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The February sunshine
Good God man… who in their right mind decided that it would be a grand idea to do a pre-Twitten run, run? And what sort of beleaguered idiot elects to run said pre-Twitten run by running up steep muddy hills and along lung busting, feet imbibing, wet, horrible trails?
More to the point what sort of fool chooses to join me…?
Me and him ran five muddy, energy sapping miles this morning before we even made the start of the weekly Twitten extravaganza. We started behind the prison with a gentle run up the Spital track before launching ourselves down the steep, sloppy hill to Houndean Farm… a sharp right then took us along the farm track to the bottom of Sweder’s hill… BUT, said hill wasn’t on the menu this morning… instead I wanted to introduce the big man to another route; so we turned left and headed out towards the woods.
The run through the woods is beautiful… a lovely dusty path, dappled in glorious sunlight with enough incline to really get the heart pumping. Sorry, my mind wandered to the heady days of spring and summer. In the winter it's a soddin' mud-fest... every step drives you backwards with arms flailing to catch something to hold onto. It’s hard, it’s steep but it makes you smile, particularly when looking back every now and again to spot the pink panther* grinding and puffing up behind me.
Eventually the top was conquered and soon he trundled around the corner carrying an expression that was both smiling and saying: ‘I’m going to kill you’ at the same time. Not a moment to hang around, so we kicked off following the course of the old race track. Although now on a flat(ish) section, the track was as slippy as hell, making any kind of reasonable pace difficult. Eventually we turned and found a relatively reasonable surface which led to a notable increase in speed. After a while of matching his pace, he gave me permission to push ahead (thanks – I was quite happy as I was), so I launched forward determined to hit an 8min/mi pace before I reached the end of the path.
The fun over, we re-joined the Spital track and headed back to civilisation… running down the high street, five miles in the bag to start the Twitten run.
By the time I fell back into the loving arms of my family, we had knocked off just over nine miles… and not just any nine miles… nine bloody hard miles. These were not junk miles.
*I believe there is a UN resolution outlawing his choice of running wear.
January: 57 miles
February so far: 18 miles
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