Not long now ...

No, not long, only 8 days and a few hours …

Today was my last long run, up to Loch Thom from our house, 25K and 200m elevation. Thomas had drafted a plan for my final 2 weeks and I have tried to stick with it. At the weekend we will do some walks, we are planning to take the 9-year-old son of friends up Ben Lomond (weather permitting) to bag his first ever Munro (or hill for that matter), followed by 2 or 3 shorter runs until Wednesday.

The last 2 weeks have been a bit like an emotional rollercoaster with Dario’s death and then his funeral. A lot of other things were going on at the same time at work, with family and friends. So I have not had too much time to get nervous yet. I am sure though that this will come. I am usually nervous before any race or more serious training run, so my 1st ultra should not be any different.
I am looking forward to the whole experience though. My main goal is to finish and if nothing untoward happens that should be possible. My next goal then is to get under 10 hours which could just be manageable given the training run recently though 10:30 is more realistic. Thomas thinks I could get to 9:30 or less but I really just want to enjoy the whole experience and find out what it is all about. If I pushed too hard I might end up not finishing at all or very late so I think I will just take it easy. And I think I will run with Andreas and try to stear us both towards a sub 10:00 finish. And I will try and agree with him beforehand that if one of us struggles, the other one should go on.
Thomas is very keen for me to run on my own, but I’d feel a bit mean then. And who knows he might be stronger than me in the end and pass me with a large grin on his face as to my arrogance of thinking I am that much faster. Anyway, we will see on the day.

It will be interesting to see if any special remembrance moment will take place for Dario before, during or after the race. He should have been bib number one. The funeral last week was very emotional but such a tribute to him. So many people had turned up, some from very far. Beforehand I was a bit worried that it might be weird to meet all the WHW runners and supporters at such a sad moment. Usually when we meet it is at the prime of everyone’s physical and mental fitness helping each other to achieve (mostly) something quite extra-ordinary like the WHW Race. It is about breaking the boundaries of your usual limitations.
But it is something else to then be confronted with the ultimate limitation of life itself, death. And such an untimely death it was.
But it did not feel weird at all. In fact I felt such a bond of united grief and sadness that again supported each other through the day and made it possible to share not only the grief but also the celebration of his life. It gave the feeling of “belonging” to this rather special WHW Family.

And I guess this is just another great tribute of what Dario has actually achieved through his WHW Race.