I arose slightly earlier than normal for a sleepy Sunday and was out in my running gear by 7.45am… in the car. The weather was less than lovely, but I had a long overdue arrangement to run with Phil (Garmin-man) on his home turf.
When I say less than lovely, I had such torrential rain on my journey that the road actually disappeared a couple of times. I saw one car which had just spun into the central reservation on the M3 and another which had morphed into a tree, deep in a ditch. Needless to say that between the rain and the obligatory getting lost, my normally one-hour drive took 90 minutes.
I find a genuine challenge in navigating in the space between the M3 and the M4 and apparently do not need a car to feel this way… within minutes of starting our run I was once more completely disorientated. The area really is stunning, but other than being able to say that we ran on some paths, some pretty back roads and occasionally along slightly larger roads, I have NO idea where we went. Other than we ran around the edge of Ascot racecourse and up the High Street.
We had a good pace going from the start, but alas this started to tail off slightly as we progressed. This despite me slowly taking off gloves, hat and jacket to stay cool. Our average speed over a carefully designed 12 mile circuit was 6.3mph though… as reported by the aforementioned Garmin after which Phil is named.
This is faster than our 12 mile run in Sussex four months ago on August 9th and also faster than my 12 mile run on 22nd November… although to be fair, the latter did include running up onto Ditchling Beacon and falling down the other side!
Back at base I was gratefully refuelled by means of a huge egg, bacon and tomato roll, washed down by plenty of tea and coffee.
I then set out for the return journey and as per normal, pretty much instantly got lost, ending up driving back via… well actually I have no idea, other than the fact that I managed to cross the M3 without realising it and join the M25 at the Chertsey turn-off!
Maybe I should go there more often… invitations?