My first double race weekend of the year went reasonably well, coming away with a third place and a fourth place, though it did leave me a little dented afterwards. Next up now was the first of my midweek MMRA race sof 2018 — Ballycuggaran Woods outside Killaloe
Ninjafit
I had a relatively easy week after that weekend. My left knee was still sore, and felt like it had a bit more healing to do. Nevertheless, I didn’t see that as license to just back off training completely. All it meant was I’d keep my runs for the week fairly smooth, and wouldn’t do any heavy leg exercises. So on the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I did fairly moderately paced 10K runs, and on the Tuesday, I did a home leg workout of banded pistol squats, single leg deadlifts, and kettlebell lunges and side lunges. On the Thursday then, I decided to go for a home workout again, supersetting slow pull-ups and dips. This lighter than usual session meant I’d not have any muscle soreness come Saturday morning, when I’d make a first foray into Ninjafit, a Cork based calisthenics gym that had recently come on my radar.
I’m not sure what the exact name is for the kind of gym I’m going to talk about here, but I think the term ninja gym makes sense with people who use them. Such gyms consist of props seen at technical obstacle races — gymnastics rings, monkey bars, ropes, peg boards, and a whole host of other things, which can be easily moved about and arranged to make for an awesome type of work out. If you’ve seen Ninja Warrior, it’s that sort of stuff. This is all a type of functional fitness. Functional fitness is a buzzword of the current generation of fitness paradigms. In fact, I think it may be the buzzword of them. I’m not using buzzword here in a negative sense. Functional fitness is actually a good thing to have. CrossFit itself sees functional fitness as one of its foundational principles. Functional fitness is fitness that has everyday use away from the domain in which it is developed. Horsing a couch up a stairs or pull-starting a lawnmower require functional fitness.
Obstacle course racing aligns seamlessly with this stuff. While we’re not exactly swamped with technical obstacle races here in Ireland yet, we have a few (Beast Challenge and Reign of Terror to name some), and only the biggest begrudgers could deny the growth in the past two years. Many of us in the competitive side of OCR here really only have our thirst for technical obstacles satisfied by racing abroad. Ninja gyms are a great way to prepare for technical obstacles, but they’re in short supply in Ireland at the moment. It’s hard to sustain a gym though solely from the competitive OCR athlete pool in Ireland, which doesn’t stretch far beyond two dozen members throughout the island right now.
So back to Ninjafit. Ninjafit is a callisthenics and ninja fitness gym. Callisthenics is just exercising using bodyweight, and so goes hand in hand with functional fitness, given that you are always manipulating your body to some degree while doing everyday tasks. I knew the minute I walked in the door that I was going to enjoy myself. Aidan, who runs the gym, was very friendly to talk to, as well as being knowledgeable about the stuff he teaches. I spent a good half hour or so playing on the bars and rings, and on a clever rig circuit Aidan threw together for me.
I also played around with some calisthenics movements too. This is something I’d like to be a little better at, but I have bigger priorities in my training at the moment. Still, it was nice to be put through movements like the bar muscle up and human flag, just so I could feel what it wakes to do them properly.
I wore out my hands too quickly by diving into the rings and bar work too enthusiastically. I also took my lats five days to recover, which which really proves that doing real obstacles hits the muscles differently than simulating them. I’ll warm up a little better the next time, and there will certainly be a next time — I hope to get down there at least two weekends every month from now on — this is an awesome place to train in.
I’ll hopefully do a more in depth write up about this place in the near future, with a few videos and such.
Killaloe
I did okay at Killaloe in 2017, finishing third on a Wednesday evening race in the middle of June. It was one of those races with a long climb early in the race, and so I lost a fair few places there, but won many of them back over the remainder of the race. I was looking forward to racing there again. This time though, the route was going to be very different, and really didn’t reflect the previous outing at all.
I always aim to get to race locations an hour before the race is set to start. This gives me plenty of time to prepare, chit-chat, and settle myself. It also ensures that if I take a wrong turn, or underestimate the length of the drive, both of which can easily happen when driving to random race locations, I have time to fix that. On this occasion, this was a useful buffer to have, as there was quite a bit of traffic going through Killaloe.
My knee was still a bit sore from a previous race, but as I’d raced admirably on it at Clonakilty, I felt that all it needed was a bit of race adrenaline to settle it. I took ten minutes or so to familiarise myself with the terrain around the start of the race, including a bit of the route that went into the forest.
The race
The race started on a fire road climb. As I knew there was going to be a bottleneck before long, I made sure to give it an extra poke once the race started. I did a good job of this, and by the time we reached the entrance to the woods, I was right at the front. I took a brief step back though to let another runner lead through this section. It was going to be a little technical, before we hit the climb — I was happier to follow another person’s footwork here.
I hit the hill into the woods then at good speed, but it wasn’t too long before I got brought back down to earth. The hill was very steep, as well as being a loose surface too. I just couldn’t seem to keep up with the lead bunch of runners, who all passed me by. Even when we got to a zippy section through some trees, I couldn’t claw back the lost places, as my ability to put my footwork on autopilot had vanished. My knee wasn’t causing me anything resembling pain, but it certainly felt like my running was uneven, and everything felt unsure. I managed the technical forest area just fine, but I had to do it all quite slowly and carefully. On the other side of this section was a stony narrow path — a section I was able to make a little bit of progress nn. but I was almost 30 second behind the runners ahead of me at this point.
The next mile or so of the race would be all fire road, and at a slight incline. Even though the race was well and truly lost by now, I got to enjoy this section a little. While it was just fire road, it was quite open, and the view across Lough Derg was really something special. The fire road eventually looped around through a short trail, and we were doubling back on ourselves all the way to the finish.
This final phase of the race was the most disheartening for me. Granted, I had quite a distance to make up to catch the pair ahead of me, we were now on the right terrain for me to at least try to do that — a fire road decline. But it was a miserable few minutes for me on this terrain. A whole gear was missing from my race game, maybe even two. On a final mile where I should have been at a comfortable sub-five minute pace, I was barely sub-six. I just didn’t seem to have it in my legs to push harder. I crossed the line in a miserable tenth — my worst result of 2018 so far, if I exclude Slievenamon, as I had a part volunteer role at that one.
This result hurt a little, as it was unexpectedly poor. It felt like everything was in order, but it all just fell apart fairly early. From four minutes into the race until the finish, I sat in the same position — that early hill just knocked me, and I neither gained or lost any places beyond that. The other runners who finished ahead of me were good, but I’d finished ahead of many of them before. My knee likely had an effect on this performance, but I still should have done better. There wasn’t a single positive to take from this race — this was a right shite evening of racing for me.
It had been a while since I had a truly poor race, so had to once again acquaint myself with my mindset for dealing with this sort of situation. Every now and again in life you have one of those moments where a song on the radio coincidentally has the right advice for what to do. On the drive home from Killaloe, I had one of those moments. The advise — go go go, figure it out, figure it out, but don’t stop moving. That’s more or less how I deal with setbacks anyway — change things or whatever, but keep pushing. I guess if I’m to take positive from this race, now that I think of it, it’s that I’ve gotten my first truly unhappy performance of 2018 out of the way now!
My next race after this was to be Europe’s Toughest Mudder, an eight hour overnight OCR in the midlands of the UK. I stayed awake for quite a while in bed after Killaloe, toing and froing about ETM in my mind. There were a few little things on my mind for a few weekl about it, but not enough in total to make me call it off. This knee issue though was to be the final straw unfortunately. I just wasn’t willing to put hours of running on mud in the dark through the knee, especially not while abroad too. Regretfully so, I decided I wouldn’t not race at ETM. This was not a decision I took lightly, and my mind went back and forth on it all the way to Friday evening. My head wasn’t right about racing though, and so I just couldn’t do it.
So my next race now will be the Comeraghs race in both the Munster and South East leagues. I performed poorly there last August, though it was towards the end of the league, and I was in the midst of fiddling with my diet at the time. It was the prototypical example of the type of race I used not perform well at — harrowing climbs and heavy descents. I have ample time to prepare myself for it — my knee will be better, and I’ll be hungry — I’m gonna give it loads!
For anyone looking to get into a bit of trail running, have a read of my post on the topic, which is part of a series of posts aimed at getting people Tough Mudder fit in time for Tough Mudder Ireland’s July event. Use code TM18PAUL for a discount.
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