December Doldrums

[Sweder]

Eleven muddy windswept miles under my straining belt, all the harder for Friday's Mayfield Marathon.
If only that had been 26.2 miles instead of 26.2 units of alcohol in the form of red wine, Guinness and latterly vodka & Red Bull. I consoled myself over a beautifully presented fry-up the following morning with the fact that SP looked far worse than I could ever feel. My partner in crime on and off the golf course resembled something dropped from a large lizard's bottom.

A foggy dawn-lit hour bumping around my kitchen listening to Cook and Pietersen resisting the inevitable Green and Gold Tsunami told me I was far from ready to hit the slopes. The run proved as tough as expected, lungs searing from the effort of dragging my corpulence up a series of extremely steep and slippery hills. Moyleman returned from his post Seven Sisters sabatical along with Paul and Steve, each recovering from minor ailments. We elected to take on the Residences route, leaving the cliffs at Saltdean to climb Telscombe Tye and drop down the western edge of the village. A brute of a field took us due west. Freshly ploughed and thoroughly soaked the heavy earth sucked the life from my ailing legs. Vast puddles of brackish water lurked at the summit, the extra effort needed to hop and skip around the treacherous trail almost too much to bear.

Finally the plunge into Rottingdean, the hamstring hell of Windmill Hill, around St Dunstans with the last two miles once more above the shoreline, an icy headlong blast battering the last ounce of my resolve.

Tough, harsh, all of the above; yet eleven miles banked and a pledge to keep this Sunday appointment each week until Almería.

I'll need to be up around the 30k mark by then