One Long Twitten: Steel City Half

[OutAlongTheRiver]

Sheffield HM update ... 3 April

Saturday was great fun - with a gathering of Lewes runners heading down to Seaford Beach Parkrun to accompany Tom Roper (AKA the Beast of Bev) on his 100th parkrun. The weather was perfect - muted sunshine and no wind, so the sea was as calm as a millpond.  Tom set off at a canter of under 6 mins per km - and kept this fine pace all the way there and back, to finish in just over 28 mins, which appears to be his swiftest parkrun for 2 years!

   

We then hightailed it 240 miles to Sheffield, arriving just in time to see Hallam FC (my Sheffield non-league team) trounce Skegness Town 3-0 in a must win game to keep up their push for promotion. Come On You Countrymen! Ahem

Sunday had been a plan to mirror part of the HM course, using off road Porter Brook path to match the same climb as we will find on the HM course (albeit that would have been offroad so tougher than the smooth tarmac of the HM course itself).

However, we ended up staying on the other side of the Porter valley, so we decided to go for a straight 8km out and 8km back to Stanage Edge. For some reason this seemed to impress local family members, since the other way to Stanage is a long drive around the roads into Derbyshire, so running there sounded much more impressive than it seemed to us! It was a lovely run around landscape where Sheffield merges into Derbyshire peak district and you end with sublime views over Hathersage and Mam Tor and beyond. The return being downhill was a comfortable trot but we pushed quite hard for good pace - and so 16km was a quality outing.

   

Still in Sheffield for Tuesday speed run, we headed out to Derwent dam - the site of the Dambusters training runs as they experimented with the very low level flight over water to launch the Barnes Wallis bouncing bomb.  A good tough 4 x (750m@4:30mins/km + 500m@6:00mins/km) with some added km at end.

So now again on taper ... this weekend will be c 13km (we'll actually do 15km) and then twittens on Sunday.

We've already sketched out plans for HM - with race strategy to see if we can get round in sub-2 ....

More anon