I had a little difficulty getting out of bed this morning, on account of a Vanilla Sky type (weird) dream. I gave up on trying to figure out what was going on in the end and got up, but most of the morning had escaped by then. Hence the reason that it was just after ten to midday by the time I left the house for my run.
When Kim had come down a couple of hours before me, there had been a large sheet of ice slowly descending her windscreen outside, but I left into a warmer but murky rainstorm feeling slightly overdressed in the same gear I ran in on Thursday (yes, unwashed!) plus an additional long-sleeved top.
Five minutes later as I ran through the first wooded section, there was a rush of wind of such ferocity that it sounded exactly like surf crashing onto Brighton beach. I thought that this heralded a wet and windy run and I prepared my mind to run only for about an hour, but twenty minutes later I was stripping off my jacket and gloves with the heat of the sunshine!
This change of weather caused me to elongate my run and a while later I found myself running down the road through Plumpton Green, passing as I did the start of the Plumpton Races. Plumpton Lane is not such a nice lane to run down on account of it being twisty, narrow and relatively busy. But it does head straight for the Downs and I had decided that if I was going to be out for longer than an hour (which passed as I passed six-mile mark at the entrance to the racecourse), I might as well go up top and soak up the view.
The bostal running up from The Half Moon is concrete and about a 1 in 4 gradient and it felt like it took me an age to make the top. I duly put my jacket and gloves back on to ward of the now cold wind, sacrificed a couple of jelly babies to regain some energy and ran on towards the Beacon.
One of the problems with a tendency towards madness is the tendency to do mad things, so it won’t surprise you that I took a small detour en route to the top. I hung a right down the path I descended last week and a left onto the steep track that I then ascended. And then on to the Beacon at about the one hour 47 mark… a couple of minutes behind myself last week.
Then I turned northward, dropping down the path under the road and into Ditchling, up onto Lodge Hill and back via Oldlands Mill.
I wasn’t going as quickly as last week on the return leg, as though it took me a minute less, the more direct route made it less than five miles. Still, overall I had run 15.1 miles in 2 hours 35 minutes and at 5.8mph it was a tad faster than last week. At this rate of improvement I’ll be ready for a marathon in May.
Two thousand and twelve.
I’ve forgotten to mention over the last couple of weeks that I keep kicking my left heel with the castellated inside sole edge of my right shoe and it has slowly been getting worse. Today I kicked it a few more (excruciating) times and have now finally resorted to Compeed!
