Over the past six weeks my training for UTMB has been pretty consistent, but with two races this week, one of them being a hundred mileer, training has pretty much gone out of the window. Welcome to week seven of UTMB training. We will spend the majority of today's video talking about victorious and my North Dan's way 100 race experience. But before we do that, we do have to have a little look at the tiny amount of running we did before the race during week seven's training. No running on Monday morning, the week started on Monday evening with 10K, low heart rate, no elevation, nice and flat, on Zwift on the treadmill. I'm on Tuesday morning, we were back on the treadmill for the film my run 500 meters of climbing, setting the treadmill at 12%. If you want a really good smart treadmill, get the Noble Pro with a discount in the link below. So far, Monday and Tuesday were relatively easy running low heart rates, nothing too special. However, Wednesday was my first race of the week and it was hilly and I was going pretty hard. You can see by my heart rate here how hard I worked and there was also some elevation. So a pretty tough race on Wednesday, it was the West Sussex Funeral League high down hike. Now I didn't film it this year, but I did film it last year. If you want to go and see that video from last year, then it's linked up there. Thursday was my only double run day of the week, although combined the runs were only about 10K. The ratio filmed my run 500 in the morning and then we did bag that bag in the evening on Zwift. So both runs on the treadmill combined 10K, nice and easy, very low heart rate. And that was it for my training for the week, a total of around 20 kilometers before the big 100 mileer. Most of that runs Zwift about 25 kilometers indoors on the treadmill and six or so kilometers outside with the race on Wednesday. Friday was a rest and travel day. We made our way from West Sussex to Farnham in Surrey, which is the start of the North Dan's Way 100. It's the start of the North Dan's Way national trail. The North Dan's Way trail is actually about 153 kilometers long, stretching from Farnham all the way down to Dover, but the actual race itself is 102 miles usually a little bit more than that, but the 2023 edition was slightly cut short, so down to 102 miles, organised by Centurion running. You know, we've done many of the Centurion races before. And it's fair to say that this year, Victoria and I have not been blessed with the easiest of Centurion races during the Grand Slam. The 10s Pa 100 was the muddest 10s Pa 100 you have ever experienced. And the South Dan's Way 100 was the hottest South Dan's Way 100 in the entire history of the South Dan's Way 100. And it was no change for the North Dan's Way 100. There was a storm blowing and the storm arrived at exactly the time that we started, but finishing the North Dan's Way 100 would mean we could continue with our quest to finish the Centurion Grand Slam 400 miles in a year. This would be our third finish if we could get it done, so we would determine despite the weather to crack on. The rain really started to do its worst. Around Rigeigh Hill, which is around 30 miles into the race, it absolutely lashed down and it didn't stop for a good half an hour. We were absolutely soaked to the skin. Despite the weather conditions, Victoria and I made it to half way, feeling pretty good. In fact, a lot better than we'd fell on the 10s Pa 100 and the South Dan's Way 100. And I think we've got to put that down to increased fitness. Plus, the conditions on the foot really weren't too bad in the first half of the race. We made it to half way in around about 13 hours, but it was after the halfway point, as you might expect, in a long distance ultra race, that we started to feel the pinch somewhat. Victoria started to complain of chafing, and she did at one point say she completely understood why I DNF my very first 10s Pa 100 race due to chafing. It was that bad. And then she started to feel sick and indeed threw up a few times. And it was around about this time that we noticed the ground starting to turn up. What with the rain and all the runners before us, it was a quagmire and it was pretty slippy and quite dangerous at times in the dark on some slippy, quite gnarly terrain. With big races for Victoria and me on the horizon, we really did not want to slip and break our ankles over those slippy bits so we definitely slowed down in those sections. Up until now I had been managing to eat and drink fairly well, but then to add to Victoria's nausea and chafing, I started to feel sick and I rapidly lost my sense of humour with the race. Thankfully though, the potential for things to go wrong was abated by the rise of the sun and a new day gave us new hope. With 20 miles to go, it was all change. During the run we'd been lucky enough to utilise the expert crewing skills of our friends, Jacob and Karen. And for the last 20 miles of the race, we picked up Jacob as our pacer. Victoria had changed out of her wet things at around the halfway mark and I took the opportunity with 20 miles to go at the Dettling 8 station to change out of my wet clothes as well, so we were really dry and comfortable for the last 20 miles of the race. Then, with less than 10 miles to go, the sun on our back and the nausea all but banished. We actually started to speed up. We felt quite good and Victoria not only had that steely determination in her eyes that she wanted to finish, but she also had that competitive streak. She was catching people and passing them. Suffice to say it was a quite brilliant finish by Victoria. But if you want to see the full thing, if you want to see the whole story, make sure you subscribe to the channel because the North Downsway 100 video will be out in a couple of weeks. All you need to know for now is that we crossed the line, we finished, we got our buckle for the North Downsway 100 and that means the Grand Flam is still alive. If you can call it a training week, we finished on 195km and around 4000m of elevation gain. That isn't at all bad if we're calling it training. We did one hard effort, that was the race on Wednesday and one long run. You know, only 100 miles or so. If you have yet to watch sick again, the story of our 2023 South Downsway video, the incredibly hot South Downsway 100, click that link right there and you can go watch that video. In the meantime, we are done with week 7. There are no more races until UTMB and OCC and we will see you on the start line for week 8 of UTMB training next time. Take care, bye bye.