And they’re off! The 2016 Self Transcendence 24 Hour Track Race gets underway
One minute until direction change!” comes the call from the sideline. Normally unmoved by such factual statements, this one catches me off guard and, for a brief moment, I’m overcome with excitement.
For the past four hours, you see, I’ve been running round a 400m track. I’ll continue to do so for the next 20 hours. The prospect of changing direction, therefore, is just about the best thing in the world.
Now, crazy people never know that they’re crazy, but believe me when I say this isn’t how I often spend my weekends. I’m in Tooting Bec, south London, for the Self-Transcendence 24-Hour Track Race. Each year since the race was founded in 1989, 45 lucky, lucky, runners are selected – on the basis of previous ultramarathon experience – to test the limits of their mental fortitude and physical endurance.
On paper, the task couldn’t be simpler: complete as many laps of the track as possible in 24 hours. The aforementioned glorious change of direction occurs every four hours, every runner is assigned an official lap counter, whom they must tell every time they leave the track, and if a runner leaves the track for longer than five hours, they are disqualified. Easy!
The thing about races, though, is that the reality is often worse than the theory. And four hours in, I’m beginning to realise the enormity of the task.
Conversations with fellow runners have revealed how woefully unprepared I am. One runner, Nick, says that for six months he has been doing double-run and sometimes even triple-run days in preparation. Indeed, in his words, he’s found it “hard to think about anything else.” For my part, a recent triple-run week was an achievement.
Up until this point, I’ve been sticking to a regimented run/walk ratio of 30 minutes of running and five minutes of walking. Each break brings with it the promise of a soggy rice cake (lesson learned: never add jam the night before), a sip of water and a chance to suppress the increasing sense of delirium. The 30-minute stretches, meanwhile, are characterised by burgeoning paranoia: what’s that pain in me knee? What on earth am I doing?
look who’s walking
As the sun begins to set on this strangest of scenes, such questions become justified. The 30:5 run/walk ratio gradually decreases to 25:5, 20:5 and 15:5. The knee pain grows, and a trip to the on-site physio results in a heavily strapped knee and the non-assurance, “I don’t think you’ll do any permanent damage if you carry on.” But I’ve come too far. I’ll crawl if I must. A wise old saying springs to mind: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough continue to do laps of a 400m track in south London’.
So, hobbling on, I try to take inspiration from the performances going on around me. With midnight fast approaching, plenty of runners have barely stopped since the race began – several of them in their 60s and a couple in their 70s. Words of encouragement abound, from both the ever-supportive lap counters and the competitors themselves. And I take comfort in the fact that, no matter how much worse things get, I am going to finish and, more importantly, I am going to dine out on this race for years to come.
So after much coffee, cake and mental strife, the endless night does in fact come to an end. The new dawn fails to bring renewed energy (running is now completely out of the question), but
it does bring an irrefutable truth that wouldn’t normally be a source of joy: in six hour’s time the race will be over.
And, lo and behold, in six hour’s time, it is!
I can’t claim to be a 24-hour runner, but I have at least survived – with body and mind salvageable if not intact. Many others, though, have thrived. The winner, James Stewart, clocked a ridiculous 160 miles, breaking the longstanding course record in the process. Even more remarkably, 68-year-old Ann Bath managed 115.9 miles – proof, if proof be needed, that running keeps you young.
As I write, my achilles is the size of my calf and my knee creaks ominously in the wind. Running round a track for 24 hours is not, unsurprisingly, the wisest thing to do, but it did teach me a lot.
Not only about my dodgy patella, or that fig rolls are hard to stomach at five in the morning, but also that runners – in their own weird, compression-clad way – are the craziest, toughest, most endlessly optimistic people on the planet.
For more info, visit runandbecome.com/self-transcendence-24-hour-race
A broken Isaac at the finish
