I had a good online video meeting with the support team on Sunday. Phil, based in California, joined the call from Newport Beach and treated us to views of the Pacific ocean!
We talked about the various points on the route where the team would join, leave and handover. That plan is well established. There’s only really Carlton and John’s handover in Wheeling to fine tune.
One of the big topics of food. I was keen to stress that I have very low expectations of what I expect from the team’s cooking. Generally, porridge and eggs (which are very expensive in the USA currently) are my staple diet. “If you can’t cook it in 10 minutes then I don’t want it” was an expression I may regret saying. That will certainly be the case for breakfast and lunch but the final meal of the day certainly doesn't have to be like that. Particularly when I have a 2 hour slot to write a blog and edit and upload content to YouTube.
I talked about trying to find consistency in everything we do. Same departure time every day. Same daily mileage/time targets every day. The dream scenario is to be in double figures of miles before 0900 each day, for example. As much as I’d like to start running at 0800-0900 every day, that’s simply not going to help me get the miles in and do all of the social media etc around the run. I have much more thought to give to this topic and communicate to the team. That’s what I’ll call Plan A. As Donna later reminded me, there are numerous things that disrupt Plan A. The main one is of course the weather. Lightning has the power to stop running altogether. While I’ve ran in many a monsoon, torrential rain has the knack of absolutely crushing my spirit.
There is very little margin for mileage error in the USA run so I expect to push on in all kinds of conditions.
I’m reminded of this by my blog on day 51 of the run across the USA in 2011 “Today was an extremely tough day. I started running in very windy conditions. I was only a mile down the way when I got an absolute soaking. By the time I got to the first stop for breakfast at 5 miles I was wet through! I waited an hour until the rain subsided before continuing on. The challenge this time was a very strong wind. Sometimes it was a full on headwind and other times it was a cross wind. It was very difficult to run in and sapped what little energy I seemed to have today.
I got to the 10 mile point and told the Support Team that enough was enough. For the 4th time in 51 days I had hit the wall. More mentally than physically on this day I think.”.
Back to the support team meeting and I also talked about recording the calorific ins and outs every day. I’m keen to try and pinpoint what works best in terms of recovery and performance. It’s always been a mystery to me why some days on my big runs have been far better than others. It’ll hardly be under laboratory conditions but I believe we’ll be able to come up with a decent formula for good running days hopefully in the early part of the USA run. I know from my experience of running across Europe in 2016 that full rest days are hugely beneficial. That’s one luxury I won’t have in the USA this year however.
One of the topics of conversation, while seemingly trivial but very important really was around the contents of the motorhome. One of my first tasks (the day before the run starts) will be to stock it up. I’ll need to buy a basic supply of plates, glasses, cutlery, pans and so on. On the subject of shopping, Phil offered to post his Costco card for use in NYC. I immediately got flashbacks of doing the same in 2016 and the huge boxes of porridge the had!
All in all it was a good meeting. As a team, we are in constant contact via a common WhatsApp group but it’s nice to get everyone on the same video call.
