A lot of activity this June with two 100K races and a great CMDS conference in York.
Kettle Moraine 100K at the beginning of the month was fantastic, won my age group and 10th overall!
I was planning on taking it easier in the first half then pushing harder on the way back in, but after letting the lead group go ahead in the opening miles it pretty much stabilized. Once I caught up with the back of the 100 miler pack I didn’t want to get stuck in a conga line so I ended up pushing to pass for a long way. The race went mostly well, no major blistering or nutritional issues, and although I got off course once I managed to catch the error pretty quickly. The temperature was perfect, and although there was a bit of rain and mud it wasn’t anything problematic. None of the climbs or descents were particularly long but there sure were a whole lot of them, and some of them were super steep. My biggest mistake was because I did get a bit confused about where I was towards the end and started pushing hard to finish off the single track too early and ended up doing a bit of a number on my quads, which made the closing miles pretty tough.
I had pretty much no idea of my position until well after I finished.. it was at least an hour before I actually looked at my age group trophy and understood what it was. Great race.
Two weeks later I was back at it with the Jurassic Coast 100K from Weymouth to Exmouth in southwest England. Lovely race through the night with the summer solstice full moon. Great scenery through active pastures and small English seaside towns. I worked out pretty quickly that I wasn’t fully recovered from the Kettle and started developing a knee issue that built throughout the race and meant that by the end of it I couldn’t descend well at all and had to give up on any placement or time goals. Still held on to 11th place and, more importantly, enjoyed myself. Tricky to navigate though, with lots of wrong turns ending up in the wrong fields.
Finally, had a great CMDS in York. Always a good conference, I presented some of our most recent results on 2D IR spectroelectrochemistry, towards studying structural dynamics at the active electrode interface. Lots of good talks, posters and conversations. Many thanks to the organizers for putting on a great conference and giving me the opportunity to speak.