After a pretty dubious nights sleep, day two started with the thought of 42 km mountainous terrain ahead. Aha, I thought- shorter than yesterday so maybe I'll get through the finish in daylight and with a chance of listening to some of the talks. How wrong can one person be in life.
I had the luck of starting behind two other women, Sarah and Megan. We stuck to each other like glue. We stomped, fell, swore, got lost, together. Three became four at the top of a boulder-strewn mountain. It took us over six hours to get through the first 15 k- things were not looking too sparkly for us.
The four of us became the fab four for a while : a few running stories told, a fair few more falls in the peat. We decided we had no chance of completing the day, so planned to pull out at checkpoint two .Bizaarely, some of this was caught on video, our girlie bad moments- so might not look too good on the BTU promo video . However, after being promised a nice track to follow to the end, only 12k which any fool could manage, we stayed in the game and took our tantrums to the finish.
All our fears were probably realised. It got dark, the promised track was a peat bog leading up a mountain, we were exhausted, we couldnt see the markers, it was hideous. At this point four became six and we decided our best policy was to stick together across this challenging terrain. After taking yet another wrong turn, we got a message on our trackers to turn around and backtrack. Also to keep following the pylons : er,, hard to do this in the pitch black on a cold mountainside . Swearwords were uttered, medicines shared, somehow we continued. We ended up splitting up into smaller groups to move quicker down the mountainside. Move quickly, try and stay warm.
At last vague lights in the distance. A stroppy end to the day. I couldnt even find it in me to hug my favourite medic, when she had done nothing but be really nice to me in this event and the ice ultra. Thats what fourteen hours of getting lost can do to you.
Guess what....already, I look back on this with fondness. Ah, ultra adventures.
