The Dragons Back race is a 380km, 6 Day race running from Conwy Castle at the top of Wales, down to Cardiff Castle at the bottom, and is known as ‘the world’s toughest mountain race’.
It has been my dream race from as long as I have known about it, but life and finances have meant that it’s always been out of reach. If I’m honest, I’ve never truly felt ready for it either. But life has been very different for the past 3 years, meaning that I’ve been able to focus on my training more, and although still not feeling entirely confident, I am without doubt the fittest and fastest I have ever been, so I bit the bullet and signed up for the 2025 race.
On average I run 50-60 miles per week, but leading up to the event I was running 80-90 mile weeks to try and adapt the legs to running tired. Training for a mountainous ultra is always a challenge when you live in Norfolk, but not impossible, you just have to be creative. This involved lots of trips to the gym to use the stair stepper and visits to Roman Camp to do repeats of a loop now known as ‘Gav’s loop’. In the lead up I also used Lakeland 50 as training……yes I used Lakeland 50 as training lol. Finishing 30 minutes quicker than when I ran it 2 years ago……a good sign!
Race day, and nothing can prepare you for the start in Conwy Castle, this has got to be one of the coolest start lines ever, and perfect for the epic event you are then going to start. Leaving the castle and you’re straight into it, 31 miles and 13,500ft of elevation including the Yr Wyddfa horseshoe. The decision had been made before the start that we wouldn’t be going across Crib Goch due to high winds, which I was a bit disappointed about, but this thought had changed by the time I reached Pen Y Pass and I was actually a tad relieved. Heavy rain right from the start was making the descents quite treacherous for everyone and it didn’t seem to matter what shoes you were wearing, despite this I was moving quite well and made it to camp 1 well within the cutoffs.
On the second day mylegs felt pretty good considering the complete hammering they’d taken the day before, but I knew from the From Mountains To Molehills Challenge that one of my strengths is recovery and being able to run on consecutive days. I was also joyed by the fact I was now running towards very familiar territory and the birthplace of Escape Trails, one of my favourite places in the World – Dolgellau. The heavy rain hadn’t really stopped, and putting on the soaking wet shoes from the day before was a joy to behold!!!! With less elevation than day 1 but a longer day I knew I couldn’t hang around and again I was moving well, until I took a fall headfirst into a bog and tweaked my knee. Although not overly painful, I was now in a little bit of discomfort on any sort of climb or descent meaning that I was moving slower. Coming down off the mountains and the final descent with about 6 miles to go I had just an hour to go before the cutoff, and it was a horrible feeling watching that time countdown quickly and the mileage countdown slowly, but I made it with 10 minutes to spare, phew!!!!
During the night my knee and kept me awake a little bit and was now starting to stiffen up. I knew there was no way that I was going to complete the full Dragon unless I was close to 100% this early on in the race, so rather than completely mess myself up and probably not make it to Cardiff at all, I made the incredibly hard decision to drop down to the Hatchling which would give me the best chance of finishing. This was an incredibly hard decision to make and I was completely gutted to start with, but once you start out on the Hatchling you soon realise what an bonkers event this is in it’s own right and that it could be it’s own stand alone event.
When you drop down to the Hatchling the mileage for the full dragon is split into two sections and you can choose if you want to do the first half in the morning, or the second half in the afternoon. For the remaining 4 days I opted to generally do the second half as usually this was the longer section. One of the nice things about doing it that way is that the front runners would come past you later in the day, which would joy you along with the support and encouragement from them as they came flying past you. Doing the second section on day 6 also means that you still get your big finish in Cardiff Castle, and crossing that finish line was still emotional despite not having done what I had set out to do.
150 miles for the week and over 40,000′ of elevation, but the full dragon had evaded me this time! I am generally happy with how my race prep had gone, my nutrition worked well, and I think without my knee problem I had a good chance of finishing. But this year taught me lots about the race and what I can improve and it’s fair to say that this event has well and truly gotten under my skin now. I plan to have a break from it next year and hopefully get lucky in the lottery for the UTMB CCC, but after that I plan to keep heading back to Wales until I slay that dragon!
