Thankfully, Christine David, who now counts as our Roving Reporter in Royan, has managed to get hold of a photo of the official positions after 1ohrs of running.

My apologies for the lack of much in the way of “hard data” on the race thus far; William doesn’t have a regular crew for this race so we knew that reporting would be difficult, but I had been counting on updates from the official site (and so far there haven’t been any…).

Christine tells me that at the 10hr point William was in 12th place overall.

The current 1^st man had covered about 65.86 mile / 106km

The current 1^st woman had covered around 59 miles / 95km

Unfortunately I can’t make out the text of the race positions to give any clearer information (I don’t have a higher resolution image than this) but I’ll include the photo in case anyone has sharper eyes than mine (zooming in an art package didn’t make the text readable but feel free to try).

Christine has now gone off to get some well deserved rest after a hard day, but with any luck we may have more from her later on Saturday &or Sunday.

It is of course very difficult to say anything very much about the race positions and distances at this point. The first 10 hrs of a 48hr race amount to the “easy” part of the event, when runners are still fresh and few problems are likely to occur. William certainly won’t be very interested in his race position at this point, as with 38hrs of running still to come almost anything could happen (and probably will). I would expect however that many runners will take breaks during the night, and William is likely to use this time to add to his distance while the track in relatively quiet.

We have been developing a different run/walk split with an altered ratio for use in this 48hr race, and while it has worked well in training I can’t currently tell whether William is on, below or above target at this stage in the race. Being in 12th position overall really doesn’t mean very much as he could in theory be anything from 5 yards to 30 miles behind the leader. In addition, many runners will start relatively fast and then slow in the later stages, whereas William will be aiming to keep a roughly even pace throughout the event. If the official race site posts any updates on the runners’ times/distances/positions I will of course post them here – but somewhat frustratingly, there has thus far been no news at all from the race website (and naturally William isn’t going to email me while running!)

The official race site has a page for photos of the race (nothing there yet…) on this page :

http://100km.iroyan.com/project-definition/48-et-24-heures

and a page which theoretically provides updates from Championchip (or an equivalent), on this page :

http://100km.iroyan.com/resultats

At present this just has a message saying (for those who can’t read French) that all results can be found on another site, but the link they have provided just goes to a site for a Spanish company that provides promotional goods such as t-shirts etc –  it has no info on the race whatsoever…

So I am currently waiting poised over a keyboard just in case, but may not have any further details for some time.

If anyone has any further information about the race at Royan, please do let us know either by leaving a comment on the blog or by emailing me on

royan-48hr-2010@ultrafitnesstraining.com

(this email address will be live until a day or so after the race, after which it will be deleted to cut down on spam!)

More news as it arrives,