Snowdonia Marathon Eryri 2017
10:30 on the 28th October and I found myself lining up on the road outside Llanberis alongside two and half thousand other runners. The weather was best described as "unpredictable" - heavy fog, rain and occasional sunny spells.
I'd entered while heavily intoxicated at midnight new years eve. Once again I blame Scibs for this. He seems to have an addiction to really painful Welsh endurance events and somehow managed to sell it to me, before conveniently dropping out!
The Snowdonia Marathon is a bit lumpy. It has three big climbs of which the last one can only be described as evil.
So the gun goes off and I head off with everyone else down the Llanberis pass. First two miles are flat and I held back from going stupid and jogged along with the rest until we reached the bottom of the first climb. Then the pain started. 3 miles uphill at what can only be described as a snails pace until you reach the Pen-Y-Pass. This is the start point for many to climb Snowdon. So gasping I crested and then came the real hard part, a mad dash downhill for 4 miles along first road then a rocky trail. It's the downhills that kill you with this race. Real quad crunchers.
Between 9-13 miles it levels out a bit and you actually get a rhythm going. I had a chat with a couple of guys who had done IM Wales a couple of months back and we trotted along exchanging war stories. At 13miles there is another uphill section for 2 miles or so then the course rolls along until 21.5mile in.
I went through 20miles in just under 3hrs so I naturally thought I would easily break 4hrs. This was my first marathon without a 112mile bike warm up. The feeling at 20miles was about the same as mile one in an ironman. My thought process at this point was keep the pace steady and the last 6miles should be a doddle. This race however has a sting in the tail.
At 21-22miles you start to climb. At 22miles you do a right turn and basically ascend up into the clouds! I must have ran/stumbled past 50 people walking up the last climb. It felt at times like the road was at 45%. It was probably a couple of miles at less than 15% but my quads were screaming. By this time I was running in rain and fog. The road turns into a muddy, boulder and slate strewn trail and after a brief rolling section the real fun begins with a steep descent to Llanberis. This was the part of the race where I discovered my real weakness as a runner. My legs were burning, but so were everyones at this point. My limiting factor is that I can't run downhill fast. I lost most of the places I gained on the climb. The going was treacherous underfoot, either grassy and muddy or on shiny wet rock. Loads of people were taking a tumble and to be honest I just didn't care about a couple of minutes enough to risk breaking an ankle!
If you could swap to trail shoes at 22miles this race would be so much easier!
It was a real relief to hit the flat for the last few hundred metres and I even managed a sprint finish.
Finish time was 4:13
Not particularly fast but a great scenic race that I thoroughly enjoyed. I would recommend this to anyone wanting a slightly different run to the usual tarmac flat/rolling surface.
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