Why?

Well ... why not?

I've been threatening to do this for some time now and for some reason haven't got around to it (the blog, that is).

In January of this year I was looking for a local half marathon that would give me the motivation to train up to and by default get me into decent shape (something I hadn’t been in since I stopped mountain biking back home in Wales).

I came across the Glasshouse Mountains trail running series in the process and my interest was pricked. The whole concept of ultra running was new to me – looking back I can’t believe I was totally unaware of it. I’d never been remotely interested and much less motivated to run a marathon on the road but an ultra run was different (this is where my ego kicked in!). But this had more.

Think about it. However many millions of people there are who have run a marathon it still puts them into a pretty elite group globally, so it follows that if you run an ultra marathon, the group is even more elite … if you see what I mean (I know, I know, the ego, right?)

The trail aspect of it was exciting to me and the more I read about some of the distances these guys were covering the more I wanted to do it myself. There were 25km runs, 30km runs, 8, 10, but I saw no point in doing it unless it was an ultra (i.e. anything over standard marathon distance) so it had to be a 50km event for me.

And so I embarked on a schedule that would see me run close to 900 km to train for the ‘Glasshouse 50’ on May 20th. My schedule started from mid February and I pretty much stuck to it all the way through.