Medio Maraton Almeria - T minus two days
Bam! Just like that I'm awake, not just awake, but wide awake, alert and buzzing as if I'd had two double espressos already. But I'm also very confused. It's pitch black, deathly silent and the only thing I know for sure is that I'm not in my own bed. I am reassured just slightly by seeing the luminescent hands of my watch on the bedside table. I pick it up and it tells me it's 3:45 a.m.
Uh huh. Realisation begins to seep into my wired, but otherwise befuddled grey matter. The time explains the darkness and the silence of course. The strange, but very comfortable bed is in fact in a room in a brand-spanking new hotel in the heart of Lewes in southern England. I realise where I am and why, but I don't actually need to be awake this early. Yes, Ash (Sweder) is picking me up at the obscenely early hour of 5:15 to take us and Duncan (CharlieCat5) to Gatwick Airport for our flight to Almeria, but it will only take me a few minutes to get ready, so being awake this early is a little ridiculous. I arrived in Lewes yesterday afternoon after 32 hours of travel, and yes, it's fair to say my body clock is more than a little out of whack, but with way too little sleep this is a bit much.
Still, there's an alter-ego somewhere inside me saying, "Wow! This is exciting, let's get up and go for a run!" Running at 3:45 in the morning might be a good idea back home when I'm working an early shift, but just now the rational part of me quickly quells such a notion as being so much crazy talk.
But it doesn't change the fact that I am wide awake with no possibility of getting back to sleep, so I make the most of things and get up to make coffee. I also fire up the tablet to see what's going on in the world, but annoyingly it requires a major Windows update before it will boot, and isn't going to let me get away with not doing it, so I accede to its demands and instead switch on the BBC World News on the room TV. I sip my coffee and think about the crazy day yesterday and how for a while there it looked like I might not make it to Almeria after all...
The Day Before
The Airbus A380 is a mighty behemoth, and I always wonder as it begins its oh so slow roll down the runway for take off how on Earth it ever reaches sufficient speed to actually get off the ground before we run off the end of the tarmac and into oblivion at the end of the strip. Of course we always do manage to somehow gently ascend with a sufficiently comfortable measure of safety and thus avoid disaster, but the astonishment never leaves me.
Our departure from Dubai on one of these mighty planes did, as will be clear, leave the ground safely, but did so 90 minutes late, and for a while there I saw my chances of getting to Almeria in plenty of time diminish somewhat. The aircraft had been loaded, the safety demonstration completed and we're taxiing out for take off when suddenly there's a couple of seconds of tremendous vibration and we're plunged into darkness and silence and the plane rolls to a stop, nothing now working on the plane other than the emergency lighting and the passengers' sense of foreboding. I'm sitting in the aisle seat of a bulkhead row, with two of the cabin crew sitting across from me. I'm watching them to see what they make of this unusual (to say the least) situation, and they're just looking at each other with quite concerned looks on their faces. Judging by their expressions, this was something they had neither encountered before, nor trained for.
The cause of this plunge into unexpected stealth mode was eventually revealed to us as being a failed starter motor which had died and in doing so stalled all four main engines and denied power to all of the aircraft's systems. Without a working starter, there was no option other than to tow us back to the terminal where the plane was hooked up to a truck with a large generator on its back and we were effectively jump started. It wasn't quite the same as some bloke running a set of jumper leads from his Ford Fiesta, but neither was it far removed. Despite the element of scale, the procedure was successfully attended to and we finally departed an hour and a half late.
It was only after we had been in the air sometime that the thought occurred to me that if the engines were to die now, there would be presumably no way of restarting them. Fortunately no such disaster overtook us. The drama of that flight didn't end there, however. After a reasonably smooth flight, we landed at Gatwick, but as soon as our wheels touched the ground the plane immediately lurched savagely to the left and would have careened off the runway if the pilot didn't implement an even more savage lurch to the right. This was so extreme that the passengers screamed, crockery and containers were jolted loose in the galley and came crashing to the floor and one of the cabin crew sitting near me yelled out a loud and involuntary "Fuck!". A third, and thankfully less severe lurch had us back somewhere near the centre of the runway and our dramatic arrival was finally, and thankfully, concluded.
Another 90 minutes and two train trips later I arrived in Lewes, greeted by a biting wind and a steady, depressing drizzle. I checked into a very comfortable hotel near the centre of town and then wandered down to the very small and excellent coffee house called 'Ground Coffee' for a restorative double espresso and to await the arrival of Sweder. We'd arranged via social media to meet there, but an unexpected bonus of this was also meeting Brian, another of the Almerian runners who happened to be nearby at the time. He saw our online exchange concerning our meeting point and so popped in to say 'hi'. It was all very civilised and put a happy gloss on the wintry weather and drama of my flight.
A meal at the Sweder household followed and a drink (or three) at the Elephant & Castle where we met up with Seafront Plodder (sadly not joining us in Almeria this year), Rob (OutAlongTheRiver) who is, and Brian who also called in again and so we rounded out the day in fine style.
I crashed into my hotel bed tired, but content and looking forward to completing the journey to Almeria with another, mercifully far shorter flight early the next morning.
Until...bam!
Fab Fun Feb
