The lonely road

Chances are that at some point during the Parish Walk you will find yourself on your own.  Sometimes you feel like you're the only person actually in the race because it is so long since you have seen another person other than your back up crew. 

Whilst competing in the last four or five Parish Walks, I have walked most of the whole distance on each occasion on my own. This wasn't through choice or having a Greta Garbo moment (for younger viewers,  she had the famous line of "I want to be alone." in some film or other) but rather as a result of either losing touch with those who were ahead of me and/or distancing myself from those who were behind me.
I actually like walking on my own in a race. It allows me to 'zone out' and purely focus on the job at hand without any distractions. When racing with a group of people who are all going at the same pace, there is usually quite a bit of banter even though you are all rivals and each wants to out-manoeuvre the others as the race progresses.
If there are other competitors ahead, the challenge is to not let them get further away and to try to close that gap! The further away they are, the more difficult it is to motivate your self to do this. If, on the other hand, you can see your quarry, or you are informed by your back-up crew that someone is 'just around the next corner' (even if that corner is half a mile away), you get a mental lift and try that little bit harder.
A good example of this happened to me in 2007 when, from around the lower Laxey area, I was constantly being informed that Sue Biggart was 'just up ahead' and that I was closing the gap. Sue has a phenomenal record in the Parish Walk: she has 11 finishes, has won the ladies' race on 7 occasions and has a PW pb of 16:23. If I could catch Sue, it would be a major achievement for me. I had long been impressed with the speed and consistency of, not only Sue but Robbie, Sean, Eammon Harkin et al. So to find myself within touching distance of catching one of these icons of the PW was unprecedented.

Bearing in mind it was dark by this point, I couldn't see the red light I was told she had on and I was beginning to doubt that she was actually as close as my crew were telling me she was. Even on the fairly long and straight stretch from the Liverpool Arms public house to the top of Whitebridge, I never saw her red light.
It wasn't until I turned the corner at the Port Jack Chippy and headed down towards Douglas promenade and the finish line that I at last spotted Sue. From Maughold where she was 10 minutes ahead of me, it had taken me 18 miles to catch her up. She was about 250 meters ahead but now that I could see her, and the fact that the finishing line was about 1½ miles away, I sped up, mentally buoyed by eventually catching her up and the closeness of that finishing line. I passed her on the promenade more or less opposite the Queens pub and crossed the line for my 3rd Parish Walk finish in 6th place which I was over the moon about. I couldn't smile wide enough!

If you are not chasing someone who's ahead of you, it is likely that you are the one being chased by those behind you.
Walking at the head of a race is essentially the polar opposite of trying to catch someone up. It doesn't matter how much of a lead you have, it never seems enough. The mind will work with the same information in different ways depending whether you are chasing or being chased. So, for example, if you are ahead of the next person by 10 minutes, those ten minutes seem very fragile when you start feeling tired and, mentally you can see the seconds and minutes crumbling away as the chaser hunts you down. In reality though, it will be your mind playing tricks on you and the gap will be more or less the same unless you really are struggling. 
Conversely, if you are chasing someone with a ten minute lead, you will feel like it is a huge gap which is insurmountable and it just won't get any smaller even though you are trying your hardest. In your mind, the gap must be getting bigger, Again, your mind is doing you no favours.
Whether you are leading or chasing, there is the constant concern that you are tiring (which, of course you are) and that you feel you are perceptibly slowing down as a result: you can start to feel as though you are walking in treacle. In one's own mind, the fact that everyone else is also tiring doesn't register and you then start to become anxious that you are being caught and that the 10 minute gap (or whatever it may be) between you and the next person is getting smaller and smaller (or larger and larger, depending on the situation).
Because (I remember my English teacher saying "never start a sentence with 'Because....'" It isn't proper England, or something. The word 'get' or any of its derivatives was another word which got him excited and resulted in furious scribblings with a red pen usually ending with an encircled SEE ME!!) you can't see the wider picture due to mental and physical fatigue, it is easy to become disillusioned and to panic mentally as your mind races away with every scenario except a happy ending. Unfortunately, this is a normal feeling within an endurance event and is one of the natural lows experienced in racing. Luckily, there are highs too so they tend to balance out however, the lows are much harder to deal with.
As you keep pushing yourself, just remind yourself that:

• everyone else is tired too, not just you,
• you aren't slowing down as much as you suspect,
• the others will be slowing too,
• everyone else will be in pain and discomfort as well as you,
• everyone is experiencing the same weather,
• and so on...

You will come out the other side and feel miles better.
When walking on your own, your mind starts to wander and you think about everything and nothing at the same time. As mentioned at the start of this post, I have spent a lot of PW time on my own so I have had a lot of time to contemplate. 
Ed Oldham from Manx Radio asked me once what it was that I thought about as I tramped around the Parish route on my own. This question really threw me as I had absolutely no idea what the answer was. Other than thinking about feeling low and being in pain and discomfort or conversely, feeling good and digging in, I honestly couldn't give him an answer. I think we all just sit in the moment and don't look backwards or forwards: it is all happening in the here and now as you meander through the Manx countryside and you don't really think of anything at all. That is certainly true for me.

Training with the usual suspects on the other hand, is a veritable smorgasbord of conversations, topics and musings. Mostly we chat about football, tv (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead at the mo.), bodily functions,  and other mundane, everyday things.
Now and again though, the conversation will swing way off the usual beaten path and we'll end up on some bizarre topic or other. Vinny is usually to blame for these curve balls with some memorable and on occasion, hilarious comments, most of which can't be put in the public domain.
Some of the more recent conversational gold nominees have included:

• a free bikini fitting service,
• lycra standards,
• collecting bull semen (don't ask),

and my current personal favourite,

• assisting someone in a diabetic coma with nothing but a Mars bar....

Pretty diverse, I think you'll agree.
It makes me look forward to going training no-end as you just don't know what you're going to get!