# Equinox 24 Hour Race



## Chris Hobson (Sep 20, 2021)

*Equinox 24 Hour Race*

Last weekend myself, wife Liz and her sister Jill all trooped off in Jill’s camper van to take part in the Equinox 24 Hour Race at Belvoir Castle. Liz and Jill formed a two person team called Twisted Sister, I was entered as a solo entry just called Chris. We travelled down from Hull on the Friday in fine weather, a pretty uneventful journey and, having arrived fairly early, were able to pick ourselves a nice spot. This was our first camper van adventure featuring “wild” camping. This doesn’t mean wild in any literal sense, not very wild at all really, it just means that this wasn’t a regular campsite with hook up points that provide plumbing and electricity but just a big field. The camper van has two gas cylinders, two twelve volt batteries and a big water tank to provide life’s necessities in the absence of a hook up point. Although quite small, the camper van has pretty much everything that you could want for setting up home from home. Toilet, shower, cooker, telly, all mod cons as a time traveller from the 1970s might say. The site provides portaloos and shower blocks and we did use the portaloos for number twos and only using our own loo for widdles, this makes the job of emptying the toilet cartridge slightly less icky. Having done this kind of event in the past using tents, all of this luxury was very much appreciated.

I have written about this type of event in the past but for any new readers here is a recap of what they are all about. The course is a circuit, in this case 10k. The whole thing kicks off on Saturday exactly at noon. A big digital clock near the start and finish lines starts counting backwards from 24 hours. Walkers and runners then have until noon on Sunday to complete as many laps as they can. You can get in a bonus lap if you begin it before the twenty four hours is up. The really serious ultra runners run through the night and clock up around 120 to 130 miles. The world record is 191 miles, that is 3hr marathon pace or roughly equal to my pace on my best ever 5k parkrun. Non of us in our little group were expecting to trouble those guys, we are all feeling our age a bit and we hadn’t done the large amounts of training that we used to do when we were tackling this kind of event in the past. In my case I’ve been doing a fair bit of cycling and swimming, so fairly fit overall but not actually prepared specifically for a running / walking event. Partly this has been down to the disruption of the past eighteen months, we have actually had this event booked for a couple of years now. Also I have had a bad knee which has prevented me from running and limited how much cycling that I’ve been able to do. The knee seems to be much better now, it has responded well to me having done more swimming, which I also haven’t been able to do due to the pools being closed. The advantage of this race format is that, if your preparation isn’t totally up to scratch, you can still get out there and just do what you can, which is what we planned to do. I have run these events in the past but this time I’m walking it with the Nordic Walking poles. Once we got our mobile accommodation set up we went off to the registration tent to get our race numbers with built in timing chips, and, for the team runners, a snappy bracelet which acts like a relay baton.

Saturday morning was bright and sunny and we were up nice and early organising cooked breakfasts, in the mornings the whole site seems to smell of bacon. The morning before the off is always a nice relaxing time because there are a few hours to kill. We wandered into the events village and bought some Equinox tee shirts and hoodies. There were various stalls selling appropriate merchandise including some head torches that ranged from sixty to a hundred and twenty quid. These were totally the bee’s knees in head torches but I don’t think that my level of involvement could justify the cost.

Eventually twelve noon rolls around, Jill and myself tag ourselves onto the back of the crowd at the start line, there is the traditional congregational countdown from ten to zero and the race is under way. I was expecting that Jill and I would go along together but she shot off like a rocket and left me behind. The course is a mixture of private tarmac roads and grass. The route on the grass parts have been mown and there are plenty of marshals to keep us on course. The route is fairly hilly with one particularly steep hill that this venue is notorious for. This hill has timing mats top and bottom and there is an extra prize awarded for the fastest hill climb. The course doubles back on itself a lot and so you often meet competitors coming the other way, lots of us give encouragement to each other as we pass. There were the inevitable runners in fancy dress, inflatable sumo wrestler, Mr. Blobby, one of those outfits that makes it look as though you are riding a small goofy horse and the occasional tutu. At the distances that are involved here it is pretty common for runners to alternate between running and walking so they will often chat with the walkers for a bit before pressing on. I was pretty amazed when my watch told me that I had completed my first lap in 53 minutes which is a better time than I did for my first ever 10k back in 2014. Not wearing my glasses, I had missed the little super script 1 before the 53, one hour and fifty three minutes you eejit. I returned to the camper briefly to grab a few snacks and loaded my ultra vest with cereal bars before setting out again. I then did the next two laps without stopping. I did three laps, 30k, on day one. By the end my hips were hurting a bit and I had a blister but, considering my lack of appropriate training I thought that I was holding up quite well. Particularly encouraging was the fact that my knee wasn’t hurting at all. Jill and Liz clocked up four laps between them on day one. I would have quite liked to have done a lap after dark because this is quite an interesting experience seeing the strings of headtorches moving along different parts of the course, but I was just too shagged out.

On the morning of day two I was so stiff that I was walking a bit like a penguin. Jill and I decided to call it a day but Liz went out and did one more lap. I had considered doing another lap as we were up and about pretty early and so I would have several hours to get round but decided that it was probably a bad idea. It is actually the first time in ages that I’ve actually been fully fit, as in not carrying any injuries or ailments, so I was thinking that it would be unwise to risk messing that up. 30k is not that much of an achievement compared with the proper ultra runners or some of my previous efforts but I’m reasonably happy with it. My watch says that I hit my target for my step count, and various other stats that it gives out about how active I’ve been look impressive. Next year I will be concentrating on my swimming challenge so I don’t think that I will be doing too many other events. The 24 hour format does leave me with a bit of an itch because, although I have attended three so far, every time I’ve been dogged with some kind of problem and so I’ve never done one when I’ve been fully fit and properly trained up. Of course there is also the fact that I’m about to hit 63 and still in denial about old age creeping up.

Overall the camper van is a lot less hassle than a tent. There was a problem one time when our water tank ran empty just as I was preparing to do the washing up. So I had to put on a head torch and load up the cart to go and visit the stand pipe in the dark. I had to take the head torch off and hold it like a hand torch to stop the swarms of insects from dive bombing my face. The weather held up for most of the event. I was hot and sunny for Friday and Saturday, cloudy on Sunday morning and then it rained quite heavily at about eleven. It rained for a couple of hours and there were a few showers as we drove back to Hull. So there we go, another act of masochism out of the way.

Related links.

(2) Ultra Running for beginners. | Diabetes UK

(2) Nordic Walking. | Diabetes UK

(2) The Mizuno Endure 24 Race | Diabetes UK


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