Bangor Strategies

Someone asked:

just curious - what if any visualisation techniques / strategies will u take on board for bangor?

I started replying but it became longer and longer until it was long enough to warrant its own post.

To be honest, I'm not much for visualisation techniques. I've tried them on several occasions in the past and they don't seem work for me. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I cannot translate the visualised images into actual performance on the road/track.

As for strategy, I'm planning on doing a sequence of 25 minutes run / 5 minutes walk for as long as I can and use the walks to take in food and drink.

While I do have a mileage goal in my head, I will try and ignore it as much as I can during the race and instead go by how I feel.

I will try and concentrate on the present lap only and never worry about how far there is to go.

I will concern myself with my race and my race only, ignoring what other competitors are doing. I don't mean that I will ignore all the other runners. Quite the opposite, I am very much looking forward to all of us encouraging each other throughout the day. What I mean is, I won't be drawn into some private race and instead concentrate on my own performance only.

I will have a couple of mp3 players to get me through the night. Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Guns&Roses and the like will be my muses at 3 am in the morning.

I will listen to my crew. They are much more experienced than me and will hopefully dish out just the right amount of abuse to keep me going for as long as possible.

I might change shoes at some stage.

I will have a variety of food with me, both of the sweet and the savoury variety. I will have gels and sports drinks and electrolyte replacements, but there will be real food like sandwiches as well. The organisers will provide plenty of food as well as far as I understand, and the general idea is to take in anything that feels palatable. I will start out trying to take in 300 - 400 calories an hour, but drawing from past experience that won't last very long, and after a while I think I will just end up eating whatever feels somewhat edible at the time or whatever my crew will force me to eat.

But you know what they say about men and their plans and all that. I have never done anything even remotely like that before and anything I plan on doing right now might be completely ludicrous after 8, 12, 16, or 20 hours.

As for my own training in the last few days, I have been taking it very easy to recover from Saturday's excursion on Mount Brandon. There is some weird feeling in my left quads. The original soreness from the mountain has gone but something is not quite right. As a result I just did a few miles each morning at an easy effort. That easy effort grew a bit faster every day, but even the 7:30 pace this morning felt easy enough.

13 Jun

5 miles, 39:06, 7:49 pace, HR 141

14 Jun

6+ miles, 46:18, 7:35 pace, HR 145

15 Jun

6+ miles, 45:33, 7:27 pace, HR 148