple of times as the river that had broken its banks. We also had to run through a couple of corn fields.. this was weird. Felt like I was in a movie, 'North by Northwest' or more scarily, 'The Children of the Corn'.
Finally, the last checkpoint. We had 3 miles to go. We had hoped to go under 7 hours, in-fact, we had hoped to go 6:30 but the conditions were just too hard. So, 3 miles in 30mins... it was gonna be a push. We finally entered the Village Hall after circumnavigating Coventy in 7 hrs 03 mins. At this point we thought we had all finished in joint first, however, it turned out a couple of other runners beat outr time. First place was 6:40, 2nd 6:51 and the three amigos came in at 7:03.
It was a tough day. One of the hardest days I have done in racing but it was a great day and a real experience. I really cant recommend this type of racing enough.