Reflecting on the Week - 29th March
Distance: 50.4 km
Time: 14:05
Elevation: 831 m
Max HR: 182 bpm
This week felt like two different lives stitched together. The first half was classic Badwater prep: a solid block of running and some honest graft in the gym. The back end of the week turned into a European road trip with more traffic jams and breakdown drama than I’d planned, capped off with a snowy arrival in the Alps and a shift into ski mode.
Training started well with a blustery interval session where comedy side-winds kept trying to blow me sideways. Not perfect conditions, but that is sort of the point. Badwater is not going to hand out still, cool air and ideal footing - in fact quite the opposite, its known for ferocious headwinds.
OneTrack Club published a long interview about the Badwater project, and it felt strangely exposing and grounding at the same time. Read it here.
After a decent interval session on Friday, the van was packed and off we went. The normal 3.5hrs to the Channel Tunnel turned into 7hrs. Then after a few hours sleep near Troyes it was on the road again.
My van lost power on the peage and we crawled off at the next exit. First garage and the diagnostics showed “no problem” and we tried again, a few hundred metres later and the same. Whilst the kids thought this adventure was all very droll, late on a Saturday in France I was not sharing their enthusism.
Second garage and this time the problem was found, the pipe to the turbo was bust. “No problem, we can fix in 2 hours” - amazing news. We then proceeded to sit next to a table of mechanics having lunch for an hour, before heading back to the workshop to fix it - how brilliantly French. Still, I am eternally grateful that they fixed my van and we were on the way.
By the time I finally reached France after the breakdown saga, the focus shifted to cross training. I managed a 2.9 km skin up a closed piste, nearly 600 m of climbing in heavy snow, heart rate right up there. Very different from normal training, but still working the engine and the legs, and stepping outside the comfort of my normal routine. It felt good to arrive, clip into skis, and remember that this whole project is richer when it includes other places, other sports and other people along the way.
Who needs ski lifts any way? A week of running, skinning up and trying to keep up with three kids awaits.