When we signed up to run THE PONDO, I think we imagined the training would involve a lot of dramatic trail runs. Sunrises, mountains, beautiful views, and the two of us looking suspiciously athletic while effortlessly bounding along the coastline.
Hopefully, there will be some of that. Right now, however, there is a lot of groundwork.
We’re still months away from THE PONDO, and I think we’ve reached the part of training that probably won’t feature heavily in the eventual montage. We’re working on strength, mobility and deep core fitness, alongside a lot of fairly unremarkable running. None of it feels particularly epic, but we’re starting to understand just how much of getting ready for 103km has very little to do with being able to run a long way.
It turns out you need a body capable of holding itself together while you do it.
There’s also been a surprising amount of admin around gear. We’re reaching the point where we actually have to test the things. And that means buying the things, as we don’t live in a part of the country where we can pop to the stores and look at the items in person.
Something can be highly recommended, expensive, and objectively excellent and still not work for your body. Shorts that seem perfect for 5km can become deeply offensive several hours later. Thank goodness ChatGPT has been by our side giving us its opinion on EVERYTHING!!! Hydration Packs have been purchased and returned. Shoes have arrived and need testing. Apparently socks are now something we have opinions about.
The biggest challenge lately, though, has been fitting all of this into normal life. We’re in the midst of school holidays; we’re often away from home; work still exists; and children remain strangely unwilling to structure their lives around our training programmes.
When you look at a training plan on paper, everything feels very manageable. There are seven days in a week, you put the sessions into the appropriate boxes, and voilà: future ultra runners. In reality, those boxes have to compete with school, work, travel, family plans, and all the other things that were already taking up the week before we decided running would be a fun addition.
I think I assumed that, at some point, training would become the routine and everything else would settle around it. Instead, we’re learning that the real skill is probably getting the training done while everything else stays mildly chaotic.
It’s easy to think the important work will happen later, when the distances get bigger, and we’re spending hours on trails preparing our legs for the Wild Coast. But what we’re doing now is building the body that will eventually be able to handle those days, while also figuring out how this fits into our lives for the next eight months.
There’s something reassuring about that. We don’t need every week to be spectacular. We don’t need every run to prove that we’re getting fitter. We just need to keep doing the work, including the boring bits, and trust that all these fairly ordinary sessions are quietly adding up to something.
When we started this whole thing, one of the questions we wanted to answer was what happens when you stop waiting to feel ready and start anyway.
I’m beginning to think that applies to the training too. You don’t wait for life to make room for something like this. You start, and then you slowly figure out how to make room for it.
So here we are.// Two months in, still delusional, just with slightly better core strength.
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