Next week I’ll be running the fourth marathon of my fundraising challenge and for the first time it will be a real race, the Sri Chinmoy Canberra Trail Ultra. This is a race that explores Canberra’s hills, trails and nature parks covering more than 100 km in four stages that can be completed by solo athletes or in teams of two to four runners. It started two years ago to celebrate Canberra’s centenary with a 100 km trail race, a distance that has been increasing by 1 km every year to match the age of Australia’s capital.

Running an official event should have made the planning stage a lot easier as I didn’t have to create a course, make a map, count the kilometers, or find suitable starting and finish points. However, I decided to run the race as part of a team (or should I say that my body decided that it wouldn’t accept 102 km as a reasonable approximation to the 42 km that a marathon should have?) which means that I couldn’t completely avoid some sort of planning. The major problem was to form a team since most of my triathlon friends will be racing the duathlon championship on the same day. I was luck to get Jasen and Shane, two other members of the Bilbys triathlon club, to run the first two legs of the race, leaving the last 47.1 km for me.

Race map with individual legs for the relay (starting from red and finishing with purple). Below the elevation profile.

I ran leg two in the first two editions of this race and I’m looking forward to complete legs 3 and 4 this time. One week to go!