After completing my second half marathon at the Melbourne Marathon festival (2:09) I wasn’t sure what to do next. Everyone assumed I’d sign up for a marathon, that being the next logical step up. I didn’t really have any great ambition to complete a marathon. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do one, just that I wasn’t in any rush.

The running group (TXR Runners) that I’m part of does road and trail runs. I’d been to one trail run with them a few months earlier at Lysterfield Lake park. Someone pointed out that my half marathon time qualified me for the Twobays trail run in January. Twobays is a 28km (or 56km) trail run from one side of Mornington Peninsula at Dromana, to the other at Cape Schanck, it includes over 600m of climbing.

So I signed up and started training. Two approaches to the training are required. Obviously the distance is 7km more than a half marathon, so I’d need to build up my distance. But at the same time I would need to introduce hills, lots of hills. I attended TXR Runners ‘Wicked Wednesday’ run for the first time. It’s a 10km loop at Lysterfield Lake park that has three good climbs and a few smaller ones, totalling around 270m of climbing. The biggest climb takes you to Trig Point, the highest part of the park.

My best 10km time on the road is 53:25, my first loop took 1:15:10, and that was moving time, there were a few stops at the top of hills to get my breath back. I did a couple more Wicked Wednesdays (WW) over the next few weeks. I also went long on a couple of Lysterfield Trails Runners Sunday runs. On one of these runs at about 18km of the planned 21km I got a twinge in my right calf. Not so bad that I had to stop running, but I did pause to stretch a couple of times.

I had a few training runs during the week and the calf was still letting me know it was there, but it wasn’t painful so I carried on. That weekend I headed off early Sunday morning for not only my longest run ever, but also on trails. I did the WW loop twice, plus I’d parked in the furthest car park which added another 8km to the run.

The WW loop is the top left part on the map, the bottom right loop was the run to the start of WW and the return around the other side of the lake. This run took 3:27:39 with a total climb of 645m. My calf wasn’t too bad but as it wasn’t going away and stretching didn’t seem to be helping.

A couple of days later I headed off to see a physiotherapist about the calf. Shortly thereafter I was diagnosed has having a grade one calf strain. I was given a few exercises to do and told no hills or speed work for a week or two. With Twobays three weeks away the plan was one week of flat running, the second week would introduce some gentle hills and week three is taper week before the big run. He seemed pretty confident that I’d be ready for the run.