This morning dawned bright and slightly cool, but for once I had no problem getting started. Unlike Nick’s car which was suffering from a garmin-esque loss of battery power. Not a man to let such a small detail stand in his way, he duly arrived and we set out at a slow pace down the road.
The Bok didn’t get his name for no reason and whilst I have occasionally managed to develop tactics to slow him down to my pace, or unsettle him, he usually figures out what I’m up to. Alas.
Except that he’s been tres busy, and the easy way to catch up with his news was to chat during a run. Why don’t you bring me up to speed, Nick?
Whilst he talked, we headed out to the Royal Oak and up through Hundred Acre Wood where, despite the rain that we’ve had recently, the going was not too muddy. Not that this was a problem as he was wearing his old trainers again… although he did tease me by showing me his sparkling new ones in his gym bag before we left!
Shame really, because I’m sure that I could have found a lot more mud if he’d been wearing them!
Deep into the wood, it finally dawned on him that he was puffing away between words while I was coasting along uttering ‘uh-huh’ in the appropriate places. He zipped up and I zipped off ahead for a few minutes before eventually having to stop for, er… a drink of water.
And some oxygen.
We crossed the Common chased by a herd of bullocks (sorry, that’s a load of bo’ks actually, but it did make him look round sharpish for a moment) and then on through to Wellhouse Lane.
It was odd that someone had stolen almost all the puddles along the track and had also filled in some of the resulting empty hollows with road aggregate. As we ran, I tried to figure out whether travellers had done this in preparation for some neat summer quarters, or that the owners had got fed up with someone stealing their puddles. Either might help to explain the car that was jammed up against the gate, sideways, designed presumably to block all but the most intrepid of entrances.
The front runner changed a couple of times in the valley past the water tower, with the Bok streaming ahead into the dip and me overtaking him up the other side… the real moment of glory (for me) was not that I reached the top first, but that his heart-rate monitor finally cracked under the pressure and emitted a solitary beep-beep-beep-beep, before he gagged it with a deft right-hander.
Despite his heart-rate maxxing out, I am sad to report that it was I who then had to pause for air while the Bok continued ahead.
He graciously paused for me to catch up and I then stayed with him for the sprint up past the station, but he stretched ahead once again for most of the way down the hill the other side.
Alas for the Bok, my coup-de-grace was the application of some differentiated strategic planning. We always stop on the same corner, which is what he did. But I unilaterally decided to move the goalposts right up to the house and by the time he’d twigged that I’d sprinted on past, it was too late and victory (pyrrhic, of course) was mine!
We covered a satisfying 6.7 miles in 59 minutes and celebrated by eating toast with espresso in the garden.