Category: Photos

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Last weekend you trecked

You may have gathered from my post earlier this week that we disappeared off to Holland last weekend to see our friends Adam & Sandra, celebrate their son Thomas’s second birthday and deliberately surprise Thomas’s grandparents, Tim & Anna, who were also visiting.

 The outgoing leg was really straightforward, with great roads right up til about half a mile from their place.  The we spent a frustrating half hour following Tom-Tom as it tried in vain to get us to the new-build on roads that have either been abandoned in a large area of development, or have yet to be built!

Utrecht is a really pretty place, with a deep set canal winding through the town with its cobbled streets and wonky houses.  The weather was gloriously bright & sunny and perilously cold, but it was a great introduction to what is probably well off the tourist trail for most people from the UK.

Adam & Sandra were generous hosts, putting us in mind of our friends Scott & Carolyn in Seattle.  In fact both Adam & Scott LOVE their coffee, but while Scott has a really smart stainless steel cafetiere, Adam has an espresso machine that grinds beans at from the top to make totally amazing and pretty much instantanteous coffee.

Their house backs on to a canal that was frozen the whole weekend, to such an extent that Adam had been walking on it the previous week.  THAT’s cold!

Most of our return trip was straightforward and we pottered back to the tunnel via some very quiet seaside villages along the French coast – one can imagine that in the summer, the glorious sandy beaches will be heaving with holiday-makers.  As soon as we unloaded in the UK we realised that the weather had changed, hence the previous pictures and the additional two and a half hours it took us to get home.

But Utrecht is well work a visit!

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Tyres in the snow

PLEASE can someone point out to the news agencies that the answer to their question, regarding the reason why we are apparently so unprepared for the current driving conditions, is TYRES and TRAINING.

Tyres

Scandinavian counties have snow & ice for a large proportion of each year so they have both summer tyres and winter tyres.  

Their summer tyres are like ours, designed to work efficiently on tarmac in dry and wet conditions, with a lot of rubber in contact with the ground. 

Come the snow, they change to narrower tyres with sharper edges and a much more blocky appearance.  Less rubber in contact with the ground means that there is greater pressure exerted at each touch point, making for more grip.

Where snow and ice are compacted and last for the season, then tyres with studs are used, the titanium studs biting into the surface and giving good, but not perfect grip.  These are not permitted in areas where the ground cover comes and goes as otherwise they would tear up the tarmac.

Rally cars, seeking greater grip still, use extreme studs such as those shown on my about page, designed to bite down harder into the surface to find traction.  

My experience of all these tyres is that there is still not as much grip as our tyres in wet conditions, therefore something else is required to keep things moving.

Training

in Sweden, part of driver training involves driving in every season and particularly learning what happens to the car in slippery conditions.

In this country we experience real snow so infrequently that tyres are chosen for their grip in the dry and wet.  Those that we use are effectively useless in snow.  

Lucky people get to drive on skid-pans to experience the effect of skidding but the rest of the driving population are not trained to deal with the conditions using the equipment we have.  

On the M20 last night, even before the worst of the snow came down, it was gratifying to see several less prepared or more aggressive drivers finding out how little grip they had WITHOUT hitting anything.  In each case they drove onwards much more slowly.

My suggestions for the next couple of days are:

  • Don’t go out in the car, unless it’s to try the conditions in your local area, in which case heed the following:
  • Keep your speed right down.  Fifteen miles per hour is FAST in the snow and CRAZY in the ice that we’re expecting tonight. 
  • Leave plenty of space and watch what is happening ahead, to the sides and behind.  Sliding cars can come from any direction and you need to be thinking how to avoid them early on, rather than assuming that they will be able to avoid you.
  • Be really gentle with the controls and use engine braking rather than the brakes where possible.  Make sure you know whether your car has anti-lock brakes or not.  Anti-lock brakes will help you stop in an emergency, but ordinary ones will need to be pumped on and off otherwise they may lock, at which point you are probably going to be out of control.
  • Avoid steep hills, up or down, unless they have been gritted.
  • If you get stuck, you can try letting your tyres down to give you more grip, but do heed the official advice and take a shovel, a blanket, a thermos a mobile phone etcetera.  
  • And keep your eyes open for someone following you into the same situation.
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Water run

The forecast was for wet weather today and I can’t say that I was particularly excited about going out into it this morning.  But I have faith in my gear and particularly in the ability of my Gore jacket to keep me warm in inclement conditions.

This is all very well, but before it had started to do this (it’s always cold when you first put it on) I had to run up the road into the wind with the rain biting at my face.  Fortunately I have a range of directions that I can go that are more sheltered, although coming across a tree that had come down across the path at least gave me pause for thought.

It was already clear that there was a lot of standing water, but just a little further on this point was reiterated… the small pond to the right of the path in the picture is normally a narrow channel.

For those sensitive souls who treasure their running shoes and keep them speck and span, this was not a day to be out and about.  In fact wellingtons or even waders would have been a more appropriate choice of footwear… it’s a good job that I care not about getting my runners wet and muddy.  

At one point I started to think about the ancient Britons and why they used to wash with mud.  Maybe it was not so much that they wanted to, but more that they were constantly covered in the stuff and just had to wash it off.  I suddenly realised that because the surface was more water than mud, my trainers were actually cleaner than they had been for an age (since new?)… strangely, the mud seemed to have migrated upwards and onto my calves!

There were several occasions when the mud tried to suck my shoes off (I’m not a great one for tightly lacing my feet in) and the mud eventually succeeded as I squelched across a field that seems to be wet even when the weather is dry.

In short, I ran out to the Royal Oak, across to Wivesfield and up through the woods to the top of Spatham Lane, then southeast and across to Wellhouse Lane, past the water tower and across the railway line, then north to the station and home again.  6.5 miles in 1 hour 10 is pretty poor going, but I did stop a few times to take photos and once to re-apply my shoe and tighten my laces.

I think I need to run more than once a week to really get back into the zone, but I’ve changed my work schedule so this is not so easy at the moment.  Maybe when the evenings get lighter… once the boys have come back from Prague and have finally worked out that I wasn’t there… maybe then I can safely increase my frequency!

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Exercise

Nigel & Kristin, as our lovely house guests over the Christmas break, may well report me as being a lazy git.  And they would be right.  The only time I went into the great ‘cold & wet outside’ during the three weeks they were here, was to paddle up the River Cuckmere with Debbie, Kim and them on New Years Day… a really still, flat grey day.  This was the first time my little Kendo had seen the water for ahem… years, but start the year as you mean to go on… that’s what I say!

Since they returned to Seattle on the 6th, I’ve been hard at work catching up.  The first thing I did was to go wimmin (that’s swimming for those of you unaccustomed to my obtuseness) for half an hour… although Kim swore that I was only in there for 20 minutes before I dragged myself out like a jelly.  Since then I went a further two times, for 30 minutes and 40 minutes, with my muscles starting to remember the strokes that I worked on before my collar-bone was so rudely broken whist skiing three (?) years ago.  By the way, does anyone else think that the lane-swimming at the Triangle is slightly over-priced, with the evening sub-one-hour sessions being priced at £3.80?

And since this is a running blog, I thought it would be remiss of me not to do some of that too.  Last Sunday I ran out into the remnants of the cold weather and returned an hour and ten minutes later in the start of the warm spell.  I did the 7.1 mile loop out past Ote Hall, the pyjamas, Wivelsfield village, Hundred Acre Lane & woods, Ditchling Common industrial estate, the Magical Path and back across the Common.  It was delightful running weather and I even had to wear my shades.

Yesterday morning was so beautiful, it was almost spring-like here and we made the most of it by doing all our outside chores… although by the time I had washed the cars I was pretty much done in and the weather had turned cold.

It chucked it down with rain last night and I was not looking forward to running in a storm, but this morning dawned bright and clear again and it was a pleasure to don my running gear on and get out into it.  Despite the ongoing twice-daily chi-kung exercises and the swimming, I wasn’t sure that I felt any fitter than last weekend, so I ran the same route to see whether there was any time difference.  Alas not… the same 1 hour ten as before… 6mph.  Although, to be fair, the ground was a little more, er, liquid than last week.

The sun was streaming into the house when I got back and I just had to sit and soak up the rays.  Inside, of course!

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Run around the races

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!

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A very Nietzche-esque thing to do

If there is one thing that running teaches you, it is perseverance.  I thought this as I walked home on Friday night with three heavy bags of shopping, stopping only once to answer my mobile.  And I thought it again this morning as I ran off down the road aiming for a slightly longer than normal run.

Which is why I started off at a sensible pace, one that neither Nick nor Cliff can run at: slow!

I headed out to Oldlands Mill, but then rather than take the Ditchling route I turned right and dropped down into Hassocks, running through the back-streets to the station.  In an attempt to find some new paths I ended up running down more back-streets before emerging to the south of the village and running to Clayton at the base of the Downs.

Here the path takes the scarp slope head on and I engaged low gear and kept running as far as Jack & Jill.  Recognising that I normally walk across the car-park before carrying on up the hill (effectively breaking the hill into two) I decided just to keep going for a change.  I might not have stopped, but I have to confess to having had a little help… in the form of a couple of jelly babies.  Well, two at the bottom of the hill and two more at the very top to be exact.

I then ran across to Ditchling Beacon and whilst I had loosely planning to continue running towards Lewes, something caught my eye.  It was a group of three people contemplating a matched pair of barbed wire fences in the corner of a field.  I stopped to offer assistance, although since two of them were in their elegant seventies, I guess that they weren’t about to take me up on my offer.

Agreeing that the best way for them to go was back the way they had come, I then took the path in front of me which lead all the way down to Westmeston.  But on reaching Westmeston, a strange thought occurred to me, worthy of Cliff or Pete.  Why not run back up the hill?  

I was all out of reasons so I headed back aloft, taking the path goes pretty much directly from the bottom to the top.  At the top I chatted briefly to the group who had also made it back to the safety of the stile, before I headed off back towards the Beacon.  Nietzche would have been proud!

I took the path down before the road, but half way down my sense of curiosity took me off to the left from normal, across up-slope from a house with a tennis court to the beacon road and down to the car park at the bottom of the hill.  Here I turned left along Underhill Lane and then right onto the path that leads to Ditchling.  The village now boasts two tree-houses of which I am envious.  One is clearly for children, bearing in mind the assault course that enables them to get down.  The other, apparently, was designed with adults in mind… taking G&T’s on the deck looked like a very appealing prospect.

I ran up Lodge Hill and back via Oldlands Mill, feeling that I was finishing at pretty much the same pace that I started… still slow, but not quite fading, although that might have been something to do with another four or six jelly babies which I had callously chewed.  Overall the time was two hours, 34 minutes for 14.7 miles… a mere 5.72 mph.

However m’lud, I would like to introduce some mitigating circumstances: the time as I left the Beacon was 1 hour 45 and the speed up to that point, including two scarp climbs, was 5.35mph.  The 5.3 miles home from there was dispatched in 49 minutes… 6.5mph.  Still slow by comparison to the boys, but not that slow!

And I did have some additional weight to carry.