 I've done the archivatrician three times now. Now the first time I did it I took my camera with me on the run. Most of you, hopefully most of you, will have seen that film. I know you all want me to take the camera with me on the run and make another film like I did two years ago and I will do that again. It may be next year, it may be the year after, we'll just have to see. But this year I did the same thing again as last year. I gave the camera to my children. This year though, I think they did a little bit of a better job of keeping filming during the whole race. So we have got most of the checkpoints in this time. So let's start at the very beginning. And the very beginning is well before the race starts. Honestly, has there ever been a race where so many people have had so much trouble just getting to the start line? It was incredible. We got caught in a snowdrift on the A38 heading down just out of Exeter. But we didn't get caught in the main blockage that happened at the top of Bodmin Moor on the A30. I know so many people got caught in that. My friend Richard got caught in it. He was there all night, didn't make the race. And I know from 192 entries to the archivatrician, 190 something entries to the archivatrician, there were 30 odd people who didn't even make it to the start line because of the snow. We made it to our hotel in Camborn late evening, managed to get a decent amount of sleep and we were up for breakfast in the morning. And then we got in the car and made our way down to registration. So we're on our way to register for the arch 2019. It's been an absolutely terrible, terrible night of getting here in snow. Some people are not even going to make it to the start line because they've been stuck all night in the snow. We luckily made it. So we're on our way to the Eco Park to register. There is a brand new race HQ for the archivatrician. It's at the Ecological Park, which is still in Port Town, but just a little bit out of the main beach area. It just means there's a lot more room for people to mill about. There's a nice coffee area. There's a lot more parking. It means that that poor blue bar in Port Town isn't absolutely swamped every year by 200 people. This guy's won this race a few times. So he knows what he's doing. So it can happen to the best of us. As usual, the start of the archivatrician 100 mile race is at Covrack small village on the south coast of Cornwall. So we all get on buses. It is mandatory to get on the buses because they can't have hundreds of cars arriving at that tiny village. All right, so 2019 archivatrician. Just getting on the bus to get to the start line. We won't film the start. I'm not taking the camera with me. The kids are going to do the filming again. It's cold and it's icy. It's really, actually really much colder than I expected it to be. We'll see you later. I'll see you in 10 miles at whatever it or whatever it's called. Listen point. Bye guys. Good luck. Because the camera was now with my wife and kids, there's no film of the start of the race. I'm not going to use anybody else's footage of the start. But suffice to say, it was a little bit different than usual. We started a bit further up near the car park. Usually we start kind of right on the seafront. There was a big banging drum at the beginning and Andy the race director introduced all the elite runners to us. So it was a bit more of a razzmatazz kind of affair. And then when the gun went off, we all ran down the hill, flanked by these blue flares held up by the race marshals. So it was quite an event to start the race. The race started at midday. So I spent the next two and a half hours running along the coast to Lizard Point, which was the first point at which I met my family. It is gnarly from the very beginning. There is no messing about with this race. Once you're out of Covert, you are straight onto the gnarly, difficult terrain. Would you say this is the first check point? Yes, first meeting point. If this was further in the race, you would say it was really, really tough terrain to get over. As you're just beginning, it's not quite so bad. But running fairly steadily, fairly conservatively just to preserve my energy for later in the race, it took me two and a half hours to get from Covert at the start to Lizard Point, which is just over 10 miles into the race. Not bad at all. That is it. 18 kilometers, 600, 700 meters of a sense of our very muddy on the course today. What time do I need to be there? Three hours 45, one hour 15 minutes. The next meeting point is a pretty little fishing village called Mully and Cove. The running between Lizard Point and Mully and Cove is just as tough, quite muddy on this occasion, very windy. Although the sun was out, it wasn't overly cold. It was still quite difficult running and I think I lost a little bit of time. That was a little longer than expected but never mind. 15 minutes behind but you're closing the gap with people in front of you. So we're now at 29 kilometers, so 18 miles, 19 miles. This is a place called Mully and Cove. Eight miles to the first official checkpoint. Eight miles to Port Levin, which is the first official checkpoint. As I said before, you've got to be prepared for your crew. We recommend bringing a bag for the things that you'll need for each checkpoint. All right, see you later guys. Love you. See you. Bye. Bye darling, love you. So on I went making decent progress from Mully and Cove to the first official checkpoint at Port Levin. Last year there was a massive coastal path diversion just before Port Levin, which added an extra two miles and half an hour to our journey. This year that wasn't there, there was a new coast path section, much easier to run on and actually the running between Mully and Cove and Port Levin is much nicer but this is the time that the sun starts to go down. The idea for me really, the idea is to get to Port Levin before it gets dark. Okay, so this is the first checkpoint to Port Levin, 25 miles and I'm doing all right. I'm ready for this checkpoint though. Do you want Red Roads to go with that one? No, I think I just might even carry it with me out. So after the first checkpoint at Port Levin, it's a relatively short journey to the next checkpoint at Penzance. There's a little stop halfway through at Peranuthna where I briefly see my wife get a quick drink but generally actually it's quite flat running and when you get to the outskirts of Penzance, you're covering four, five miles of flat, lit tarmac road all the way into Penzance and out of Penzance. I quite like it in a way because it breaks up the 100 miles. You've got the initial gnarly cliff section from the start into Penzance and then you've got this town which kind of breaks up the whole 100 miles from just before halfway and then you kind of get back on to the old gnarly cliffs again. So Penzance is around about 38 miles depends how many diversions you've done depends how often you've gone wrong and off the trail. Yeah that's a really flat bit for about three miles along the seafront there and you feel like you've got to run it all so I did run it all so I'm quite tired now I need a rest but this is a good milestone to get to Penzance. If you get out here, get to land's end, you're doing good. So now we come to the section of the race where there is a little bit of a lack of footage. Partly my fault, partly my wife's fault. So you leave Penzance, it's nice and flat, you're still on the road and then eventually you're leaving Penzance up onto the hills again and onto Lamorna Cove. I thought well there's no point in filming Lamorna Cove, it's quick through, we're out there in a second, it's dark, let's just get on with it. So we went through Lamorna Cove and on to the next stop which is Minak Theatre. If you were at Minak Theatre on Saturday morning for the start of the 50 you'll know what it looks like. Absolutely beautiful part of the coast, a kind of amphitheatre built into the rocks so you can watch a play and look out over the sea whilst you're watching it, beautiful in the summertime, probably not so great in the winter. So we didn't film at Minak Theatre either, I thought we'd wait till we get to land's end, there we can go inside, it's nice and warm, it's light, we can do some filming, have a catch up, everything will be fine. So a few wrong turns, lots of mud, lots of climbing up steps, a fair bit of running and I made it to land's end, slightly ahead of schedule, something like two o'clock in the morning. Anyway I got to land's end and my wife wasn't there or at least I couldn't find her, she says she was there in the car park, I don't believe her, I don't believe her. Anyway she wasn't there, I had to rush, I didn't want to spend too long at a quick bowl of soup, chicken soup, very nice, thank you very much, looked after very well by the archangels as always and on I went. Land's end to Cape Cornwall, last year had a navigational error where I managed to come back on myself, I made sure that I followed my watch and I didn't make that same navigational error again and there's also a navigational error, a lot of people make the mistake of missing a turn going downhill into Sen and Cove. A lot of people end up on a road and wonder where on earth they are, it's just a case of making sure you look at your map or making sure the GPS track on your watch is correct so that when you look at it you know you're going in the right direction. Look it's a self navigation event and sometimes stuff happens that you just can't predict, yes in theory keep the sea on your left and everything's fine but honestly it really isn't like that, there are places where if you turn left you will go to a headland and it'll be a dead end and there's nowhere else to go or you turn right and you'll go all the way inland and I'll tell you about that in a minute. So there are mistakes you can make, one thing you must not do is simply follow the person in front, I've learned that to my cost plenty of times, unless you know and they know exactly where they're going and you trust them don't just blindly follow the person ahead, last year we went off into a field somewhere because we all followed somebody the year before that I went into brambles because I'd followed somebody just blindly not taking any notice of where I was going just watching the person in front, just don't do that, be confident in your own navigational ability, it might go wrong but at least you're the one to blame and not somebody else. After Sennin Cove and onto Cape Cornwall it is some of the best terrain, honestly you absolutely love it, it's boulders and stuff you've just got to climb over and sometimes you don't know where the path is and you're wondering if there's a massive cliff drop to your left and there probably is, it's really really good. Anyway my head torch died at this point so in the pitch black I had to try and change the battery of my head torch, managed to do that eventually and managed to get to Cape Cornwall where my wife cleaned my feet and I was feeling a little bit worse for wear. You'll also notice how tired I am here, I say St Ives when I mean Land's End so you can see I am getting tired, mental focus is not quite what it was earlier on the race and this is what happens. We had a slight mishap at St Ives, I arrived far too quickly and Victoria hadn't got there yet and I just missed her apparently. So here we are at Cape Cornwall it is about 10 to 4 in the morning, 5 to 4 in the morning and I'm just having my feet cleaned, I'm starting to feel really wrecked now so yeah we're at now um well we've done 102 kilometers whatever that is 60 62 miles 60 something miles I don't know I feel like I'm gonna be sick in a minute yeah maybe so I've got to get to Pending watch lighthouse in five miles and then there's a 13 mile slog over really over really rough terrain to get to St Ives but once we're at St Ives we'll have a nice rest there and hopefully it'll be an easy 20 mile jog home. From Cape Cornwall it's a short hop to Pending watch lighthouse um I was fairly conscious of time here so I really didn't want to spend too long um at the checkpoints at the meeting points with my wife I'd had a little bit of time at Cape Cornwall where she'd washed my feet and changed my socks and things like that so you can see here at Pending I don't want to spend too long having tea and things like that. Do you fancy a cup of tea? No I'm good I'll just go yeah I'm just gonna go. This is a hot flask here if you want so don't don't knock. Is it right there? Yeah okay go go for it. Okay it's quarter past five in the morning we're at Pending watch lighthouse so now 13 miles 21 kilometers with no um help um until we get to St Ives so I'm hoping to get to St Ives by at least half 10. No that is great. No problem. Loads of people are coming to our rescue because our boiler's not lighting. You all right Alice? Yeah good lad. Elsa are you okay? Excellent stuff crew we're doing really well. You are unlikely to run in the UK on any terrain tougher than this section between Pending watch lighthouse and St Ives add to that the fact that it is mostly in the dark and add to that the unbelievable weather that then started to appear. The wind had been blowing a gale most of the night. We then had rain but we also then had sideways hailstones and these were this is not just tiny hailstones these were marble sized hailstones for a good 10 15 minutes on and off for a good period during that whole section so you're you're running but you're not really running you are making your way over rocky muddy slippy difficult terrain in the dark with hailstones sideways hitting you in the face as you go this is not easy running guys seriously and stuff goes wrong and stuff went wrong for me I was not paying attention so I got about halfway into this run it was starting to get light but my mental focus was going I wasn't looking at my watch I climbed up a hill then I looked at my watch and I knew I was off track now rather than do the sensible thing of going back down the hill and rejoining the path I thought no surely there's a way just to get back onto the coast path if I just carry on this way and just go round I'll just get back onto the coast path oh no oh no I just kept going and kept going no path on the left no path on the left to get back on the more I went the harder it was to make the decision to turn around and go back and back track back to the coast path from where I came so I just carried on going going eventually there was a path off to the left a normal public footpath through some farmers fields which took me into the village of zen or itself where I asked somebody in a car park how do I get back to the coast path and it was literally another mile along a road before I could rejoin the coast path I think I added half an hour and two miles to my journey which really annoyed me at the time but these things happen and if you're not again as I said earlier if you're not paying attention if you've not got your eye on your gps track or on your map if you're not paying attention to the acorn signs that are on I mean this you know it shouldn't be hard there are acorn signs on posts that you can look at and they tell you where to go and it says coast path with an arrow for goodness sake when you're tired these things just don't happen and I went off and I yes I added two miles to my journey but there we are it got light and eventually made it over the bolder climb more bolder climbing again lots of fun I mean it is terrific you know you are tired but this is what you're there for it's absolutely fabulous it's it's a hard hard work you cannot really run very fast on this terrain but it's just enjoyable it's like Dan Lawson who came second in the 50 mile race he said it's like playing it's like dancing through the puddles and over the rocks that's what it's like it's just it's a game but it really is such a relief to get to St Ives thank you to the valets the archer patrician valets who meet you just before the checkpoint and run you in to the checkpoints every checkpoint there are valets that do that thank you to Melissa who was my valet who ran me into St Ives where I could rest you can see here that I'm tired and I actually say it's taken me 10 and a half hours to get here what I mean by that is it's half past 10 in the morning not that it's 10 and a half hours it's actually taken me 22 and a half hours to get there okay so finally arrived at St Ives that was hard work that sideways hailed some of the time rain a lot of the time really howling gale for a lot of it and most of that in the dark but we are here now so I've arrived here in 10 hours and 20 minutes which means as along as I leave here in the next half an hour we'll we'll get under 30 hours for the whole run we've travelled 132 kilometers there are one or two steep tarmac sections getting out of St Ives itself but then it's flat running all the way around the bay into hail I sometimes briefly say hello to my wife there and grab a quick drink and then it's on to the dunes of doom the dunes of doom when I first did it were not waymarked so the staff at archivatrician put glow sticks through so you could find your way through now they've been replaced by big slabs of stone marking every two 300 meters through the dunes and as long as you keep your eyes out for those markers then you will find your way through the dunes fairly easily I don't realize the idea of doing it in the dark though as the arc 50 runners had to do so the next section you see me arrive at after the dunes of doom is godrevy godrevy is around about 11 12 miles from home so this is godrevy and we've got two more well no we've got one more stop to go before the finish from godrevy you climb back up onto the cliffs from the beach and you go past hell's mouth which is a well-known tourist spot and all the way along to uh potrith compared to what's gone before it is relatively easy running it's fairly flat most of the way apart from a little sting just before you get into potrith uh where there's two down and ups one little one you go down and you go through steps and then another big valley you go all the way down into this valley all the way back up again absolutely kills you uh with six miles to go that really hurts but finally you drop down into potrith and and here i am at the final meeting point with my wife so this is port three watching a nice uh beach kind of town i've got five miles to go so slow on the lap i'll get in under 29 hours hopefully so obviously by now i knew i was going to get um well as long as nothing disastrous happened i knew i was going to get under 30 hours um if i continued to run relatively well i would get um a pb but i was really shattered by now and i hadn't been going the speed that i'd really wanted to go from St Ives all the way to potrith i'd been really quite slow uh and i was a bit disappointed in my speed over that terrain so i did pick it up a little bit i just tried to run in the last four miles five miles from potrith into port town and there's a different finish now to the archipetrician he used to end at the blue bar on the beach at port town but now you have to run down the hill all the way out of port town and then up another hill to the finish so it adds another mile on to the run at this point i was on for a finish of 28 hours and 30 minutes i wanted to just try and sneak under 28 30 so i was really pushing it to try and do that well this evening i'm finished my god i'm finished much crew does it again with that i imagine the hill those tears at the edge nice will understand 100 miles is a long way 100 miles with much of it almost half of it in the dark is harder still given the terrain given the weather that we had it is an absolute relief to cross the finish line it's a relief that you've crossed it in the first place that you haven't been injured you've fallen to your death down a cliff you haven't had to pull out because you've been sick because you've fainted because but for any number of reasons you might dnf a race like that there's a massive outpouring of emotion that happens at that moment that you cross the finish line you're just so incredibly grateful and happy and relieved to cross that finish line without any disasters happening that's what those tears are about and they're also an immense sense of satisfaction and pride and achievement and it's a great it is a great feeling it's a it's a feeling that you don't get very often in life and those those tears are absolutely not embarrassing to me at all it's just something that i do when i've had you know it doesn't happen every race doesn't happen every race but it happens on those races where i've really been through the ringer and it's really meant a lot to get to that finish line great job buddy you i had nothing for that last 20 miles you two flew away brilliant job really good is that is that Laura hello did you win darling oh well done you well fast this time um 28 and a half just over because that bloody here but um yeah i mean i had a little plan for 27 hours that i thought i probably am not trained up enough for that time and true enough i wasn't but i went out i went out with that in mind and i got to the last 20 once i've left sent eyes i had nothing left and there was a lot of struggling that last 20 this is laura by the way laura won today she's and now she how long have you been there since you finished how are you john i'm good yeah i'm yeah knackered but fine thank you laura so we are at the ecological park which is the new finish of the archivetrician the 100 mile race 104 106 because if you go the wrong way you add plenty of miles um but once again we finished once again we've got a gold buckle so we can't be anything but happy with that and i'm going to drink coffee and have a long long bath so the next morning we all gathered back at the ecological park for the prize giving massive congratulations to kim collison who managed to come in in a new course record time and uh here he is so this is this is kim who was the winner of the 100 this year did you enjoy it i mean it's a hard old gnarly course isn't it today yeah i really enjoyed it there's sections that isn't like the road sections because that's not my first thing but i really like that first section on the daylight with the host of views and i did like about the port in ice and just the train that suits you me with the the technical the fold-off being did you enjoy the weather uh i mean it's not too bad four o'clock in the morning horizontal hailstones every spell you know over in five minutes all right it's not like half an hour today all right thank you very much kim pretty well done and the winner of the arc 100 2019 in a time i'm really sorry it's not a course record which is the first thing you said to me when you cross the line actually in 26 hours 48 minutes and 30 seconds representing the team 19 arc 100 in a fantastic time and a new course record of 20 hours 43 minutes and 46 seconds representing team ragelike is kim collinson so the finish line's been taken down we're all going home it's a beautiful sunny morning here in port town and uh that is it for the arc 100 and the arc 50 as well but an absolutely amazing time managed to get a pv 28 hours 31 minutes 39 seconds something like that approximately a round about that might have been a bit quicker for i hadn't gone off to zenor and added an extra mile to my journey but that is the way it is with the arc it's just an adventure if you have even the slightest inkling that you might like to try it you've got to sign up really the arc is an amazing event so that's it do subscribe to the film i run youtube channel and we'll see you again for another adventure another ultra another marathon next time take care bye bye