Using an event as a training run

Last weekend we headed to beautiful Jervis Bay, about 3 hours drive south of Sydney. We have some fantastic memories of this area, often holidaying with our children and friends, and always enjoy an opportunity to spend some time relaxing in this peaceful area by the coast.

This time, our visit centred around the inaugural Ultra Trail Jervis Bay – a new trail running event through the Booderee National Park. I was keen to enter this one as soon I heard about it and signed up for the 53km Coastal Trail option. Right from the outset, my intention was to use this event as a training run. There were a couple of reasons for this:

Firstly, the event date was 6 weeks post UTA100, and I didn’t want to compromise my recovery from UTA by focussing on “racing” another ultra just yet. I am a huge believer in recovery – it is essential to realise the adaptations from our training and need to allow the body and mind time to recover. My focus over the last 6 weeks was sleep and nutrition – prioritising my sleep, getting a little extra when needed, and fuelling my body for the work it was doing during training and to support my recovery after each session.

Secondly, I regularly will enter an event specifically as part of my training. I will use the event to test out a new aspect of my fuelling and/or hydration during an ultra, or sometimes to trial or practice with some new gear. For this run I used gaiters for the first time and also had a different solid food bar that I was keen to try a few hours into a run. Both worked well during the run although I still managed to bring some sand from the beach back to the finish line with me in my shoes!

Using an event as a training run also means I can take a little of the mental load off in terms of navigating a trail. This is helpful as I often do long runs on my own on trails I haven’t been on before so I can spend a bit of time checking maps and so on. With an event, the course marking is there for you. It also helps that you have aid stations along the way so I don’t have to be as self-sufficient as I would normally on a long training run.

Another key aspect for me of using an event as a training run is I feel less nervous at the start, my mindset is very switched on to the purpose of the run and overall feel more relaxed and at ease.

For this one at Jervis Bay I had the added bonus of being able to run the event with my husband Grant. Whilst being a runner for many years, he has only recently gotten into both trail and ultra running. He decided to enter Ultra Trail Jervis Bay as a training run as well and one we could run together. This was definitely a highlight and loved being able to share the trail with him from start to finish. We kept the pressure off ourselves and each other, weren’t too concerned with our watches, and just enjoyed spending the day running together. We traversed some beautiful trails, enjoyed some sand running (helpful that we had nice and compact sand along the beach due to the low tides as the time we went through) and saw some whales. A fab day out and will definitely be back for this event next year.