Introduction

Welcome to my blog. The title originates when my primary athletic activity was competitive walking, but now that I am back to running it also includes that.

Not all content is accessible from the main page: for example, the rogaines, racewalking, and ultramarathon pages all include content that is only accessible from those pages.

Ultramarathons

Ultramarathons are any event longer than the standard marathon distance of 26.2 miles / 42.195km. Standard distances for ultras are 50km, 50 miles, 100km, and 100 miles. There are also 12 hour and 24 hour track runs, and multi-day "stage races".

I have currently (September 2012) completed 30 ultramarathons, plus 1 DNF at about 66km at the Molesworth Run. Reports for most events are provided below.

See also

Rogaines

Rogaining is the sport of long distance cross-country navigation. Events can be as short as 2-3 hours or the standard 24 hours. Teamwork, endurance, competition and an appreciation for the natural environment are features of the sport. Rogaining involves both route planning and navigation between checkpoints using a variety of map types.

GN Phillips and RJ Phillips, Rogaining, 3rd ed, 2000


The two main umbrella organisations for rogaining in New Zealand are: My reports for selected events are provided below.


Hiking and Mountains

The Hiking, Trail Running, and Mountains pages are all inter-related, but with some subtle differences:
  • Hiking is not an organised race, and may include Coastal Adventures, activities in the Mountains, and hiking in other locations;
  • Trail Running covers organised events, some in the mountains, but others on local hills and trails; and
  • The Mountains category covers both events and hiking in various places that can be classed as mountains.


    • Racewalking

    Racewalking only has to meet two technical requirements:
    • no loss of contact, as judged by the human eye; and
    • the leg has to be straight from the moment of first contact until it is upright.
    More detailed rules are here.

    I'm not particularly good at racewalking, often falling foul of the straight leg rule. But I still give it a go and here are the results of my endeavours.


    Running

    This blog is primarily about my walking activities, but sometimes I do run. Here are reports for events where I have run.

    Shorter Races

    I classify events as ultramarathons, marathons, rogaines, and "shorter events". So a "shorter event" is just something that is shorter than a marathon and is not a rogaine. Consequently there's a mixed bag in here: running, racewalking, half marathons, 10k and 5k races, , etc.


    Wednesday, August 10, 2011

    Progression

    One of the nice things about running a given course semi-regularly is that it's possible to track improvement (or lack thereof) over time. The chart below shows my times recorded for a trail near home. Excluding three significant outliers, the the year to date has seen a fairly steady improvement in my times as fitness improves, hill running ability improves, and general ability to run the more technical sections also improves.

    Also noticeable is that after the first data point there is a small cluster at about the same time, then a more recent cluster with a lower average time.

    The slope of the trend line suggests an improvement of 2.41 seconds per day. That suggests that over the next 6 months (180 days) I should get 7m:14s faster. But to put that in perspective, the course is only about 9.25km, so that is almost 47s/km faster. Or alternatively, the time currently predicted by the trend line is 49m:39s, and the trend predicts that I will be 14.6% faster in 180 days. I suspect that this is a rather optimistic prediction with most of the easy gains already made, and as a consequence the trend line should flatten out a bit more over the rest of the year.

    Posted by Andrew Shelley
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