Preparing for UTD100

On 28 April 2018 I'm planning to run 100km through the Drakensberg mountains in southern Kwazulu Natal.

I decide to add this entry today as it is 1 month away and I can't back out anymore from this point.

http://www.ultratraildrakensberg.com/

Over the past 8 months I've been preparing for this race. Will it be enough? I don't know, I've never attempted to run this far...


In 2017 I did the 30km version of this event and completed it in just under 5 hours. What made this experience unique was that I ran with the leading lady and 4th place male of the UTD100 event for the last 15km and it gave me a unique and great insight into how these top athletes approach a race like this. It also showed me how much they suffer, basically the same as all the other racers of all the other distances. I ended up motivating the leading lady the last 10km as she was in a bad state and I could see she was ready to give up. I was quit proud of myself being able to motivate someone like that and this gave me the self believe that I could finish a distance like that.









In the past I have done 24 hour races but those where multi discipline and in a team so although I acknowledge it would have prepared me mentally I'm not sure about being on your feet alone is entirely the same thing.







A little bit of insight into my training so far for 2018 (January, February and March):

This coming weekend will be my last big run of 60km before I start tapering.

Land Cruiser 79

I bought a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser 79 Double Cab on 30 January 2018.

Why did I do this?
Well I owned at Land Cruiser 76 Station Wagon since 2012 that was stolen in September 2017. That vehicle was awesome and I dearly miss it.
I've always said that if I had to buy another Cruiser it would be a double cab. It is more versatile as a daily driver as you can use the bakkie part for all sorts of things. So I went and bought a second hand ex Hire Cruiser 79 Double Cab with 150000km on the clock.

It had all the overland gear I could wish for and we went on our December holiday.

But

The vehicle and I never clicked. I realized I would never trust that vehicle with my family out far and away from home, and that would be it's primary purpose.

So on 30 January 2018 I traded it in on exactly the same Cruiser but with 12km on the clock... and it was beige.

I kept all the extras the old Cruiser had. I had the load bin rubberised at Toyota and immediately on delivery went and changed the tyres from the old to the new. The old cruiser has Cooper ST Maxx's which still has many kilometres on them I have first hand experience with how useless the OEM tyres are.

The wife approved: