Vitosha 100 km, 2012 (short)

It will be a few more days until I get around to writing a proper race report, so here are the highlights and a few pictures (I am not sure whom I should credit for these – please let me know):

• Record turnout (200+ for the foot race and 600+ mountainbikers), the best course marking I have seen (heck, even I had no trouble anywhere!), and very well stocked checkpoints. Overall, a world-class race – mark June 21-22, 2013 on your calendar and come to find out for yourself!

There were often only about ten of us at the start line
in the early 2000s, and I thought this wonderful
event was going extinct. Boy, was I wrong!

• The field is getting increasingly competitive – five people ran under the previous course record (including at least two, who had never run this distance before), and 26, including two women, broke 12 hours. I am not sure when this trend of massive improvement will plateau, but my gut feeling is that we are nowhere near that point.

 Top three women: Maria Nikolova (left, 11:28),
Hristina Kozareva (middle, 10:18!!!),

and Malina Vatskicheva (right, 12:28).

 Hristina’s time would have been good enough to win the race
outright between 2000 and 2009! She finished looking really
strong, so I am sure she will be much faster next year.

Top three men: Dimitar Davidov (left, 9:02 - 32 min. improvement!),
yours truly (middle, 8:44), and Plamen Tsukev (right, 9:22 – 100 km debut!).
This does not even include the two runners who pushed the pace
early on: Iliya Kutsarov (9:23 – another 100 km debut!) and 

Bojko Zlatanov (11:50 after taking a nasty fall). I am guessing that, with
better headlamps, we will see at least one of these two on the ‘podium’ 

next year, and probably in the middle.

• I finally broke nine hours, and even won the race, but it was far from smooth sailing. More details on that soon (the traffic stats for this blog have convinced me to write my race report in both English and Bulgarian – thanks for the attention!).

Welsh 1000m peaks (DNS)

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to get up very early in the morning on race day, not even have to look through the window to know that the weather is horrendous, and then (bailing out obviously being out of the question) have the divine/demonic intervention that the weak and negative side of you has been hoping for all along? Well, it happened to me today, and it sucks! 

I hit a road closure just a few miles into my drive to Llanberis early this morning. Incredulous, I opened the road atlas, looked at the long detour that I would need to take and calculated that I would definitely miss the bus to the start, quite possibly the start as well. So I turned around and drove back home. Now I can definitely relate to the images of crying runners after the cancellation of the 2010 UTMB, even if the scale of my disappointment is obviously quite different. So it goes…

On the positive side, I was definitely a bit worried about having to run an undoubtedly gruelling 4-5-hour race only two weeks before the Vitosha 100K, with the Lakeland 100M only a month later. And I am kind of curious to see how the involuntary long taper will work out.

Running with the Bulls (Cader Idris 2012)

No, not the one in Pamplona. This one takes place in Dolgellau (N Wales), and the ‘bulls’ are actually quite agile:

 Matt Roberts (top) and the Jones brothers (Andrés - middle and Felipe - bottom). I am not quite ready to hang with these guys, but have halved the gap relative to last year.

This was much less of a kick in the teeth relative to 2011. 

 But it still hurt and highlighted my lack of
specific training for fast hill running. 

 I did, however, manage to hold my position on the downhill,
and even passed one runner.

10th overall in 1:39. Not bad, but maybe I should
take this more seriously next year…?

In case you were following Zegama and are wondering who Lauren Jeska is. Six days after running an amazing race in the Pyrenees, she said she was tired,
but I couldn't really tell.

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Welsh 1000m peaks tomorrow, and more running with the bulls. This time over a longer distance and rougher terrain. Course knowledge is apparently key for this one, and mine is limited to the last 800 m. Not a good sign, but I am still looking forward to it. Should be a half-decent day too, after a week of ‘unsettled’ weather, even by British standards.