After working on a project late into the night, the alarm seemed to go off all too soon this morning but though it was still dark, I alighted from the bed with a spring in my still-stiff-from-the-last-run legs and got the coffee pot on. It’s amazing how much easier it is to run (or motivate yourself to do many other things) when there are two or more of you.
Nick duly arrived and we headed out into the grey morning, which was not as cold as I had anticipated. He was after a short run so we looped across the Common as far as the industrial estate, but on the way back the Bok in him decided 35 minutes was too short so we continued on into Wivelsfield and came back via Ote Hall.
Lots of surface water & mud today so lots of slip-sliding-away (we know a song about that mate) and Nick tried patiently to explain the idea behind transmogrification, which I now reckon might have been one of the inputs that Philip Pullman had in his mind when creating daemons in The Golden Compass. It comes from a comic book strip, but I’ll get him explain it to you some other time!
I can imagine that I was a bit like a sack of spuds for company this morning and having dragged the sack around most of the way, I think we were both surprised when I picked up my heels and sprinted (only for a minute of so) towards the end.
Overall, 6.06 miles according to super watch in one hour one minute makes 5.96mph and not, somewhat importantly, the 9 point something that the watch was claiming… which casts doubt on the Bok’s earlier claim of an 8.57mph run last week. Some quick retro calculation puts the figure more correctly at 7mph for his run, which is still great by any standards after the excess of Christmas!