24 hours before departure.
It has been a long, hot, humid day, but it's dark now and cooler as a gratefully received rain front comes across providing a little relief. Mrs MLCMM and I are outside in the dark, moving the pot plants from their sheltered position under the eaves out into the rain to get the benefit of what is by then a decent soaking. Then suddenly and completely unexpectedly it's daylight again, not the friendly golden sunshiney kind, but a harsh, intense, electrical kind of daylight, followed less than a split second later by an earth-shattering, ear-splitting, bowel-loosening explosion of thunder the like of which I have never previously experienced.
My immediate thought was a fairly unimaginative and naive 'Shit, that was close!' but I barely had time to consider it when a second and then a third similarly close and powerful lightning strike had us scampering indoors as fast as we could go and wondering how close we actually came to scoring a direct hit. I've experienced some pretty close lightning strikes before, but nothing as truly frightening as that. The fact that we scored three such close bolts with no warning at all only made it more frightening still.
After that however, the storm moved on, the Lord of Thunder rolling away all grumbly and irritable and seemingly now satisfied to have taught us a lesson. The only lessons I think I learned from that is that lightning can strike with no warning at all and that I definitely don't ever want to get any closer to a lightning bolt than we experienced then.
9 hours before departure.
Given our narrow escape from the wrath of Thor the previous evening, it seemed to me now that nothing could stop the journey to Almeria from being a roaring success, so I opted this morning for one last, very short taper run before the race on Sunday. Although this amounted to no more than 15 minutes of running, in true taper madness form it was anything but easy. Despite cooler conditions, I sweated my way through it with heart rate soaring, shins aching and constantly looking at the time to see if my allocated quarter hour was up yet. Had my chances of completing the Almeria half been based on this run alone, you'd give me as much chance as Donald Trump has of winning Mexico's National Civil Defence Prize.
As we know, of course, tapering is like that, and I've little doubt all will be well on Sunday.
Right. I'd better get packing.
Fab Fun Feb
