November

[Sweder]

A stodgy, mud-splattered, mist-shrouded 5 mile loop around Blackcap this morning.

I left home just as Kevin Pietersen completed his 100 against Pakistan in the 2nd Test in Faisalabad.
It was an innings of good fortune and precocious hitting, the perfect Pietersen paradox. A crowd-thrilling six bludgeoned off the bowling of Shoaib Akhtar brought up the ton.

By the time I'd reached the first yard of cloying chalk-mud, one delivey later, he was gone, attempting a fourth clearance of the boundary. Onto the Downs proper as Flintoff fell, Akhtar living up to his Rawalpindi Express moniker, a snorting 95 mph 'yorker' ripping middle stump out of the ground.
Freddie filleted, back in the hutch for 1.

Ian Bell, recent whipping boy of the critics, sculpted a century of his own. 100 runs crafted and nurtured with loving care and due diligence, the antithesis of KP’s brutal knock.

As I thudded steadily across the fog-bound hills, visibility reduced to a mere handful of yards, I pondered the difference between Sundays’ sunlit dash and this pedestrian slog through Baskerville country, appreciating the parallels with the sport beamed into my headphones live from the sub continent. There’s a time to go for glory, to thrash the bowling or hammer out a PB. And there’s a time to grind out the necessary, to build the foundations on which later feats can stand.

Definitely a building session this morning.
Around an hour, a shade over 5 miles banked.