15 miles

[Charliecat5]

Running is adventure, and that’s what I like best about it.

Up until mid-afternoon yesterday, I was going to run the Twittens this morning, perhaps with a three-mile romp over the Downs as a warm-up.

However, a well-timed email from my crazy friend Mary-Lou changed all that.  She forwarded me a missive from the Head of the Herd inviting people to attend a little Sunday jaunt from Firle pub carpark.   I looked at the weather forecast – cold and crisp – and decided to go for it.

So at 07:45 IN THE MORNING, I picked up the crazy lady and we headed to the pub in Firle, which sadly was closed.   We were pretty much the first there.  As others stated to arrive we realised we’d made a tactical error.  They were all the quick, serious guys… you know the sort.  One chap who goes by the name of Ed, had run from Newhaven to join us!

We stood around in the carpark doing our best to keep warm as the sun did its best to break through the early morning mist.  Then the Head man blew his bugle (he didn’t actually have one – I wish he did tho’) and we set off - straight through the village and onto the Coach Road (Moyleman in reverse). 

It was chilly for the first mile but then the pace upped a gear and soon I was panting and sweating like an overweight bulldog in a chip-shop.   We cleared a good couple of miles at a 7:15 mile pace, rolling gently up and down the track underneath the shadowed hills to our right.   Eventually we joined Bo-Peep borstal and I readied myself to take it on and give it everything I had; only to find that we had another half a mile (I’ll come back to this ‘half a mile’ in a second) before we turned right and upwards.

One thing I have noticed about our esteemed leader is that he doesn’t really have a good grasp of how far a mile actually is.  I have realised over the last twelve months in his company that when he says “half a mile”, what we’re actually facing is a minimum of a “whole mile”.

So a mile later, we turned right and headed up a lovely, but soddin’ steep track.  But hey, I like lovely steep tracks, so I saddled up and started to grind it out.

Pleasingly I was got to the top in third place after Newhaven Ed and a lovely South African guy.  At the top we waited for the others to catch us up (I say we… Ed did a loop back down the hill so he could run back up again – that tells you all you need to know about the people we were running with).

After a while most of us were there enjoying the views and the sunshine, which was now making an appearance.    The front group decided to head off, leaving a few of us to pick up the tail-end.  The tail-end arrived, but there was no sign of Mary-Lou.   Then my phone rang.  The good news is that she hadn’t fallen over… the bad news is that she’d got lost!  I say ‘bad news’… I meant funny news… until it dawned on me that I was going to have to go back down the STEEP hill to find her.

So having sent the others on their way, I headed back down the hill until I eventually found her, looking sheepish, now back on the right path.   Back on track we made our way across the tops of the hills, with the sun on our backs crossing Bo-Peep and Firle Beacon before eventually starting the long downhill into Firle.  Back in the carpark several of the runners had waited to make sure the lost sheep and her crazy friend had found their way home.

For me, this is what running is all about.  It didn’t matter that we arrived back last… it didn’t matter that we didn’t achieve a personal best.  What mattered was we had an adventure and we spent a couple of hours in great company with some mad, mad runners.

9 beautiful miles.