Following the successful Malvern Marathon in June, the next event that I am entering is the Wistanstow Challenge. Results since 2007 are available on the website and these are worthy of a small bit of analysis for planning purposes.

Firstly, the context is that my target time is, ambitiously, 6 hours and 30 minutes, about an hour quicker than the Malvern Marathon. An idea of the difficulty of this can be obtained by looking at the number of entrants and finishers.

Around 75% of entrants finish, and about 15% do it in under my target time, so this is going to be tough! Further context can be gained by looking at the fastest time achieved – I am not sure whether the course is exactly the same each year.

Aside from the first couple of years, these fastest times are comparable with the Malvern Marathon times. Looking at the split times at 11.5, 17.5, 22 and 26 miles for the 2012 event gives a crude indication of which sections of the course are hardest. The thick red, black and pink lines in the following chart show the expected splits for a flat pace and finishing times of 4, 6 1/2 and 12 hours respectively.

The average split times for the four sections are 17, 20, 17 and 23 minutes respectively.

The event course is not published in advance as it goes over private land, however taking a guess at it by reading various course descriptions gives an approximate elevation profile.

What this shows is that there is a steep ascent around the middle of the course which would give rise to the higher split there, probably fatigue is the main factor behind the higher fatigue in the last section.

Putting this all together I have made a wild guess at average speeds over each mile of the course.

The ups and down scale to the same profile as that for the average of all the times, the only possible divergence is that I have anticipated a little more speed in the final mile. One thing that I will keep an eye on over the course of the event is the average speed per mile, so it is worthwhile plotting this out too.

Basically what this is showing is that for the first 10 or so times I have to keep the average mile time down to 14 minutes at most anticipating that this will rise in the middle section. After that pick up some speed in the low teen miles with the anticipation as fatigue sets in around the 20 mile mark.

In recent training runs over 13 or 14 miles the 13 mile point has been reached in around 2 hours 30 minutes to 2 hours 45 minutes, so about 30 minutes quicker than the requirement for this event. The terrain I have been practicing on is hilly and has a lot of stiles and long grass, but not quite as big a hill as expected in the middle of the Wistanstow Challenge and of course additional time has to be added for navigating an unfamiliar course – the hour before the event scrutinising the course map is going to be crucial. All in all, 6 hours 30 minutes is possible, but certainly very challenging and I can’t afford any long stops or navigational errors.