Last Sunday I successfully completed the Versailles – Rambouillet trail race, known as the Trail des Villes Royales and announced as a 51 km race, but more like 54 km.
Here are the Strave details.
It was a bit early in the year to attack a race of this magnatude. You have to train through a lot of bad weather in January and February. With the short days, the cold, the rain and the occasional snow, just getting out the door with the running shoes on is an accomplishment. The weather this year was not too bad actually and I was able to muster the courage to get out.
On top of the weather challenges, this year I was dealing with sore feet. I got out of bed on 1 January and promptly strained or stretched a tendon or something in my right heel. During the first 2 weeks of the year I was hobbling around with that, then the left heel started to act up with similar pains. Then, because of overcompensating while just walking around, the outside edge of my foot began to hurt. Not to mention (though I will) my everlasting pain in my left big toe which has some arthritis and a limited range of motion. The pain there only goes away when something else is more painful.
So with my aches and pains, I effectively had only about a month of training time to prep for this race. I did long runs on Sundays (17, 23, 31, 33) and got up early about twice a week to run before work.
The 23 km run was the Hivernal Trail race on 24 January. I forgot to do the race report on that one. It was run on muddy forest trails around Saint-Léger-en-Yvelines. For the record, I finished in the middle of the pack: 47 out of 99 in my category and 247 out of 512 runners overall. I did that one with my running buddy, Thomas.
Knowing that the Versailles – Rambouillet race would be run through on a lot of muddy trails this was good training. Also Thomas and I did a 31 km sortie though a sloppy Marly forest. It definitely helps to have a running buddy to get out and due these types of long training runs in difficult weather conditions.
So for the Versailles – Rambouillet race, I was in fairly good shape, not in mid-season form, but ready to go the distance.
We got lucky with the weather. It was 7.2° C (44.96° F) with light rain early in the morning. By race time, the rain had stopped. There was some wind that made it cold just standing around at the start. It “warmed” up to about 11° C (51.8° F) during the day.
This is a point to point race so Thomas and I drove to Rambouillet, left our cars at the train station and took the 7:15 train to Versailles. The start was at 9AM so we did a lot of standing around. There was no hot coffee to keep warm :-( at the start, near the chateau.
I started out wearing my wind-breaker at a too-fast pace. We were told that there was a choke point at 1.5 km, so we wanted to get there before the majority of the runners which was about 800 in all. In addition to the 500+ solo runners there were about 300 3-person relay teams. Trying to stay warm before the race
I quickly warmed-up and had to stop and take off my wind breaker, losing a minute or so, transferring the race bib to my long sleeve t-shirt. It’s no big deal to lose time like that in a 6+ hour race, except that psycologically, you hate to have all those runners pass you like that. With that pause, Thomas and I got separated as he went on ahead.
End of part 1