Written by trail running enthusiast, Mary Butler.

A few months ago my friend Lara and I took four days off work, packed our running rucksacks and stuffed every pocket with Veloforte nutrition. Then we hopped on the train and ran a hundred miles along the Southwest Coast Path, from Plymouth to Star cross. We wanted to try something resembling a multi-stager, and although we hadn’t trained specifically for this, we had both just finished ultra-distance training blocks. The aim was to go slow and enjoy the trip. 

Veloforte generously sponsored us with enough nutrition for the whole trot. We are very much amateur, average trail runners, but they liked the spirit of adventure behind our plan. We are extremely grateful for their support in keeping our energy up and making the miles taste good. Hopefully other amateur trail runners out there might read this and be encouraged to make some unhinged plans for their next adventure, while learning from our experience.

We operated by the ‘low mood, eat food’ rule. Or better yet, eat so much you never get into the low mood. We had four days of running to get through, and we wanted it to be fun. We reminded each other to eat roughly every half hour, and I alternated between Veloforte's oat bars, gels and chews.

Almost every lunchtime I ate a pasty or donut. It was really important to look forward to eating; sometimes that’s all you have on a long stretch of trail when you’re knackered. 

The snacks I got most excited about were:

• Riba energy gels
• Amaro energy chews
• Fig & Oats snack bars
• Di Bosco energy bars

I always had one bottle of electrolytes and one of water.

Every evening we refuelled with huge amount of pub food and recovered with Veloforte's Nova shake.

Overall, we smashed our nutrition goal, and only ever got into one hole. We also made sure we had several hundred calories leftover by the end. If in doubt, buy a bigger backpack rather than leaving the emergency snacks behind.

Don’t forget that trail running or the trails themselves could defeat you, give you a sprained ankle, or throw an angry cow your way. The cows we met were actually very chill, but I’d rather err on the side of respect.

The Devon coast may seem tame compared to Chamonix or the Rockies, but these trails can be risky, especially in winter when we were on them. Take every precaution, bring enough clothes and emergency kit, know the routes (Lara and I had both run sections of it before) and bite off less than you can chew. In the initial planning we considered 60km days. In the end, 39-43km proved to be loads.

We also learned an important ego-related lesson on day one. We could have had our taxi drop us at the B&B after the final river crossing. Instead, we decided to run along the road, to get up to 42km. By this time it was dark, and no amount of head torch power will keep you safe when you’re running along an A-road with no verges.

We fearfully termed this experience ‘A1 chicken intervals’. It involved sprints of a few metres, followed by one of us shouting ‘CAR’ and both pressing ourselves as far as we could into the stiff hedges at the side of the road. It took us half an hour to go 1km.

Next time, we would leave the egos at the door. Changing your mind is a good thing, whereas having a fixed goal might lead you to push it too far.