Equinox 24 2019 Jason Buckley

​What’s Equinox 24?
I’ll be honest, I had no idea what to make of Equinox 24 when I first heard of it. I can recall some of the KADS highly recommending it after running it in 2018, but the concept was so out-there to me, I couldn’t compare it with anything I’d done to date and get my head around it.
This is how it works:

• The race starts at 12:00 noon on a Saturday and finishes at 12:00 noon the following day (although you can finish a lap started before then), so involves 24 hours of running, including in the dark of course.
• The course is a 10km loop around rolling parkland in the Vale of Belvoir, with the castle stood alongside perched on a hilltop, lit up at night. It’s a mixture of grass and tarmac, with some uneven sections but nothing ‘technical’ – no rocks to navigate or streams to ford. There are great views from several areas.
• There are a couple of hills involved, both of which have attained legendary status in the Equinox world, and after running them both 11 times, I can see why. The first is dubbed “Not that Hill” and is about half a mile up at about 5 to 6%, so is a test, but is runnable (although many chose to walk some of it to preserve energy on longer stints). The second requires a sense of humour. It’s dubbed “That Hill” and the organisers set you up for it with an awkward downhill section before turning you back up the same steep hill (arghhh, the pointlessness of it all!!!) for a 0.2 mile hands-on-knees slog at up to 25%.
• There’s one drinks station at about 3.5 miles, after the top of “Not That Hill”, where friendly marshals served water, electrolyte drinks and sweets, and had a disco going to lift you as you headed for “That Hill”! There are also drinks at the start-finish line.
• The start-finish area is set in the middle of a huge camping field. Thousands of folks turn up from Friday afternoon and most leave on Sunday afternoon, although entry includes camping on Sunday night too. Bell tents are available for rent
• Showers, toilets, fresh water and chemical loo emptying are all provided, and there are several food stalls and a bar, in a funky old bus. There are also merchandise, camping and running gear stalls, and I picked up a pair of new trail shoes for a bargain price.
• You have four choices of how you can run the course:
  • Alone (aka solo – hundreds of runners or walkers chose this option)
  • As a pair (70 pairs took part, and there’s no distinction on age or sex, everyone competes against everyone)
  • As a small team of up to 5 runners
  • As a large team of up to 8 runners
• There are also a couple of stand-alone 10k runs, one at midday and one at 8pm (the latter was in the dark), plus a fun run for the kids on Saturday morning and an ‘adult fun run’ involving beer on the Friday evening!
• The rules are basic: if you’re in a team, only one of you can be on the course at a time, only full laps count, and you have to run as many laps as you can.
• You get an event t-shirt before you start, so can run in it you fancy, and a hefty medal at the end.
• You can read more about the race here: equinox24.co.uk, and see 2019 photos here: www.curleyphotography.co.uk

The 2019 KADS Teams
Four teams entered for KADS in 2019:

• Pair – Kerstine Herbert and Rachelle Sherman
• Pair – Jason Buckley and Dave Taylor
• Small Team – Leigh Turner, Nicholas Crehan, Chris Worth, Dave Savage, Steve Robinson-Day
• Large Team – Eve Taylor, Julie Buckley, Emma Ward, Chris Chandler, Claire Croll, Patrick Burke, Michelle Chauhan
• There were also KADS taking part in other teams and running the stand alone 10km runs

What Happened Before the Race?
Ju and I piled down to Belvoir on Friday. The gates open at 12, and we thought we’d be first there. Arriving at about 12:20pm we joined a 2-mile queue into the venue! When we wound our way onto the field lots of old hands had already pitched up right next to the course where it runs up the centre of the camping field, and taped off large areas around them for their teams. We borrowed some tape and did like-wise, but with our camper couldn’t get next to the course.

The bulk of the KADS arrived on Friday afternoon and evening, Rachelle opting to set her tent up and retreat home for a warm night’s sleep, and Chris Worth getting a pre-race test when his caravan tyre imploded on the way there. A wee fire was started on Friday evening and we all sat about chatting over a few beers (or lemonades!). Having failed to actually bring any firewood, Nick pulled off a fine manoeuvre offering to buy some of our neighbour’s stash, who promptly gave it to him for free.

Race Day (and Night)
One of the defining features of this event is the fact one team member is always ‘out of camp’ during the 24 hours of the race, and often two as one will be waiting their turn in the handover area just after the start-finish line. The camp ebbs and flows with people as some run, some crash, some tuck into a pot noodle, fish ‘n’ chips (whatever has calories in it), some shower, some feed the fire and some stare into the darkness, blankly, gone that tiny bit crazy by 3am…

Being part of a pair, I can only give you my own perspective on how the race felt as it progressed, but my feeling was the spirit of each team grew and solidified as the miles and laps wore on. For Dave and I, we’d set a strategy to run 3 laps each, so 30km (18.6 miles) and then swap. We nicked this from the other KADS pair of Rachelle and Kerstine, as we were clueless beforehand. Dave ‘won’ the toss and started for us at noon, after which I only ever saw him for fleeting moments. We swapped a few words of encouragement during the laps and handovers, and sent back and forth a handful of text messages later on in the night, but other than that we just piled on around the course.
I was nervous on Friday and Saturday morning, even more so during the wait until 3pm when I’d get to start my first set of laps. My heart rate was bouncing along in the 80s as I sat waiting. I was confident I’d get around the first 30km OK, but after that, who knew? A 27-mile training run two weeks before was tough to finish, and my mojo was low. We’d agreed to start at about 10 min mile pace, while my guess is both of our marathon pace is less than 8 min miles. Knowing we’d a long way to go though, the slower pace seemed sensible and paid dividends in the end.
Come 3pm I finally got started and joined the steady stream of runners and walkers on the looped course. Although it has ‘solo’, ‘pair’ etc written on your race number, I couldn’t make many of these out so I’d no idea what strategy the people around me were doing. It is a race with yourself, not with the people around you. Only the website and screens around the start-finish area gave an indication of where your team are in the grand scheme of things. The atmosphere was good though, with fancy dressers (who must have suffered in the daytime heat) and vocal marshals (one of which spotted me heading off course in the night and corrected me, thanks!).
After lots of umming and arring I’d decided to run with a backpack with a bladder, containing about a litre of water-OJ-honey mixture (Dave drank Tailwind and said it worked very well). It was warm, and I’d cut the top off a freebie baseball cap to create an airy-sun-shield for my thinning hairline! Both worked well, although I was a bit keen on those first 30k and ran out of drink, which I sorted later by using the drinks station rather than carrying more than 1l of liquid. My personal preference is to be able to drink in sips, a little at a time, so carrying some liquid made sense for me. I opted to run “Not That Hill” and walk “That Hill”, which again worked well for me. Faster 10k and team runners (Dave Savage, are you reading this?!) legged it up “That Hill” at least once, and I bow down to these mountain goats. There were timing stations at the bottom and top of ‘That Hill’, so you could see how your climbing ranked after the race.
Before my second 30k stint I’d had a shower, changed my top, eaten and drunk, utilised the toilet facilities and was amazed how recovered I felt once I’d started running again. I’d put on warmer shorts too, and donned my head torch, as it was about 9:20pm by this point. I also pulled the headphones out for this stint, entering a weird world of darkness, Rocky tunes and an endless stream of runners decked out in fairly lights, funky reflective gear, headlamps like something from the Starship Enterprise and even one chap with a wheel barrow lit up and banging out tunes, raising funds for charity. The night run was a wonderful experience for me, I really enjoyed the hours of internal solitude among my fellow runners. My pace slowed from ten-min miles to ten-mins and 30s, not by anything much as I’d expected.
It was well after midnight when I handed back over to Dave. He really got the graveyard slot, a hard, hard slog until about 4am. I can’t speak highly enough of my team-mate as he toughed out those miles, eventually rolling over the finish line having nailed 90km! He’d suffered for it, and my respect went even higher as I gritted my teeth and headed off into the dark, leaving him for a well-earned sleep. I’d got maybe 15 mins of kip myself, another revelation that I could keep going without it. By this point we’d crept up the pairs field and were amazingly in 4th place.
Looking at how far ahead the podium places were, I knew they were out of reach unless one of the other teams had a problem, but I really didn’t want to lose that 4th place! I wanted it enough to get four laps in to give Dave a chance to recover, a little bewildered I could complete the best part of a marathon having already run about 37 miles? My pace wasn’t quick, but was only down to 11:24 min miles, and apart from “That Hill”, which I’d long started to see as a rest, I wasn’t needing to walk. The rain started on this session, so the headphones went away and the phone went on load speaker (after much frantic stabbing at the wet screen in the rain), so everyone around me got the Rocky soundtrack from this point…

Every lap gave a boost when I came around the tents and up towards the start-finish line. At all points of the day and night there were folks sat offering encouragement, and it was a buzz to cross the line and head back out again onto the course. After the end of that 4 laps I was really ready for a rest though, so thankful Dave was stood there in his waterproofs ready to complete his 100km effort on seized legs, and ensure we got 4th place. Top man! He’d enough in the bag to get back before 12 too, so we could get in one final lap (we couldn’t be passed for 4th, but my brain couldn’t work that out at the time so I needed to make sure of it) to complete a total of 210km, 130 miles, which we were both staggered by, coming over the line together for the final time and buzzing!

The Other KADS Teams
All the KADS teams did a cracking job knocking out the miles, hour-in, hour-out, day and night, all placing highly in among the other teams:

• Rachelle and Kerstine came in 7th place from 70 pairs, the first all-female pair (Kerstine had amazingly completed three back-to-back ultra runs only 3 weeks before at the 135-mile Ring of Fire). They completed 19 laps (118 miles).
  
• The KADS small team placed 18th from 143 teams with 25 laps (155 miles) run.
  
• The KADS large team placed 51st from 113 teams with 23 laps (143 miles) run.
  

Equinox 24 turned into something for me while it took place. Beforehand it had seemed whacky and I’d not really prepared properly for it, although I did taper in the week beforehand. During the event it acquired an increasingly meaningful feel. A feeling of solidarity with fellow KADS in the face of the innate difficult nature of the thing. A feeling of pushing personal boundaries (in a safe environment), finding myself capable of much more than I thought possible, a huge emotional boost for me. A feeling of being uplifted by the efforts of my fellow club members, many of whom were running distances further than they’d ever done before. To all KADS who attended and made it what it was: thank you.

Lessons Learned
A few lessons I personally picked up from this epic event, which might be of use to someone else organising or running it in future years:

• Having a pitch by the course is useful, as you can set up a gazebo for those of your team who want to stay awake, and they can support passing runners without waking up others in their tents further back. You’ll need to be in the queue at 10am on Friday I think to achieve this.
  
• Bring some wood and a decent fire pit! It gets very cool at night, even in September.
  
• A good-sized gazebo is handy when it starts raining back in camp.
  
• Neither Dave nor I thought we could keep going anywhere as long as we did. It’s amazing what the human body can do. I was very tired afterwards though!
  
• After each stint I ate some high-energy food (cold sausages, hard-boiled eggs, fig rolls, nuts, malt loaf etc), drank a pint or two of water, coke, coffee etc and then rested, sitting down as much as I could with a bit of stretching. I also ate a few fig rolls or similar as I ran, the keep the calories going in (Strava claims I burned 8000 calories in total). That worked well, no stomach issues although I was dehydrated at the end.
  
• If I did it again as a pair, I’d think about adopting the same strategy the top 3 pairs did: one runner did a single lap at the start, then the next did 2 laps and they alternated at 2 laps from that point, perhaps switching back to one lappers towards the end. I noticed I started to get tired on lap 3 of each stint, and that 3-hour wait at the start wasn’t fun.
  
• Overall the event was a real boost to my running morale. I’m writing this 9 days later and have managed a few jogs out before getting a cold which has had me resting for four days. I’m not surprised, and I think it’ll take me a full month to fully recover, but the knowledge my body could do that kind of long-distance running came as a big surprise to me. The night running was a first too, and I really enjoyed it.
  
• More lube! Almost forgot, the miles wore away at skin under my arms and around the old nether regions. I knew I needed something to help avoid chafing but didn’t get it right. The soreness was gone a couple of days after the run and wasn’t bad anyway.
  
• I ran in trail shoes and didn’t get any blisters, probably helped by the fact it stayed dry for much of the run.
  
• Running as a pair was a real privilege. It felt like we were there for each other, pushing and pulling each other along. The sensation of team-achievement at the end was overwhelming.
  

Cheers, Jay