And so to Bath.
It’s easy to forget, when planning future races, just how much emotional fuel gets burnt around an event. During the peak times – spring and autumn – it’s tempting to enter two or three races in quick succession, always underestimating the time it takes to repair yourself, to refuel, and to refocus. After last spring’s congested calendar, I did promise myself not to enter two races on successive weekends, but here I am, on my way to the Bath Half just a week after Silverstone, and onto the 15 mile Cranleigh race the weekend after that.
Bath, for the benefit of the non-Brits here, is a small but architecturally glorious city, a few miles south-west of Bristol. It’s a stopping-off point on the standard American tourist circuit, along with London, Stratford, Oxford, Luton and Edinburgh.
I’ll stand aside here to let Nigel Platt deliver the fleshed-out historical survey of Bath, but in essence it’s famous for its Roman baths (hence the name, geddit?), and for the cascading tiers of opulent Regency crescents. It was the Ibiza of the Jane Austen generation, and they left their elegant architectural footprints all over the show. And if they weren’t attractions enough, once a year, in March, the city hosts a half marathon for 4000 runners. Its doors open for entries at 9am one Monday morning in September, and are forced shut again by the volume of applications a day or two later.
The race gives me yet another chance to meet up with Nigel, whose disembodied presence has accompanied me from one end of the running universe to the other. Chicago, Newcastle, er… We’ve spoken on the phone in these places, but never met. And Pete (Griff from the forum) will be there too. He might even treat himself to a RunningCommentary masterclass by tagging along in my wake for the first mile or so.
But hang on, here’s an email from the fellow in which he claims to be running… to be running 7-minute-something-miles. I see. Perhaps I should sprinkle my gifts among more deserving cases.
My quads ached on Monday, and I thought it best to give them another day off yesterday, but this morning, around 7am I had to get out for a leisurely recovery run. Cool but sunny. It felt damn good.
PS Only joking about Luton…
