I once again took part in the Leighton Buzzard Dirt Half as my last event of the year. It’s a great little event, easy to get to (usually – more on that in a second) and I always enjoy taking part.
I’m not running with Lorna this time, she had a bad ankle injury at the start of the year and hasn’t been able to run since. Instead I found out my friend Dale is running this year so I tagged along with him.
Training was… ok I guess. I’ve not been very consistent with my weekly runs but started to pick up through October. I booked this event mainly as a way to motivate myself to get started again.
We had car troubles around the day of the event so I got a lift with Dale, met up with some of his friends and had a light warm up run to Tiddenfoot Lake, where the start line was.
The start is slightly different this year – moved from the school field to the nearby lake. There is now a lap of the lake before getting onto the canal which helped the runners space out a bit. This is a welcome change as the canal stretch has often been a bit crowded in past events.
All was going well until I got a nosebleed in the first couple of miles and had to walk until I had it under control. When I was able to run again I was stuck behind a lot of people running a slower pace and couldn’t easily overtake. I didn’t mind too much, this wasn’t a serious attempt and it was good to be out taking part in something again.
The weather had been much milder than expected, but very wet. The track opened up a bit through Brickhill and Rushmere, so I could pick up a more comfortable pace, but it was getting very muddy. The fields leading back to the canal was pretty special, wet, slippery and more or less ankle deep in thick sludge the whole way! I saw some runners struggle to stay upright was we slid about in the mud.
The run back along the canal was pretty tiring, my shoes had filled up with water and were feeling very heavy as I plodded back towards the finish. The last leg back over Tiddenfoot to the finish was a killer as usual. I was feeling exhausted but managed a bit of a sprint finish with a time of 2 hours 10.
This was by far the muddiest and toughest Dirt Half I’ve done. Something about the mud and heavy shoes made this feel more like running a full marathon, and I woke up exhausted the next day! It took a few days to recover and has been a really great challenge to kick-start more training for the next event.
