William Sichel begins his most gruelling event of the year later today when he starts running in the 8-day long “No Finish Line” ultra-distance race in Monaco. The race will run from 1pm UK time (2pm local Monaco time) Saturday November 12^th and finishes at 1pm UK time (2pm in Monaco) on Sunday November 20th.

As usual, I’ll be doing my best to provide as full coverage as possible here on the blog, updating as often as I can with reports from trackside courtesy of William’s hard working race-crew, long time regular members of “Team Sichel”, Alan Young and Tim Rainey.

With a little luck there should be chip-based time and distance figures appearing on the official race website at some point during the event, and I’ll post these as soon as I have them.

This will be an particularly long event – Monaco hosts the world’s only 8-day race – and William has quite a few targets that he aims to achieve during the 192 hours of this non-stop event. The first 24hrs or so should see some interesting running but in many ways the action will only really begin to hot-up after the first full day of racing when any initial busts of “enthusiastic” running will begin to give way to the steady war-of-attrition that typifies multi-day ultra-distance racing.

We have put a lot of time and effort into William’s pre-race preparations, not only with regard to his physical training, but also with regard to his in-race nutrition (especially thanks to Team Sichel’s nutritionists, Rebbeca Dent and Lavinia Sinclair) and of course his overall race strategy. Naturally I’m not going to say too much about this last aspect during the race itself, but I’ll mention a few things after key points in the event.

Obviously, no matter how well prepared an athlete may be, some things are always beyond any individual’s control and rest in the laps of the gods – the weather being one of them. With a little luck weather conditions will be good during the event, but a lot can change over 8 days of running. I’ll post a weather forecast for the race shortly.

One added handicap to the seriously competitive runners in the event will be the large number of casual fun-runners who will periodically join the field, doing their bit to raise money for charity. In last year’s race, over 6,000 people took part (not all at the same time), most of these joining the event for short runs before or after work. Naturally at such times the track becomes decidedly hectic with little room for the 8-day race entrants to manoeuvre… William has run in the “No Finish Line” race before, winning the 6-Day race, and at the time he said he wouldn’t go back due to the over-crowding at times on the track.

Which only goes to show that you should never say never again…

News from the race as I get it,

All the best,

Shaun