Daren, Andy and I met at Jack & Jill windmills this morning for a quick run before (a late) breakfast. It was a beautiful morning, as can be seen from the photos.
We ran up to the top of the first hill and left down the tank tracks to the gate at the bottom. We made out to Andy that the gate was locked and ran back up the tank tracks to the top.
Despite being knackered towards the top, the testosterone still kicked in and Andy & I ended up sprinting for the gate! Meanwhile Mister P was much more circumspect and gracefully gave me just enough time to take a photo of him.
Gluttons for punishment, we dropped down Burnhouse Bostal with a view to coming back up that too, but on reaching the bottom changed our mind & ran along Underhill Lane to go up the Beacon path instead.
This time Andy left nothing to chance and gently pulled away from us towards the top, saving all of us some energy!
We then pottered gently back along the top of the Downs to the cars. All in all a thoroughly enjoyable run with a gratifying height gain of over 340 metres!
Our 6.25 mile (just over 10k) run took us one hour 17 minutes (4.87mph), which was clearly slightly slower than the 13.88mph of Kenenisa Bekele from Ethiopia who ran 10k in under 27 minutes in the World Championships in Berlin yesterday.
However, for the race to be a little more equal we would need to tilt his 400m running track to have one end 5m higher than the other and then make the surface a lot less pristine… let’s see him do 60-odd laps of that!
Speaking of which, Cliff & Pete are off to do some crazy race next weekend where they will have a gain in height of about 60 times our run today whilst completing a third of the distance I have run in the last year! I have to sit down just to think about it! Good luck boys!
Ooops… I almost forgot.
