Marathon at Dirab Golf Course

The weekend started with some of the hardest training I’ve done yet. I left work on Wednesday afternoon at 1430hrs (our weekends are Thursday/Friday over here and we get an early knock off Wednesdays) and headed for Ban Ban Sands. Ban Ban is a great area for desert driving and has some serious dune contours. I parked up at the North-West corner of the area I know best from the driving trips and set about running a 10km loop. I’d left a route trace with our duty officer and sent him a text just prior to setting off. I kept away from the areas popular with the locals for their driving exploits, as they are not known for their safe practice on the sand (or road for that matter); so I felt I’d mitigated any real dangers.

There’s really nothing like running on sand to drain the strength from your legs. It feels like running uphill when on flat, and uphill feels like running in tar. I would normally walk on the uphill, but this was a short training run and I wanted to try and run as much as I could. Even so, I had to resort to walking on the big uphills as I wouldn’t have made it round. I had chosen to wear thin socks and not put on any lubricating cream on my feet, as I wanted to know exactly where the hotspots were with my race shoes. I could tell whilst running, my right heel was suffering and the outside of my big toes were rubbing quite badly – blister plasters and new socks please!

Where's Wally?!

This was a good leg stretch for the Riyadh Road Runners’ Marathon at Dirab Golf Course on the Friday. Six laps of a 7km route that took in 2km of the half marathon course followed by 1.5km in an ‘L’ shaped loop. The race was open to individuals and teams, with team members doing one or more of the laps each. Doing six laps was reminiscent of the SANGCOM Half, which was a rather dull lap of a housing compound, so six laps with some lovely rocky scenery to look at made things pass relatively quickly, even though my MP3 player packed up on the first lap!

Start of the second lap

I was running with Chris and we had agreed to keep a steady pace, but he was suffering from an injury and dropped back after two laps, stopping after three. I reached the half marathon distance at 1hr 57mins, which I was quite happy with; having chopped 4 minutes off my best weighted effort. Unfortunately the sun was well up and things were about to slow down. Chris had taken some pain-killers and got going again over a lap behind me. The final two laps were quite painful and the hard tarmac road had taken its toll on my legs. I finished in just under 4hrs 16mins. Chris soldiered on, clearly in pain, now in a fairly powerful dust storm, but made the finish with his usual burst of energy, that he normally drops me with on the home straight!

Looking better than I felt at the finish!

I didn’t eat anything on the way round, but drank five x 750ml bottles of water, four of which had a ‘Zero x'treme caffeine stimulant’ drink tab in. These seem to give me a little boost, with enough glucose to make the drink isotonic, plenty of salts, and caffeine to revive me a touch.

I got a lot of encouragement from the other runners when word had spread about why I was running with weight, and one other runner was kind enough to hand over a cash donation on the spot (thank you Tony Caskey). I’d like to thank Chris Denison from Riyadh Road Runners for doing such a good job of organising the race and everyone there who helped build the inclusive atmosphere.