Chris Worfolk's Blog

Last Saturday, I completed my 300th parkrun.

Unfortunately, there was no time to celebrate. I was hoping to do it on 1 April and had even cleared a space in my diary to finally stop for coffee after. But then I had the flu so missed that run. By the time the next week rolled around, it was in the middle of the DUHAC 24-hour relay, so I had to keep running. But good to make it through the unofficial milestone.

Trinity Harriers holds an annual fundraiser and this year’s challenge was a 24-hour run. Ten teams of four athletes had 24 hours to run as far as they could. I was on Team Cool Runnings along with Joanne, Oren and Eoin.

I wanted to run a minimum of 60k as that felt achievable: with 24 hours, you can essentially run a marathon and a half as if it were two separate days. But in the back of my mind, it would be great to hit 100k. Ever since I had to drop out of Endure24 at 86k I wanted to try again. However, Race to the Castle was cancelled two years in a row and Eurovision got in the way of God’s Own Backyard Ultra so I’ve been left wondering whether my hip would stand up to the distance.

Race day report

I decided my best strategy was to run for two hours at midnight. I could then get six hours of sleep before parkrun, and wake up with fresh legs and a whole day ahead of me. Things did not go to plan. I had stomach issues on the run and the cramps continued throughout the night making it difficult to sleep. I managed to hold down some toast in the morning and then set off for parkrun which would provide a second two-hour block of running, taking me to 42k. Obviously, I ran the extra 200 metres.

After this, I came home and prepared a hot lunch: chicken, bacon and lettuce sandwich which I had absolutely no interest in eating. I took a few bites and my hunger slowly started to kick in. After battling through it I decided to proceed based on 10k loops, allowing me to take a break every hour or so. I managed three of these loops without much issue, albeit getting slower every time.

By this point, I was at 72k and setting out on my fourth 10k loop. This was proceeding like the previous loops until the 3.4k point when I started running up the hill to Cabinteely. I felt dizzy. I stopped and debated whether it would be safer to walk back. This didn’t solve the lightheadedness, though, so I decided to sit down on the grass, eat some emergency Haribo and call a taxi to take me back home.

Having safely made it back to the apartment, I cooked a pizza which I managed half of and then decided I would see how far I could walk with the remainder of the day. I was always planning to switch to loops around the building at some point in case of digestive issues. But trying to get through 25k worth of loops was not on the original plan.

I completed the first 11k just as the sun was setting. It was still warm enough to be in a t-shirt. I did some running but still wasn’t feeling great and didn’t have much energy left anyway. At the 14k point, I went back for another break, stuffing whatever food I could manage and switching all of my energy drinks for Red Bull. Now all I needed to survive was a final 14k of mostly walking in circles in the dark. After another 10k, I took a final toilet stop and headed out once more but now with that “I actually might finish this thing” feeling.

There was no grand energy boost for the final laps. Just a slow and relieved plod. When I finally finished I sat down on the wall and checked all of my stats to make sure it had really happened. I kept imagining later discovering “oh no, I only ran 99.8k and I have to do it all again!”

Results

In the end, it was a comfortable victory for Team Cool Runnings. We covered 228.01 km between us, giving us a 83.89 km victory over Team Scrambled Legs in second. The closest runner to me was my teammate Joanne who finished with 62.28 km including a marathon in a single run, and my teammate Oren covered the fourth farthest distance split over 25 separate runs completing a minimum of one mile every hour. Incredible effort, team!

I was moving for just under 11 hours, spread across a 23-and-a-half-hour period. My watch measured me at 100,260 steps (1002% of my goal, apparently) and I burnt 9,753 calories.

Well done also to Team Legs and the City and Team Stridge and Prejudice who trounced everyone else in the fundraising competition. Collectively, we raised over €3,800 with helps support the club as well as raising money for Special Olympics Ireland. The quality of team names was also excellent.

Reflections

I haven’t trained much with DUHAC since I moved house so it was nice to be part of a club event. A big thank you to Moya and Peter for all of their organisation around the event.

I’m super happy to get 100k in the bag! I started to have some hip pain at GOBYU so I wondered if I was always going to be an issue. I did a weight lifting course earlier this year to try and build some strength but then between university, paid employment, fatherhood and charity commitments I have just been overwhelmed and haven’t stuck to it.

I think what made the difference this time was focusing on technique and core strength. If I stopped focusing on my core, I would start bending from the waist and that put pressure on my legs. As long as I stayed focused on lifting from my core, my technique remained good (both running and walking), the discomfort went away and I moved easier.

Would this work at a 100k race? I’m not sure. Maybe at something like Endure24 where I can start, stop, return to base, etc. I’m not sure it has given me the confidence to take on a 100k point-to-point race despite having previously had a ticket to Race to the Castle. But who knows what the future will bring. I have a backyard ultra next month so we will see how that goes.

I’m also very pleased to have recovered from the flu in time. Of the three races I had booked so far this year, I’ve missed two due to illness and I was worried my lungs wouldn’t be back to full health. I’m grateful every opportunity I get to take on one of these challenges.

364 days a year, Irish people complain about British people coming over and imposing their culture. But once a year, on the 17th of March, all of that goes out the window and every one parties in remembrance of Saint Patrick. Typically a parade is involved somewhere.

It was a traumatic day for Venla because she had an ice cream but the ice cream was too cold. Somehow she got through the experience though and we made it safely home. At least Fluffy had a good time.

Last year, Holbeck College launched its first diploma pathway for CBT, and later its mindfulness diploma path. Today, it is launching its counselling diploma path. These pathways enable students to combine the courses they are studying with an exam to work towards a higher level qualification.

Learn more about it on the Holbeck College website.

Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America is a book by Scott Adams. In it, he makes the case that most of us make had decisions or fall into an array of thinking traps which he coins as “loserthink”. In the book, he looks at the lessons we can learn from studying psychology, engineering, history and science to escape our “mental prisons”.

It’s a solid popular psychology read with a lot of good stuff in there.

I’ve been working my way through The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop. Elina bought it for me for Christmas. But probably the previous one and it has sat around waiting to be used for a while. Well worth the wait: there is some delicious recipes in it!

Gong bao chicken

Duck with cashews

Dry-tossed beef

We went to The Vanilla Pod for Elina’s birthday this year. It was busier than expected but they managed to seat us pretty quickly. Elina was a little disappointed that her potato salad actually had salad in it but otherwise very happy. The South Korean chicken was good, too. And they do slushies in a lot of different flavours.

I recently finished a six-week Learn to Lift course. Despite being a strength and conditioning coach, we only do bodyweight in triathlon, so I didn’t know that much about getting the weights out in the gym. The course was really good: we covered squats, deadlifts and the bench press mostly using the barbell. Thanks Grace!

Duathlon is a multisport run-cycle-run event. I’ve never really been that into duathlons. It doesn’t have the sex appeal of triathlon. Perhaps because it is plausible that people like both running and cycling. Whereas nobody likes swimming, cycling and running so we can all suffer together.

Still, Trinity Triathlon was making it a club trip and my previous experience in Naas, for the Naas triathlon, had been a good one. This one was at the Punchestown race course and featured a 3k run, 20k cycle and 3k run.

Just as we rocked up, the freezing rain came down. Fáilte to Ireland. Luckily, it held off for the race and sat comfortably in the cold but not too cold temperature. The bike course was an out-and-back which had a long hill that, to its credit, felt longer on the way down than it did on the way up.

My splits were:

Good enough for 128 out of 178. It was on the National Championship series so everyone was annoyingly fast. I’m claiming victory vicariously because I drove Maxence to the race, and he came first in his age group.

Every year, I do an audit of the courses I teach to bring them all up-to-date. This year’s audit was bigger, though. I made significant updates to social psychology, person-centred counselling, cognitive psychology, CBT for social anxiety, and large updates to many other courses resulting in around 172 new lessons.

This has been my main focus since finishing the gestalt course around six weeks and it’s been exhausting. So, I’m looking forward to taking it a little easier until at least tomorrow!