"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." - Les Brown

I'm Ben. I should begin with a disclaimer: I'm a bit mad. I do big, outrageous goals, because otherwise how does one get anything awesome done?

Background: I'm seriously hyperactive by nature, but have done almost no structured exercise for the majority of my life. I've always liked the idea of running, especially in wild terrain, but have always been too busy with umpteen other hobbies to devote the amount of time I knew it would take to get good enough to be worth it.

Last year, having reached the grand old age of 27 and settled down a bit, I revisited the idea and decided to go for it, with no actual plan besides "as much as possible as fast as possible". One month of inadvisedly rapid mileage increase (on concrete!) later, cue crippling shin splints and a medically-demanded one-month break from any exercise. Cue in turn characteristic Aspie tantrum :angry: "sod this, I have other hobbies that aren't self-limiting", stop running.

One year later, decide to try again with a more thought-out plan.

But creating an actual plan meant I needed a sufficiently insane goal. Some digging around follows, and it turns out there's this thing called the Dragon's Back Race. Turns out it next runs in mid 2015. That's got to be enough time to train up, I thought. Ah, but no - applications close in September 2014, and all relevant experience for qualification has to be clocked before then. The best 60 applications get guaranteed places, then 60 more are drawn by lottery from all other entrants.

Shrug. Deadlines are good for the soul.

Still, 18 months from couch to "ten marathons in five days over mountains"... clearly this will take some planning. It's not entirely clear what standard of experience is going to be required, but a typical day on the DBR is 30-35 miles with about 15,000 feet of ascent. Ergo, I figure I need to beat both of those figures by a decent amount (in single-day events), as well as doing something multi-day, to have a chance of qualifying.

So my current schedule looks something like this:

First six months (Mar 2013-Sep 2013): reach marathon standard. Demonstrate this by doing the Loch Ness marathon in under 4 hours (preferably under 3:30 - hey, it *is* mostly downhill). This constitutes a gentle introduction that I'm hoping will build enough bone/tendon strength to avoid injuries later on.

Second six months (Sep 2013-Mar 2014): mileage up to ~50mi, with some ascent. Demonstrate this by doing the White Cliffs 50 (53mi, 5,800ft).

Final six months (Mar 2014-Sep 2014): more ascent, multi-day race experience. Great Lakelands 3-Day in May, V3K in June. Sometime in late August/early September, either the Mourne 500 or (if things are going really well) at least an *attempt* at a Bob Graham round.

Oh, and somewhere along the way, learn how to use a map and compass. I'm thinking that's probably not very hard, but since the closest I've ever come to map-reading is tabletop role-playing, I realise I could be totally wrong...

I am aware that on the 1-10 madness scale, this is somewhere around a 12. See above re landing amongst the stars.

I'm based in Cambridgeshire, so getting hill experience is going to be "interesting" (especially since I don't drive). I do have various ideas for increasing the difficulty of running around fens (Training Mask, shoe weights, heavy backpacks...), but I figure a lot of long weekends out to real geography are going to be required. Per the other Cantabrigian thread (hi, Irrevocable!), I'm looking at the Midsummer Madness weekend in June for an initial taster of real fell running.

So... experienced people... tips (other than "don't do it, you mad sod"), ideas for better ways to arrange my training schedule, etc?