Entering My Big Unit Era

After a few good months of health and fitness I am yet again struck down with a cold. I snuffle as I type and lament the missed long runs this weekend in favour of recovery. But it has given me time to type this post out without having to rush too much.

This is another life update blog post with a run down of what I have been up to and what is planned in the future. There are training updates, a Maria Island running adventure, my ascension into becoming a big unit heavy weight runner, an update on the three peaks race and much more.

🗓️ Training Update

My training has finally started to gain some momentum, which is great considering I have a 100km race in Vietnam coming up that somewhat frightens me. I’ve kind of reached a point of semi-complacency about racing that distance, but then I remember that it is not an insignificant undertaking and doing it in Vietnam poses additional challenges, namely the possible heat and humidity. So I have been making a concerted effort to put in enough work so I can have a race with the right balance of fun and suffering.

The main metrics I have been targeting is overall time and elevation gain. I’ve also been trying to intersperse a little bit of tempo intensity in there to remind my body what it feels like to go faster. As Vietnam approaches I have been working up towards 3000-4000m of elevation per week and I’d like to get one or two weeks above 5000m but I am running out of weeks.

I raced Tolosa Half a few weeks ago, it was a good hit out and a great benchmark of my fitness level. It showed me that I am not where I was at last year. It felt like a super hard effort and I was 3 minutes slower than last year. The time I ran was still a good one, but I have my past self to compare to and I am not as fast as he was. Despite the slower time I enjoyed the race, I wasn’t sick this year (unlike last year) and I am considering it a great training stimulus for my bigger things to come.

Overall the build has looked good, things were on track and this week I was gearing up to smash my vert target until my body had other thoughts. On Thursday I was out doing our typical group laps of Knocklofty where we try to hit 1000m of vert, which has now been titled the “Thursday Thousand”. I was feeling great but towards the end I could feel a scratchiness in my throat. The scratchiness has since developed into a proper snotty nosed, sore throated cold. I don’t try to brute force my training though these kinds of sicknesses anymore, so my big week has been thwarted but I am hoping my restfulness and big nights of sleep get it sorted for me soon because I have a race next weekend!

🌤️ Life Updates

Big Unit Era

Our bathroom scales ran out of batteries about 6 months ago. I finally got around to replacing them a couple of weeks ago and I was given a rude shock. My weight was up to 79.5kg and I was shocked by this number!! I usually hover around 74 – 75kg and I couldn’t believe I had somehow stacked on and extra 5kg pretty much without noticing. This might explain my slower time at Tolosa Half this year, I was lugging an extra 5kg up that mountain.

I started taking creatine earlier in the year which could explain some of the gain, but this can only account for maybe 2kg of weight gain at the most, the rest of it is most likely for me eating too much. I was deeply ingrained in ‘little treat culture’ and I had become partial to a beer or two quite regularly and they bring with them many a calorie.

My weight gain isn’t huge in the scheme of things but it was a good wake up call to start paying attention to what I am eating and watch out for overfuelling. In the lead up to Vietnam I have stopped drinking all alcohol and started loosely tracking calories with the cronometer app. It is definitely helping because it forces me to eat better to avoid the guilt of having to enter exorbitant amounts of biscuits into the tracking app. It doesn’t help that my new job has a tea room with an almost unlimited supply of biccies.

🏝️Maria Island Trip

I was invited on a Find Your Feet running trip to Maria Island. We were all given Salomon Genesis 2’s to test out for the day. Some were given the standard model and others the S-Lab version. In the week leading up to this trip I got an infected toe and I was fairly concerned about heading on a 30k run in brand new shoes with an infected toe. But thankfully the toe healed up just in time and the shoes were super comfortable.

I was given the S-Lab version to try. Straight out of the box I love the look of them, super sleek and cool dark colouring. They look fast and tough. I popped them on and they fit like a glove or maybe I should say like a sock. They have the sock like upper that hugs around the ankles which is comfortable and also prevents rocks getting in your shoe.

The trip was so much fun, we were blessed with some of the best mid winter conditions you could dream of. Sunny, clear and minimal wind. It was so nice to go casually running with a good group of people. We managed to summit Mt Maria, see the painted cliffs then we ran to the fossil cliffs initially planning on climbing Bishop and Clerk but we had run out of time. So we had a leisurely run back to the ferry to finish off the glorious day.

Upcoming Running Events

My late year race season is about to kick off with Wonderland 50k next weekend. Shortly followed by Hounslow 17k then reaching the climax with the Vietnam Mountain Marathon 100k. It’s been good to have a few months away from ultra distance events to recharge the batteries and build back the excitement for such events again. Then my final big boy of the year will be the GPT100 stage race.

I recently sent my old Nnormal Tomirs away to get resoled. It is a test run for a resoling initiative that Nnormal is hoping to roll out in the near future. They were the shoes I was wearing when I DNFd the GPT100 last year.

Sending them off sparked an invasive thought that I have struggled to shake. It got me thinking about jumping back onto the full 100 mile race again and finishing it in the shoes. For some reason I love the idea of finishing the thing wearing resurrected shoes hopefully doing a resurrected performance. But this thought has started losing it’s potency in recent weeks as I remember how much fun the stage race format is. So I will let that idea simmer for a little longer before I make any impulsive decisions.

The current focus is VMM 100k. Flights and accommodation is booked, now I just need to recover from this sickness and put the finishing touches on my training block. Hopefully get a few weeks of big vert to prepare the legs and a solid heat week in the sauna to get my body heat adapted. I am looking forward to my first international event. It will be more of an adventure that a competition for me and treating it that way will probably give me a good outcome and a fun experience hopefully.

🗻🗻🗻Three Peaks Race Locked In ⛵

If you follow along on this blog you may remember that I was invited to be on the Three Peaks Race committee earlier in the year. Well that role quickly became a lot more than I could handle and I found a more suitable replacement to take my place on the committee. But I remained super keen to participate in the race myself as a runner.

So I put my name on the crew register and quickly had a number of boat options to choose from. In the end I settled on a small local boat called the Dog House. The final decision was based on wanting the most competitive, locally based boat that sounded like the most fun to be on. I had interest from interstate vessels but much prefer being on a local boat so I can get to know the crew, go out sailing with them and get to know the boat too. And being a little patriotic, wanting to be on a Tasmanian boat to represent my home state.

The crew gave me the privilege of choosing my fellow runner. Crews are made up of 3 sailors and 2 runners. After much deliberation I decided to offer the position to Juzzy. He’s had a long hiatus from running after the GPT100 last year and I was hoping a big, scary and exciting goal event with a long lead time would provide the motivation to bring him out of retirement. It worked, he took the bait and he’s jumping on board. I am so excited to take part in the return of this iconic Tassie event. I used to watch the start at Beauty Point as a kid and see the progress on the news and dreamt of being involved and next year it’s going to happen and I am so keen!!

📖 What I’m Reading

Shoe Dog – Phil Knight

This is the memoir of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. It’s the story of him starting Nike from nothing and building it up to become the behemoth that it is today. I loved this book, it was so entertaining and interesting learning about the strategy involved in building a business from nothing and the challenges of rapid growth.

London Falling – Patrick Radden Keefe
This is the story of the mysterious death of a 19 year old boy in London in late 2019. His body was found in the Thames and there was footage captured of him jumping from the balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury apartment block on the bank of the river. His parents went looking for answers and they found that their son had been pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch and was mixed up with all sorts of dubious characters.

This book examines his death and searches for answers. It is so captivating. Say Nothing and Empire of Pain are two of the best non-fiction books I have read, Patrick Radden Keefe has a way of writing these narrative non-fiction books that makes them absolute page turners.

This book feels especially weird given I was in London about a month before the death took place. While I was wandering the streets of London as a tourist this young man’s web of lies were unravelling. Makes you wonder about all of the crazy stuff that takes around you without you even knowing.

🎧 What I’m Listening To

In Waves – Jamie XX – This album is so good, gets me fired up!! I have been listening to it on repeat on runs and it is guaranteed to make me thrive.

Science of Sport Podcast – No one specific episode, but this is a great sport science podcast, keeps me up to date with what’s going on in the world of sport that goes beyond just trail running.

Here’s a good one on cramping:

This is a good one that relates to my recent post about training load quantification:

🔭 Reflections / Looking Ahead

The next few months is going to be packed with many new and exciting experiences. It’s always good to have a variety of fun events and experiences on the horizon to look forward to and I have no shortage of them at the moment. There are more big future adventures brewing too which I haven’t even mentioned in this post. I will save them for another day.

Thanks for reading, I hope you found it entertaining and informative. Let me know in the comments if you like this format of post. I am trying to develop a template for the standard blog style post and am open to feedback.

Joseph Nunn: An avid trail runner based in Hobart, Tasmania. He loves getting out for big days on the trails with mates or racing against them.

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