Britain's moistness has always been a bit of a challenge. Every year I get a complete new set of toe nails as a result of the miles of mud and slurry we slide through. This year's 100 mile event though was extra special and after 46.6 miles of wading through the valleys of South Wales I called it quits.
Failure is an unusual sensation. After a shower and some sleep there's the inevitable regret ... Could I have kept going just that little bit more? ... Probably not. If I hadn't been pulled out of a sink hole by some lovely lads from up north I may still be in Wales. And my stomach had decided that the mini scotch eggs really weren't going to stay down and why should they. I'm a flexible enough vegetarian that I will eat as many carbs and fats as possible during endurance events, and in the damp confusion of a checkpoint the eggs covered in pre-chicken nugget machine processed meat paste were looking pretty good. But in hindsight a bad choice.
My choice of underwear was also dubious as it turned out. Ladies, you will understand (boys, turn away now) ... there is nothing worse than chafing, particularly when it feels like septicaemia is setting in and making your thigh balloon into a red jellied mass. So bad did it become that there was no choice but to 'go commando' as it were, which involved borrowing scissors from a marshall and removing the offending undies as it was impossible by this stage to get sodden gaiters, boots, overpants and leggings off. I'd like to see Paula Radcliffe top that.
Choosing who had the voice of authority when it came to navigation added to the pain. Now I've made some spectacularly bad directional decisions in past events, including insisting to fellow eventers a few years ago that it was a right turn through a village and not the left, with the added authoritative 'I'm a geographer, trust me'. Technically I would have been correct if I had been in the right village. The embarrassment has probably scarred me into being slightly less assertive these days but when my gps, my route description and my gut are all saying the route is up the hill not down, I really need to stop listening to other people.
There is an upside to failure though. It's always possible to rationalise it as the outcome of poor tools. This means that the only solution is new kit and I'm now the proud owner of running underwear from Sweaty Betty; so expensive that if they were to chafe I'd never be able to justify cutting them off. And my pride and joy, the Ultimate Direction PB v2 backpack - water bottles in the front and more pockets than you can poke a walking pole at. Nothing like new toys to dull regret and once my new toe nails are back in place we're set for another season.
