At the end of last week I managed to temporarily misplace the hearing in one ear… I’m hoping that the doctor is going to help me find it again, but unfortunately that’s not going to be for another ten days! Meanwhile my hearing is somewhat dull and as I sat relaxing with a quadspresso in the teahouse, half-listening to the waterfall, it was almost a good enough excuse for me not to run this morning.
However, it was a beautiful morning and I didn’t want to lose the momentum from the last few weeks so I just got out there regardless.
It was hard work to start with and I had already decided to do the shortest of my loops when I passed a ‘mad woman on a bike’ (her description, not mine!) going the other way. My memory is nowhere near as good as my dull hearing (and it was frankly unlikely that I would have recognised anyone dressed in mountain-bike protective garb and dark glasses), but she somehow recognised me from an event we attended a good few years ago so we stopped to chat. I love those random conversations that you have whilst running and by the time that she pedalled off to continue her training session I felt totally reinvigorated.
I continued on the same loop I’ve been doing recently, deep in thought, as much as anything about a team-building session that I need to design for a Finance team. Every step of the running was a real pleasure! Well, almost… there’s a stile and a short section of path that are being reclaimed by the undergrowth, so I had to duck and dive and still managed to get stung by the nettles!
Last week the distance was 6.9 miles, which is still a short run according to the criteria I’m used to, so I was keen to run at least one tenth of a mile more today. I decided to loop the other way around Ditchling Common, using a path that I used to use as a speed circuit. It’s a while since I’ve run that way, but I’m sure that there’s a tree where there wasn’t one before.
As I got back towards home I decided to have another go at the sprint… it must be about 300m along a road that many runners use and so there’s a league table on Strava. Whereas last week I simply hurried along there, today I lifted my skirts and sprinted, pretty much all out… such that I ran out of steam towards the end. My personal best had been 1.04, but today I managed 58 seconds. Hooo-RAH! This is the third fastest time… though the ‘course’ record is a sobering 48 seconds.
So 7.1 miles completed in 67 minutes, an average of 6.35 mph. You can see the stats on Strava.
One final thing: they say that when one sense is dull, others are enhanced… like seeing vivid colours in the dark?
