Entering my first Ultra Marathon

, I think the Some of you may know that earlier in the year I decided to enter an Ultra Marathon. Not just Any Ultra, The Hillary. I chose The Hillary because over the preceding years I had tramped different parts of it at different times, because I started surfing along the coast line that it trails, because I basically live on it , because I felt drawn to do this one. Because I got brought up in the area that it traverses. I'm not sure whether its a good idea to, not actually be a runner and, not really have run for 3 years at all and enter a 80km Trail run with 14 weeks to train , but I did. I really didn't have much of a clue about training for it. I had run a very bad and flat marathon 3 years earlier and then stopped running having supposedly ticked that off the bucket list, I had entered the Auckland half marathon to help raise funds for diabetes in Nov 2015 but I actually only trained for that for 2 weeks. And hurt my knee during the event, but when I saw The Hillary Advertised I knew ! The time was NOW! Bad knee, no training and 14 weeks to figure it out! I like the sounds of that and so I started . I found a plan on line to follow that seemed pretty good and told myself my number one rule in training for this would be “make it to the start Line” . So many times I have heard or seen people talk about training for an endurance event but never make it to the start line because they don't listen to there body and push it to hard to soon. My training plan was pretty simple 3 runs in the week Tuesday through to Thursday basically 14km, 8km, 14km . Monday and Friday were rest days and I was suppose to do 2 long runs in the weekend and slowly build them up till a peaked a few weeks before the event .
Its assumed that you are running 50-80km a week before you start this plan. Obviously I wasn't. So I did what I could and built into it, having a bung knee made sure it was impossible to run too much and my first two weeks I managed 32 km total by Sunday, I truly believe the sore knee saved me from over doing it . The following week I managed to up it to 69km. My knee had stopped aching by then. This is where I needed to start to figure out , Nutrition and Hydration . How was I going to do it. How was I going to manage the long runs (20-40km) and how was I going to make sure I was fuelled enough for the event it self. The first thing I decided to figure out was my hydration. My next blog will discuss this!  

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