Old Man In Tights

Running slowly in the beautiful North of England

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Behind the Scenes at an Ultra Marathon

on October 18, 2021

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From the Old Man

Hi, my name is Eddie and I'm a slow, long distance runner. This blog is an intermittent record of my running, my thoughts about running and my struggles to get and stay fit.

I also blog on Christian mission and theology here, if you are interested.

When It All Goes Horribly Wrong

This Saturday, I was due to run the Lakeland Trails Hawkshead Challenge. At just over ten miles, it is shorter than most races I do, but I was hoping that going a bit faster than usual would be good for me. Another advantage was that my son and daughter-in-law, Dave and Lina would be running. Dave, Lina and I about three miles in. It was great to meet up with a few folks from the facebook #run1000miles2019 group at the start. The route starts with a steep climb up out of Hawkshead and Dave and Lina soon dropped me, but I caught up again on the flat section along the ridge. We dropped down to the water station at Sawrey together and climbed up the steep section together before the technical (steep and rocky) descent to the lake. All three of us like fast descents and Dave and Lina bounded off like scalded mountain goats. I was stuck behind other runners and couldn't keep up. however, the path soon widened out and was able to start to mo...

Running With the Black Dog

A lonely house on Bardon Moor About six weeks ago, my GP told me that I was depressed and that I needed to do something about it. Actually, I told him that I thought I had depression and he agreed with me. The first thing he told me to do was to step away from work for a while - he wrote a nice note for my employer (I'm self employed). Things did ease up a little, but after a month he prescribed some anti-depressants, which don't seem to have had the desired impact yet, but they have had some interesting side-effects (more of that later). So what does my depression look like? I don't want to go into detail in what is a running blog, but there are a few main impacts. The first is that the world seems dull, the only way I can describe it is by saying that everything seems to be in black and white. The second is that I struggle to sleep, even more than usual. Finally, I really can't concentrate on anything. Whether it is work, leisure or doing stuff in the garden, after ab...

33 Hours in the Pennines, or How I didn't Finish A Race

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about my upcoming Spine Challenger race and mentioned that my main aim was to finish. Well, judged by that fairly simple standard, I failed. I didn't get to the end, in fact I barely managed to get two thirds of the way along the route before a very sore back brought my jaunt to a premature halt. Looking back on the event with a few days of hindsight, it was far harder than I expected, but it was also very enjoyable at points. In this post, I'd like to give a brief overview of what actually happened and then I'll add another post which looks at some of the lessons I learned on the way. Sometime around 11 pm on Saturday, I was slogging my way up White Hill in the dark. I'd never been there before, I didn't really have much of a clue where I was, but it was great fun. I love being on the hills on my own and there is something really special about being out at night. Three hours or so later, I was dropping down into Hebden Brid...

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