Category Archives: Training

To pee or not to pee

January 29, 2015Trainingadmin

I was working in St Albans, North West of London, today and will be there again tomorrow. So I decided that rather than driving home tonight and back to St Albans tomorrow (a trip of approximately 40 miles each way via the M4 and M25 motorways) I would leave the car at my client’s office and walk home – and then catch the train back to St Albans tomorrow.

Google Maps indicated that it was only a 25 mile walk in a relatively straight line heading directly south via Wembley and it would give me the opportunity to join a small dot on my ever-growing map the rest of the map of my walks around London. I had run the St Albans parkrun back in November and my map showed a small dot miles north of anywhere else that I have walked, and I knew that if I didn’t take this opportunity to join the dot to the lines on my map today, I might not get that opportunity again for some time.

Connecting the dots. Several more still to be connected.

I was actually working in a small village called Wheathampstead which is about 5 miles north of St Albans, but my client offered to drop me in to St Albans after work and collect me off the train tomorrow morning as she would be going in to St Albans anyway, and the country roads between St Albans and Wheathampstead don’t have footpaths all the way meaning that they are not overly safe for walking – especially in the dark.

So I was dropped off at Verulamium Park (the venue for St Albans parkrun) at 6:15pm and started the journey south. This was only my second walk after the 50 miler on Saturday night (following an easy 80 minutes last night) and my legs appeared to be well recovered. I made good progress but by the time I got down towards Ealing my Garmin showed that I had already covered over 20 miles and I still had at least 8 miles to go. Under normal conditions that wouldn’t be a problem, but it was already 10:30pm and I was unlikely to be home before midnight (and on a school night J). So given that I had already succeeded in my mission to join my St Albans parkrun dot to where I had walked previously on my map, I decided to call it a night and completed my walk (22 miles in total) at the Ealing Broadway bus terminal which is where the number 65 bus to Kingston starts from. And I was home 30 minutes later.

To pee or not to pee

As well as physically joining the dots on my map I had a realisation whilst walking tonight. Something that I don’t fully understand but found very interesting.

For the last few months – since about the time that the weather got colder at the beginning of winter – I have found that I need to pee a lot more often than usual during my walks. I had put it down to drinking too much during the day. I am sure that that is a part of the cause, and since taking up walking 2 ½ years ago I have found that walking tends to put a bit more pressure on my bladder than running did, and I need to stop occasionally when out for longer walks.

But lately I have needed to pee every 30 to 60 minutes whilst walking and each time I would lose between 20 and 40 seconds while I stopped to answer the call of nature. Fortunately, being a man, I have also found that I don’t actually need to stop if I don’t want to. I can pee whilst walking and I only slow down by a few seconds rather than having to stop altogether. Obviously this is something that you can only do when on secluded trails (or deserted streets at night) and should not be done when walking in to a head wind!

Anyway, you are probably saying “Stop – too much information”, but this blog is as much about me talking about where I am walking around London as it is about me talking about my training and the challenges that go with it – which is why I am discussing this topic.

And the realisation?

Well, I discovered that when I took my gloves off, I no longer needed to pee. Strange but true.

In the early stages tonight it wasn’t that cold and at one stage I needed to pee but was unable to find anywhere to stop or anywhere secluded, and I was walking up hill at the time and decided to remove my gloves. Within 30 seconds I no longer needed to pee.

Later on in the evening I was in a similar position and I removed my gloves again. And the urge went away again.

Interesting, and something I will experiment with further.

50 miles in Bushy Park

January 25, 2015TrainingBushy Parkadmin

To date I have done three 100 mile or longer walks and every time I have struggled through the night and especially in the early hours of the morning. This has been partially due to physical tiredness but also partly due to the fact that my body expects to go to bed at the end of the day rather than walking through the night. At the Roubaix 28 hour race last September I had to sleep for about an hour 25 hours into the race, but in the other two races I had managed to keep going but had struggled with severe tiredness during the last 4 or 5 hours.

So as a part of my preparation for the Bourges 24 hour race at the end of February the plan for this weekend was to have a normal Saturday (parkrun in the morning and a normal day of activities) and then to start walking at 7pm and cover 50 miles through the night. Bushy Park is closed to traffic from 7pm during the winter and with a one mile flat stretch of road between the Teddington Gate and the Hampton Court Road Gate it makes a perfect place to do a walk of this type.

So just before 7pm I met fellow Centurion, Suzanne Beardsmore (C1094) at Teddington Gate and after hiding our food and clothing near the start area we headed off on the first of 25 out and back laps down Chestnut Avenue, around the Diane Fountain to the Hampton Road Gate and back.

25 out and back laps of Bushy Park

Suzanne and I walked together for the first six miles, covering the two mile laps in approximately 24 ½ minutes, before parting company as Suzanne wanted to maintain a slightly slower pace than myself.

Another Centurion, Sue Clements (C950), joined us at about 9pm and walked with me for the next ten miles – she did 20 miles in total – helping me to maintain my 12:15 to 12:30 mile pace, but when she stopped for a break I began a five mile bad patch which saw me lose a few minutes, passing half way (25 miles) in 5:11:45. My target time for the night was between 10:15 and 10:30 so I was still on pace but not feeling great.

During long distance events you will have highs and lows and shortly after I went past half way I started to feel good again and picked up the pace and for the next 80 to 90 minutes, walking some of my fastest laps of the night.

It was an interesting night. At 7pm the temperature was still reasonable at about 4 degrees but by the time we finished at 5:30am the temperature had dropped to zero and the grass on both sides of the road and slowly gone from green to white. Fortunately the roads and remained ice free though.

My nutrition strategy for the night was to drink a sachet of Generation UCan at the start and then every two hours throughout the night, with fruit (raisins, mandarins and bananas) every hour in between. In total I consumed five sachets of UCan, two (frozen) bananas, two mandarins and three small packets of raisins. Not much at all, and significantly less than I used to consume before discovering Generation UCan.

But the problem with it getting so cold is that I was effectively eating partly frozen bananas and the water was freezing in my water bottle! Not a problem I have experienced previously.

The other problem I had was with my new head torch which I had only recently purchased and was using for just the second time. Whilst it is a hundred times brighter than my old head torch, it turns out that the battery doesn’t last very long and after two hours the brightness started to diminish rapidly and by four hours the light wasn’t much use at all.

I don’t need the head torch for my coming 24 hour races but will need a powerful light for the Thames Tow Path and Grand Union Canal races in May, which both go through the night on terrain that will require good lighting to ensure no accidents.

This was another reason for the overnight walk – to test equipment.

Having passed the half way point in 5:11:45, I managed to walk the second half in 5:13:25 for an overall time of 10 hours 25 minutes and 10 seconds. A good time in the dark, but my goal for the first 100 miles in Borges is sub 21 hours (NZ record is 21:04) so I still have a lot of work to do over the next five weeks.

When 4 hours becomes 6

January 17, 2015TrainingDartford Bridge, London Loop, parkrunadmin

I had promised my wife that I would be home by 3:30pm today so you can imagine my surprise when at 3 ½ hours in to my walk, and with what I thought was about 60 minutes to go (plus a 75 minute drive back home), I checked Google Maps on my cell phone to find that I was about 2 ½ hours away from Shorne Woods in Kent, where I had started at 10am, and where I had left the car.

It was Saturday again today – parkrunday. And I decided to head over to Kent to do the Shorne Woods parkrun that I hadn’t done previously – it was my 74^th different parkrun but was almost cancelled due to dangerously icy conditions. Fortunately the run director was able to move the start and alter the course slightly to enable us to run, and I ended up with my fastest time since November (22:27).

My intention was to then do a four hour walk alongside the Lower Thames up to the Dartford Bridge then across to Dartford to link today’s walk to last Saturday’s on my ever growing map, before heading back to Shorne Woods by road – which I thought would take me about an hour.

Last Saturday's walk and today's walk — Last Saturday’s walk and today’s walk

The walk up the river had taken a bit longer than planned, but as with last week I got to see some sights that many Londoners will never see and below are a few photos I took along the way.

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The Dartford Bridge – known as the ‘Dartford Crossing’

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As a result of my mis-calculation I ended up walking 50km (31 miles) to give me my third 30+ mile walk in eight days and one of the highlights of today’s walk was that I was able to comfortably walk the 50km on very little nutrition – having only taken two packets of raisins and a mandarin with me for what was supposed to be a four hour walk. I also had one sachet of Generation UCan before I started walking. This is a product that I am really starting to like.

Once again, due to work commitments I am unlikely to do much walking this week. Last week I got out for two shortish nighttime walks in Richmond Park. I don’t know what this coming week holds, but am looking forward to our second Bushy Park overnight 50 miler starting at 7pm next Saturday.