The D33side Ultra

Saturday 3 April saw the running of the inaugural 33 miles Deeside Ultra race. The race's website sums the event up thus - "The concept is simple, turn up at the Duthie park car park in Aberdeen and register and run the first section of the Deeside way to Banchory, check in with marshall, turn round and run back. You get water at checkpoint, anything else you need to carry yourself or get from your Mum." Map of the route -

According to the webpage 120 people had entered, and on the day 94 people trapped. Maybe the others were put off by the forecast which was dreadful, but as it turned out we had a cracking day. I wasn't too sure what to wear on the feet and on arriving I met Ian Beattie who assured me that road shoes would be the best choice so I went with that. Wise words as it turned out as there were long stretches on tarmac and my joints don't like that.













After A quick briefing from George (pic above) we were off. Thankfully the route follows the old railway line so was really flat. As usual I ran my own race and didn't bother worrying about the people passing me. Normally I would think I could catch them in the later stages but this race was a bit short for me so I was treating it as a training run, and besides I've never run a marathon and was sure a lot of the other runners would be marathon runners and this wasn't much over that distance so figured they'd be much more acomplished.

I reckoned from my training runs that if I ran at 6 miles an hour I should finish the race in 5hrs 30min so this is what I was aiming for. After a couple of miles Ian Beattie went past me and he though he could finish in 4hrs 30min. I thought that was a bit fast so let him go.

I plodded on keeping the pace easy and went through the 8 mile checkpoint in 64min dead. I fell in with a chap (who I think was Mike Raffan) and his gps told us that we went through 10 miles averaging 7m 25s/ml way faster than the 9min/ml's I had planned.

I reached the half-way checkpoint turning in a surprising 2hrs 9min, glad that I still felt good and hadn't really dropped the pace, but expected to feel it on the way back. This was the first out and back race I had run so it was good to see the other runners as we passed, but all too soon I went past the back markers and was on my own again.

My hamstrings had been tight all day and about 200m from the 25ml check point, bang, I was hit by cramp in the right one. I hobbled to the checkpoint and took on some water, put 2 packets of dioralyte in it and downed it in an effort to get me home. I had been thinking that a sub 4.30 might have been on but the cramp scuppered that.

The last stretch seemed endless, I was running at a pace just slow enough to keep the cramp at bay. Encouragingly the rest of my body and mind seemed that it would be happy to push the pace a bit more but if I wanted to finish I daren't.

With about a mile to go I was joined by local runner Scott Craighead, who'd never run an ultra before but was looking very comfortable. The chat between us took our minds off the never ending finish and we crossed the line together in 4hrs 35min 5s, joint 18th position.


















The finish.

At the finish there was a massive table of very welcome cakes and every finisher recieved a bottle of race beer and a medal - made of chocolate !!



















I was delighted with that run, way faster that I had imagined possible for me, and apart from the cramp felt very comfortable. The leason I learned though was that if running long distances unsupported then I need to drink more, the problem I have though is that I carry everything in a rucksack and my water bottle isn't easily accessable which discourages me from drinking. In future I think I need to wear it in conjunction with a water bottle belt and that may solve the issue, I'll try it out next long training run.

Full results can be found HERE.