It gave me a chance to do a couple of runs up there in the fens, including a 10 miler on wednesday morning out along one of the river banks onto what is called Spalding Marsh. Dead flat of course, but it was windy and there is no shelter - none at all, not even a tree. As a result when I returned home my chest and stomach were slightly "wind-burnt" despite the faithful Helly Hansen Lifa Vest protection.
I never did much running up in my home town as I only started running when I worked in the city and lived in East London. There are some really good routes around Spalding, including many gun-barrel straight lanes (or droves) as we fenmen call them. On a long run, they can be monotonous but are undoubtedly good for the rhythm. The traffic is not exactly heavy either and you can literally see for miles in all directions. It certainly is the "big sky" area of the UK and is in marked contrast to the over-crowded south east.
A week before this I had run my longest run of this "training phase" so far, a near 15 mile run along the Grand Union Canal towpath between Ivinghoe, Marsworth and Tring.
My two running mates, Trev & Paul, and I ran the entire 145 mile length of the towpath, from Birmingham to London, several years ago. We have a formula for these sort of challenges - a succession of winter sundays; two cars - one left at each end of the day's leg; a flask of coffee, bananas and fig rolls left in the car at the finish. I rememeber we had a lot of fun, saw the middle of the country in a totally different light and hurdled literally thousands of fishing rods. The latest Sport England survey indicates that there are 1.8 million runners and joggers in England and less than 300,000 anglers. On the Grand Union Canal in the midlands each sunday morning these statistics look absurd - we met very, very few runners and caused anxiety to countless anglers, hyper-protective of their roach poles worth hundreds of pounds. You tend to come across them in packs and Trev coined a descriptive collective noun for groups of coarse anglers based on their attitude to the approach of a trio of runners - a "Twat" of anglers.Thankfully my run last wednesday was virtually "twatless" and I was able to develop a pleasing rhythm, broken only by the short inclines of the locks, and a midpoint change of drink. I also recovered well from this run and on friday did my regular hilly trail run in Wendover Woods with no ill effects. I'm getting fitter.
Unfortunately, and almost unbelievably, I'm also getting fatter! My trip to hospital in early October caused the sharp loss of about 3 kg in weight - well it's grown back! I'm back to touching 86 kgs and would like this to go again before I toe the line in Seville in February. Christmas will make this hard but I now plan to up my mileage to 50 per week pretty quickly.
I'm running in the Bedford Half Marathon tomorrow and hope to lower my Nottingham time of 1:50 by about 2 minutes unless the predicted bad weather destroys all hope of a fast time and then the father-son challenge will be renewed in the Langdale Valley next sunday. Today is therefore a rest day after a good 7.5 miles in the hills yesterday. With a 17 miler scheduled for wednesday, I have a hard 10 days or so ahead. Let's hope I am as ready for it as I feel!
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