The summer is gone for sure. It was cold at 5:30 this morning when I set off to do my 5 miles along the canal. The first time it’s been this nippy since March.
Predictably, it wasn’t a great run. The lack of a consistent training regime has taken its toll, and I even got a stitch today for the first time in months. Dark, cold, painful, totally bloody miserable.
If I use a bit of imagination, I think it could have been worse. Apart from a 3 minute break to shake off the stitch, I ran solidly for an hour. Or jogged. It was slow, but so be it. I need to try to claw back some endurance while there’s still a few weeks available.
The other positive from this morning was the discovery that running along a canal at 6am on a crisp autumnal morning can be utterly spellbinding. As the sun rose, the dense mist started to lift from the surrounding fields, giving the world a weird, Middle Earth sort of feel. Plenty of rabbits about, and swans on the adjacent lake. Then a splashing, and a heron emerges from the reeds and glided languidly down the canal, close to the water, looking for breakfast.
Three hours later I’m crushed into a corner on the tube to Waterloo, but I can feel myself smiling faintly. I’m still somewhere else.
