Challenge Stu

Last Friday I ran the Fuji mountain race in Japan. There are a few races around Mt. Fuji, so for clarity, this one is not the Ultra tour of Fuji or any of the other races "on" Fuji... it's the one that starts at the bottom and finishes at the top, with 21km of distance and 3000m of ascent between the two. The runner's fair at registration on Thursday, with Fuji-san in the background It's renowned as a bit of a brutal race, and the cutoff times are notoriously tight, with a lot of dissapointed racers each year! The race accepts about 3000 entries, but only 50 of these are open to foreigners, so when I realised that I would actually be in Japan for the week following the race for an academic conference, my initial excitement at being able to enter the race faded a bit as I realised I would need some luck to even get an entry. I entered and crossed my fingers... Fast forward to last Friday and the dream had come true, I was standing on the startlin...

As I write this I am sitting in the departures area of Manchester Airport. In an hour or so I'll be flying to Dubai, then a few hours later on to Tokyo. All being well, sometime tomorrow I will arrive in the town of Fujiyoshida at the foot of Mt. Fuji (Fuji-san as I think it's called by the locals!). I'm really excited and looking forward to the race, but first I just can't wait to get to Japan and experience the culture and the country. I'm staying in a traditional Ryokan in Fujiyoshida, so hopefully I'll have a proper taste of Japanese life. Training for the race has gone well, I think the last month or so has probably been the most intensive period of hill training I've ever done, but quite rightly, as Fuji-san is a massive hill. The race stats are 21km with something like 3500m ascent... A bit more than Win and Lose Hill where I've done lots of my training. I did my final two Win Hill reps yesterday, and this morning I caught the train from...

Last weekend saw the annual outdoors-fest that is Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (ShAFF) take place at the Showroom cinema in Sheffield. As always it was a fantastic and inspirational event, and I'm very proud to have been a ShAFF ambassador once again (just look at the other people on the list !). On Sunday I gave a talk with superfast ultra runner Marcus Scotney. As well as being able to run really quickly, Marcus is a sport therapist and the director of the Accelerate Performance Centre, the newly re-vamped and rebranded part of the Accelerate / Holywell sports therapy centre. It's the centre that is now looking after us supported athletes, which is fantastic news and I'm very excited to be involved! Marcus and I spoke about running your first ultra and covered topics such as food, kit, planning, training and the mental approach. Marcus certainly knows more about most of these topics so I'm afraid he had to do most of the work, but I contributed a bit, and lear...