{"id":4520,"date":"2015-10-06T21:57:45","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T20:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/?p=4520"},"modified":"2022-04-11T16:43:08","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T15:43:08","slug":"rab-mountain-marathon-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/rab-mountain-marathon-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Rab Mountain Marathon 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spurred on by relative success at the Marmot24<\/a>, I decided it was time to test myself at a more traditional mountain marathon and do one solo. There were mixed results.<\/p>\n

My excitement levels peaked when it was revelaed that the location was… Snowdonia! I’d never done a mountain marathon there before, so figured my local(ish) knowledge would come in useful. The Rab is score format, so at the start I was given a map showing lots of control points, and a separate sheet which described which ones were active that day, and how many points there were worth. The only thing remaining was to plan the most efficient and points-heavy route for myself in the six-hour time limit. This was always going to be the hard part, but after fretting for a bit I settled upon something half-decent and started running.<\/p>\n

\"List

List of controls, and sunshine. Woohoo. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2015<\/p><\/div>\n

Unfortunately there wasn’t much running beyond the first mile on the road, and after four and a half hours of following strings of other people walking between checkpoints, I was getting a bit tetchy. After dibbing a control in Cwm Pen-llafar I was rueing the fact that I’d spent all week in work running around and surrounded by other equally manic people, and now I was doing the same on my day off. I got down to the river in the bottom of the valley, a really lovely spot, and thought “sod it, I’m going to have a lie down<\/em>“. That quickly turned into dozing on the riverbank as the water burbled by, and I eventually spent a wonderful 45 minutes just letting the world pass me by.<\/p>\n

\"Approaching

Approaching Bwlch Tryfan from Llyn Bochlwyd on day two. \u00a9\u00a0Ian Corless 2015<\/p><\/div>\n

In the end I did have to wake up and continue making my way to mid-camp, where I arrived chilled-out and late enough to incur a seven-point penalty. I spent a pleasant evening alternately cooking big pans of food and catching up with an old uni friend. There were comparisons of tactics and route choice, but I didn’t regret the “halfway snooze” plan – at least, not until the evening’s results went up and showed that I was still in 36th place out of 172 starters despite the napping. What would have happened if I’d really put the effort in? I’d probably still be grumpy and stressed!<\/p>\n

\"Guess

Guess where I had a lie down! \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2015<\/p><\/div>\n

After listening to Wales win the rugby I settled down with a hot water bottle and immediately overheated. My super-light strategy (the least I’ve ever carried on a mountain marathon) backfired about 4am, however, when I woke up cold. I was still a bit chilly at 4:30am, by which point I was wearing all of my layers.<\/p>\n

On Sunday morning I decided that I should definitely try to get a reasonable score, since a leisurely bimble the day before had obviously gone quite well. I set off shortly after 07:00, and proceeded to make two appalling route choices. The first was to climb over Y Garn instead of contouring around from further down the Nant Ffrancon valley. The second was to attempt to bag an extra control when I didn’t have sufficient time at the end of the day. This resulted not only in me having to do a 5km dash down the gravel path from Tryfan Bach to Capel Curig, but also in missing three other controls because I couldn’t take my planned route. As a result I obtained a decidedly average score, and thus finished 38th out of 163 overall, and 18th solo competitor<\/a>. Interestingly, I was 36th on day one, and 41st on day two, so there wasn’t a huge discrepancy in results from the two days despite entirely contrasting approaches!<\/p>\n

The Race Director’s report<\/a> reveals a few behind-the-scenes issues which I must say weren’t noticeable to me as a competitor. Overall I clocked up around 44km and 3750m of ascent for the weekend. Saturday was a passable performance and I ran very well on Sunday, so was pleased with that but made silly route choices. I think it proved I don’t like score courses anywhere near as much as linear. Which is fortunate, as it’s a linear course on OMM<\/a> in a few weeks…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I decided it was time to test myself at a more traditional mountain marathon and do one solo. There were mixed results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[825,420,119,616,1127,1128,396],"class_list":["post-4520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-outdoors","tag-carneddau","tag-fell-running","tag-glyderau","tag-mountain-marathon","tag-rab-mountain-marathon","tag-rabmm","tag-running"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}