Princes Park 6 Hour: Preview

So, week five of training for Larapinta taught me something about the process of training for an ultra distance race whilst tackling a marathon-esque project.

Some of you may know that for one week of each month – for 11 months of the year – me and my partner throw all our energy into building and publishing our local newspaper.

Usually at the end of this week, I emerge from behind the computer screen looking like i’ve been in a bar fight a bunch of barnyard animals and come off worse.

Equally, in prevous training cycles I have hobbled across the line at the end of the week, having achieved my distance target and felt pretty much the same way.

But we’ve been doing this paper a while now, I am a much better runner than I used to be and the training for Larapinta has been going really well so I thought I could do both.

Turns out I cannot!

Finishing a marathon project while running serious distance is tough, too tough.

So I have decided to make all future “build” weeks light training weeks during this training cycle.

My life as a spice rack

Variety is key to life, or the spice of it (I think that is what that particular colloqualism says) and running with a meal analogy for this week, my spice rack is pretty well stocked.

Th main course, this week, will be the Princes Park 6 Hour run this coming Saturday.

At 10am on Saturday, me and a couple of dozen hardy souls will begin running 2.5ish kilometre loops around Princes Park for 6, 12 or 24 hours.

It is no secret that I am easily distracted and the concept of running around in circles for an extended period of time is not usually at the top of my list of “fun times while running”.

But I have run around in circles for a long time in the past.

In Doha I spent the long hot middle eastern summer hell season running around a 200 metre indoor track, one time covering 75 laps in the two hour window I had.

So despite the fears of boredom playing in the back of my mind (although i have seven seasons of Run, Zombies plus three running podcasts to catch up on if I get desperate), the componets which make up Saturday’s run are not new to, I have done them all before – just not at the same time and for as long.

Still, I find myself salivating over the running menu for this week.

My entree was a 7 mile run on Tuesday morning, starting before the sun rises and with some company for the first mile and a half.

The main course is obviously Princes Park 6 Hour, a sumptuous slab of vegan loveliness in the form of a 50km+ target, a beast of a meal where all I need to do is eat 5-mile morsels per hour for six continuous hours (seriouly hats off to the 12 and 24 hourers).

Dessert will be a slow hike on Sunday, maybe around Sugarloaf if my legs are still talking to me.

Like all fancy three course meals, there is a small wicker basket of bread rolls sitting on the table, the bread rolls are my 30ish minute runs which I am free to use whenever.
With the excitement now well and truly mounting for this weekends event, the trick is to exert some self control and go easy on the bread rolls.