It may be a little late, but I’ve started to pack more runs into my week. This week consisted of:
- Monday’s track night, with Seaford Striders, at the Lewes Leisure Centre track. After a warm-up, our group ran 300m with 100m recoveries. I lost count of how many. I’m not a big fan of track running, but this was oddly enjoyable.
- Wednesday’s club run with the Striders. It was a cold clear and still night, so my group headed for the sea-front, bagging a little under five starlit miles; one of our number ran a couple of circuits of the car park to make it up to the magic 5.
- On Saturday, I returned, with Rob, Paula, and Sweder to Bevendean Down parkrun. The latter took on the vital task of timekeeper, while 22 ran in total. It’s been a long time since I ran here, since September 2017 in point of fact. It remains a lovely, but hard course, this week made more difficult by the addition of a herd of cows at the top of the hill, whose hooves had stirred up the mud, which had then frozen into an unforgiving rutted surface. Some of my fellow runners took fright at the cows; we could have done with the presence of CharlieCat, who would doubtless have been able to draw on his repertoire of cowherd’s calls to move these beasts. I finished, with the tail-runner on my heels, in a rather disgraceful 35:24, though I see it was not my slowest ever time here. I need to return.
- To round the week off, today I ran according to time, rather than distance. My aim was to run for 1hour 45 minutes, and on road. The half will be on road, after all, and I’ll be running on mud again next weekend at the East Sussex Cross Country League event in Heathfield Park. So I set off, my aim to run towards Newhaven and turn as the clock struck 52 minutes and thirty seconds. The first half was a hard slog, into a chilly head wind, but took me almost exactly to Denton Corner, one of those serendipitous running accidents. The return journey was better and faster, as my splits show. In spite of the wind, the sun shone brightly. What will the weather do on half marathon day? Speculation is pointless, as I have to run it whether it’s snow or sun, -5°C or 20°C. Still, it would be nice to have mild still conditions.
Total mileage this week: 21.32 miles
Two weeks till the Brighton Half. Running for the BSUH Charity: sponsor me
