Pegasus Ultra Running – #TheVOGUM
Any business owner will know that if you put your mind to something, anything can be achieved. If you don’t try, you’ll never know what can be done. We took this mentality from the workplace and challenged ourselves this weekend. We stepped out of our comfort zone and literally into the unknown. In ultramarathon territory.
At the turn of the year, following a successful (and multi-award winning finale) to 2017, we knew that we had to make 2018 bigger and better. Push ourselves and the business to new, unchartered territory. In a business context, this has involved relocating and employing an apprentice. Outside of this, it was committing to the Wye Valley Challenge.
With this physical target set, we laid out a training plan, which due to work and family commitments meant entering events that would help us achieve this. We’ve run 10ks and half marathons but we knew we needed to step this up. We scoured the web for events that would help us with our goals.
One of these events we found were Pegasus Ultra Running.
A new event organiser with a 40 mile ultramarathon in beautiful South Wales. An area Creative Director Dale is familiar with, his young family love going to the awesome beaches there and it’s also a great surf spot (when there’s swell!). As the area was known to us, the event Pegasus had set up was a great stepping stone for us. We don’t want to take anything away from the team and simply call it a ‘training run’, it was to be a huge stepping stone in personal achievements for both MD Chris & CD Dale.
Physically, we both pushed ourselves to new physical heights, making Pegasus’ #TheVOGUM a very memorable experience for a number of reasons:
Our reasons:
We’d never attempted anything more than 15-20 miles in one go
We’ve never covered a marathon distance on foot
The longest duration of continuous exercise either of us had done never exceeded 3-4 hours
Work and family commitments meant limited time to push these achievements further
Reasons the event was so memorable:
We entered Pegasus’ #TheVOGUM because the website states:
At Pegasus Ultra Running we are all about the runner and experience, so if you are willing to push your limits to make it to the end, then we will do our utmost to get you there, meaning we don’t believe in cut off times!
This itself sold it to us! However there’s even more in addition to this!
The team were awesome in the run up to event, emailing with information and encouragement. From the get go the guys knew we were ultra-distance newbies so it was going to be a long day! They didn’t care about how long it would take us, they stuck to their word. The worst thing for us would be to fail by not making the cut off times, being picked up by a sweeper wagon with a DNF. Whatever it was going to take to finish, we were doing it.
We decided that we would aim for 12 hours. However, the guys picked possibly the most amazing day of the year to date and it wasn’t long before we realised we had to really pace ourselves. By this, we mean go slow. Just get it done! By achieving this, we’d already smashed our previous goals out of the park. Also the views were a bit distracting, you’ll see by the number of photos we just had to take! Oh and being ever conscious of the need for nourishment, we did take advantage of the awesome checkpoints at ever opportunity. Breaking PBs and new boundaries yes, setting the world alight with our distance running we were not!
Here are a lot of photos! They’re all in chronological order…
If you ever thought I’d never be able to run an ultra marathon, we know what you mean. However Pegasus’ events are exactly the kind of organisers you need to turn the impossible into the possible. Trust us, we can 100% verify this! Welcoming, supportive, friendly and the team were as jolly as they were 15 hours before at the start! At no point did we feel pressurised, we were getting the job done…It was just going to take a bit of time!
The team are planning another event – they’ll release the details in due course but if you wanted to try ultrarunning for the first time, do it with Pegasus. We’re taking all these positives into our next challenge which is 100km from Chepstow to Hereford. We learned a lot and jumping straight into a 100km run without knowing what we know now, we probably would be put off. Absolute credit to Pegasus, can’t thank you guys enough. Now we’ve sent a benchmark with #TheVogum, we’ll have to come back next year and hit that 12 hour goal. Sorry guys, you’re having a late one again!
Absolutely awesome though. We write this red and sun-baked with all manner of treatment to our feet! Oh, that and we completed our first ultramarathon yesterday!
Here’s a list of personal achievements from yesterday’s Pegasus Ultra Running 40 mile #TheVOGUM that RunKeeper kindly noted for us:
Distance
Duration
Calories burned
Elevation climb
Distance in a week
Duration in a week
Calories burned in a week
Elevation climb in a week
Distance in a month
Duration in a month
Elevation climb in a month
Check out Pegasus Ultra Running here: WEBSITE, TWITTER and FACEBOOK
Cheers guys, see you soon!
