It was a close to ideal Sunday morning for me… get up, make coffee, play guitar, read HBR, run. It was very cold and miserably grey outside and I went upstairs to put on my shorts (for a run on the machine)… but for some reason came down dressed for the outside world. My runners were still caked in mud from last week and dried to a crisp, so I followed myself around with a dustpan & brush once I’d squeezed my feet into them. I stood ready by the door and then had an idea.
I had installed the Strava app on my phone at some point in the dim & distant past and had even gone so far as to create a profile… but that’s as far as I had managed to get. Here was a great opportunity to test it out… so I agreed to the T&Cs and set it (and me) running.
Cold it most certainly was, but as I tramped along the road there was a faint glow behind the grey mantle… enough to make me very glad to be outside. I opted for the same circuit that I ran often through the summer and quickly reached the start of the mud… oh boy, this was going to be a muddy run!
As I’ve written here often before, mud comes in lots of varieties, though I’m sadly unfamiliar with their names. Today the mud was light, wet, splashy, slippery and moderately deep in places (though fortunately not sticky enough to relieve me of my shoes!). Realising that I was going to get muddy regardless of how careful I was, I opted for a ‘plough through the middle’ approach, as much to lessen the likelihood of slipping over as anything else. This meant that I was quickly splattered in mud, but better this than running on the complex gradients at the margins of the path, having a repeat of last week and landing in the mud face-first!
Due to the temperature and the general slip-slidyness my phone stayed tucked away in the pocket of my jacket and thus photos were few… these should give a sense of the day though:
More mud ensued but little else caught my attention during the balance of the run… the benefit of reading HBR before running is that my mind was more active in trying to assimilate the new input, so random ideas kept pinging out including an idea for a short article.
It was fortunate that I had left the dustpan & brush out, as the floor was covered in mud by the time I had extricated myself from my socks and running longs, whilst my runners were returned sodden to dry ready for the next run.
According to previous calculations my circuit is 5.75 miles, but Strava reckons it was 6 miles… at least the difference is in the right direction! More curious, according to my watch the run took 60 minutes, whilst Strava calculated it as 58.30. Thus the average speed was in the range of 5.75 mph to 6.15 mph… either way not bad for such a slippery day!
You can even take a look at the circuit for yourself https://www.strava.com/activities/236534713