The Goring Gap Ultramarathon 18th may 2025
Sorry we've been a bit quiet recently on the Rucking front, we had to pause our adventures to focus on a different challenge. In a moment of lunacy, we entered our 1st Ultramarathon and when we got towards the end of our training plan we needed all the recovery time we could get from our training. We started training just after Christmas and slowly built up our distance over time and Rucking Rosie got to joins us on our 21km taper run.
This was Shelly's first race of any kind ever, so she really had jumped in with both feet for this, and we are really lucky to have such amazing countryside to train in especially when you are running for 4-5 hours on a single run.
Race day ended up coming round really quickly, but we had put in the work in training so felt as ready as we could be.
As our training had gone well we had set ourself a target of finishing under 6 hours, but what we didn't expect was that this would put us in the 1st wave of running to start that day. We both started to think we had maybe been a little optimistic in our target time, but we couldn't change it now so eased our way to the back of the group and get ready to set off.
The route was really lovely and scenic, through quaint villages and mostly along the banks of the river Thames. We picked this Ultra as it was pretty flat along the river but would still be a good challenge with the distance.
We managed to finish in 5 hours 56 minutes so were really pleased to achieve our target. We did loose fair bit of time with some unplanned stops to deal with a couple of blisters and the obvious food and loo stops along the route.
For our first attempt at an Ultramarathon we both had a great day and really enjoyed ourselves. The atmosphere, people and scenery helped as well and we will definitely be back again next year. We must have looked like a sight for sore eyes on when we stopped at the motorway services on the way home though as we stiffened up quite a bit in the car on the 3 hour drive home, but we just found it amusing as we'd earned it.
