The road to the round
The idea of me doing a Ramsay Round first came about in 2019. After running Coniston Marathon in June, a summer of not doing much running was followed by doing the East Neuk 10k. Neither me and Amy particularly enjoyed the race and we were both a bit disappointed with our times. We decided to turn back to more fun running in the hills and attempt a Tranter round in 2020, I think I had the vague idea of that as stepping stone to a Ramsay even then. Amy had bought me Jonny Muir’s book The Mountains are Calling earlier in the year which had tales of doing big rounds so this may have also inspired me to some degree.
In October we began serious training on a DMC meet with a planned run of the mamores with Lu. The weather did not entirely play ball and after some snow showers we descended from An Gearnach, after doing the first 6 summits, but this run meant I had now been to the summit of all the munros in the Tranter round. 2020 saw Covid which meant training for the Tranter took a bit of a hit but we still managed it in early August finishing outside of 24 hours and having a new appreciation of just how hard big rounds could be. The following year we went for a closer to home round of the East Mounth and I also went back for a solo attempt at the Tranter 6 weeks later. This took me 19:26, faster than with Amy but not on the pace to run a Ramsay round (I think you need an under 16 hour Tranter round). I really struggled with eating then in a way I hadn’t before and concluded that I really needed to train more long runs on my own, to practise eating at a higher pace, if I were to go for another big round.
The next few years were a time for other things. I still kept up hill running, slowly ticked off more of my remaining munros (including a fast packing trip camping on summit on Beinn Na Lap) and did various hill and trail races. The other important thing that happened was a move to compressed hours at work given me a 9 day fortnight. Taking every other Friday off but still working full time equivalent hours over the two weeks. This allowed me to go on long solo runs while still spending time with Amy on the weekends. At the end of last summer I had two reasonably successful long races managing to score points in the Scottish hill runners championship in both long races (coming in top 40 for men needed for this). I decided it was time to give the Ramsay round a go and see how it went.
Aware from my solo Tranter experience of the need to practise eating when running at higher intensity I decided to try and run an ultra over winter. After various indecision between possible events I entered the tweed valley 65k ultra in November. In the run up to this I actually calculated carbs in food I ate and realised I was a long way short of 100g an hour and decided to see how close to that I could get in the ultra. Potatoes are quite a poor source of carbs it turns out (too much water). The first half of the ultra went fine and is quite a nice route. Then at checkpoint 3 the first drop bag point you turn around and start heading back up the Tweed valley. I found the second half quite hard, it is much flatter than the first half and so has less to break up the distance. I finished the ultra in my primary target of under 8 hours and decided I definitely needed to eat a wider variety of things (and possibly drink more of my carbs). I also decided that running an ultra was really quite hard and takes a while to recover from so I abandoned my vague idea to try a second one early this year. That week was the 4th biggest week in distance of my training (although only 12th in elevation gain).
The rest of the year was a write-off for training between recovery from the ultra, getting ill and then Christmas. The new year saw a renewed start of training with a zero-taper race at Feel The Burns (4 mins faster than previous year). The rest of January proceeded well and I was trying various other foods to try and get my carb intake up (I finally decided tailwind was ok and also discovered rice crispy bars). February had our first altitude camp/ ski holiday staying at 2000m. Then I came home, did my first ever 90+k training week (ultra week had been longer but that was a race) and promptly got ill and took a week off with only one run to recover (this week did include a birthday trip to Mull with three days of hill walking in a row so possibly wasn’t that restful).
March saw another attempt at relaunching training (and final rewrite of training plan reducing planned distances). I now needed to start thinking more about elevation and getting more of it in my runs. I had my possibly worst weather training day doing reps up munros in Drumochter pass featuring very strong winds and wintery showers. The advantage of doing reps was you can go back to the car to get your snow goggles out before going to the summit for a second time. Two weeks later I had another very windy run in Howgills so I was certainly getting the winter miles in. Then came the second altitude training camp with an early April trip to the Sierra Nevada in Spain. This one actually featured 4 days of running (plus a day walking up Mulhacean, the highest peak in mainland Spain) and I did abandon Amy for a solo run one of the days too. This was the third biggest week in training (in both distance and elevation this time) and again required a recovery week afterwards.
May was unsurprisingly my biggest month of training. The first week I headed to Ben Vorlich and Stuc a Chroin for some repeated ascents looking for steeper ground, more technical ground than found on many east coast hills. The following week saw a trip to the lakes to climb all the 3000ft peaks (one of Amy’s goals for the year). Then I had my hardest three days in a row, doing Kinoull hill race on Thursday evening (slightly sad I was slower than before on this but probably because I couldn’t fully commit given next two days), then driving over Friday morning for a 42k recce of the final sections of Ramsay I hadn’t done and after camping in Roy bridge doing one leg of Ramsay support for Tom Hollins (who I had never met before). The recce told me the descent off Stob Coire Essian towards Stob Ban was much easier than I had feared and the “track section” was not in fact a track and was harder than I thought, all very useful information. I had a slight scare going over my ankle towards the end of the run but did still manage to get down ok.
Providing Ramsay support to Tom was very useful for finding out what I found frustrating as someone doing support and gave me an idea of what it was actually like to do a Ramsay round. I was supporting on the first leg (he was running clockwise opposite to my plan) and there were supposed to be two of us supporting but the second person was dropped on Ben Nevis so I gained a lot more things and continued carrying everything for both of us. It was a very hot day which meant lots of work getting water then trying to catch up with Tom again was required. Luckily I was faster in descent than Tom so had some time to recover slightly but it was a struggle keeping up with him every ascent. Sadly he came in just outside 24 hours which I think he may have made it if he had been more able to drop his support runners at times. The main lessons I took from this was the importance of lots of pre attempt communication with support and the importance of being prepared to drop support during the event. It ended any real thought of getting people running with me to carry things for me on my round, instead going for static support for supplies on the hill. I would also say living in Scotland and therefore being more familiar with the terrain you might find there is also a great advantage. Sunday was a rest day (joined by Amy who had cycled all the way from Dundee on the Saturday) but I did use it to recce a shortcut in the woods I had failed to find in my Tranter attempts. I also bumped into Tom’s leg 3 pacers then who had been dropped by him in a last ditch attempt to get under 24 hours. This week was my biggest training week in both distance and elevation.
May finished back down in the lakes with a holiday with my family (featuring an Ochils run on the way down). This was a (fairly easy) walking holiday but we were staying part way up Helvellyn so I managed an evening run up via the edges, one longer run in terrible weather and a practice head torch run up some of the Dodds. We were staying Friday to Friday so I finished the holiday week with some reps up Creag Leacach and then a run from the door to get me up to 100k for the week. This was my second biggest training week for distance and elevation. I was then very ready to begin tapering with my ankles in particular being in the need of some rest.
Overall in my training I had never been sure how big my long runs should be and what was reachable as the biggest week target. I think I revised my training plan down three times during training and never did hit my distance targets even on the final version. Making the plan I had tried to be realistic with things happening in life in my training plan and so set a doable plan. Plot of distance and elevation against plan is shown below (I did have a vague elevation target too but it was 4-weekly not weekly).
I mostly managed to stick to my base plan of 40k in the week with longer runs on alternate Fridays and the weekend. We also have a Les Mills subscription so I was doing 4 classes at home most weeks a combination of their yoga, core strength and some barre. I did a few long solo runs at the weekend but Amy was away with work for some of these so it was only really the ultra, Ramsay support and one day in Sierra Nevada I abandoned Amy for (and she had her own adventures on all those days). I finished the training confident I should be able to get round the route but still quite unsure on if it would be under 24 hours (I had set 26 hours as a notional upper limit that would still want to do it and finish in).
See the next instalment to hear about the actual round.
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