B & B

- recognising I had a mild (and passing) case of attitude sickness on the climb up Kirkfell in the Wasdale show race, and still keeping on plodding onwards and upwards. I would say that I got a grip, but grip was the one thing I didn’t have as I slid grassily back down. Best race in the calendar? 2,400 feet up in a mile and a quarter. 2,400 feet back down the way we came. Two shaky legs that made me suffer and smile on the stairs for a week afterwards

- finding my way back to the running track. First of all, on the last day of summer, for what turned out to be the rainiest hour of the year. Three weeks later, in the first cold snap of this end of the year, with that feeling of blood in your chest. Keeping my promises up there so far too, back there last Tuesday, running the last few reps with the white lines being gently blurred by a rising-or-falling autumn mist that held around our knees

- playing “it” with two enfs as a warm-up at the start of a Park Run that we went to, being happy that as teenagers they still know how to play obliviously, and being cautiously optimistic that they won’t let growing-up get in the way of that

- pushing back the rising unease on the last sea-swim of the year, when I was more-than-usually alone (because the crowd actually had gone the wrong way this time), and the waves were too high for me to see safety. And finally happily unsteadily beaching in the quickening dusk, landing heavily like a flightless bird or a swimless fish. Oh, and stopping at the little beach amusement arcade when running back afterwards, confident that a day when I was so gifted by my undrowning, was the day when the gods of the cuddly-toy-grabber would smile on me and tighten their always-unreliable grip. (They didn’t, of course)

- a night on the moors with Bambi & Becki, setting the course for Dartmoor Runners under both ends of a rainbow, listening to the downpour in the night, and collecting the controls in the sun next day

- just avoiding a James Herriot soggy-rolled-up-sleeve moment, when I nearly ran into the back of a cow in the fields by the river tonight. Time to play with headtorches again. Winter drawers on, as the BBC never said.

What do we get when we join the dots? I’m hoping it’s a good base for a quickish (for me) 10k on the road (eek) in early January. We’ll see what added colouring-in I can do between now and then, won’t we?

Statts House is not a Big House.

And off we go. Five weeks after Borrowdale was such a pain in the arse, it’s time to start plodding (carefully) round the Dartmoor Runners winter series.

From the Warren House Inn it was over to the forest and along the edge of it. While I could see some other figures taking detours, I decided that today would be a straight line day.

Up a hill, and I edged a bit of determination in quite early on; part of my new plan is to work a little harder in races like this, rather than hiding in the thinking that it’s long distance so I must be slow. Some good grassy downhill then, to control number one. This was at the source of a stream, which doesn’t mean a nice bubbly spring or anything, just a bog-with-a-sense-of-purpose.

Over from there to the ruin of Statts House, and a hideous tussocky lurch around the edge of Sittaford Tor to get there. Halfway along, I stumbled (yes) across a path leading to the top of the tor, and decided the long way might be shorter, and followed the path to where it was going rather than where I wanted to be.

Part of the point to the detour was that I hoped there would be some sort of path from the top across to Winney’s Down, rather than another tussock-fight. As it was, my sense of direction forgot about my earlier thinking on straight lines, and I managed a spectacular if ineffective dog-leg that picked out tussocks that themselves had tussocks on top. I was right though; there was a good path from Sittaford Tor and across. I know this because it was plainly visible in the distance when I looked back across my own lurchy route.

Over from Statts House then to Hartland Tor, sploshing through some more stream sources before a whooshy descent and a good hard run along solid paths before some gorse trampling to get to the top and control three, which was cunningly hidden in plain view. Took me a couple of minutes to find it, but once I’d realised it was a big orange and white flag stuck in the middle of a big rock, I was fine.

Too much road over to control four in the woods at Soussons Down, (but that was my choice on how to get there), and too many trees once I arrived. Unusually for a plantation though, the tracks and rides were where the map said they were, and it was just my legs that were limiting me now. What was nice though, was that I was near a pair who were running stronger than me, but were taking longer to navigate because of joint decision-making. When there’s just the one of you, the arguments are quicker, even if your legs aren’t.

And that was just about it, then, out of the woods, and through the heather, and up the hill for a little lie-down before coming home to take assorted enfs to feed assorted types of bread to a range of swans and seagulls pretending to be ducks.

I like Sundays.

Friend....!

So here I am up on the moor, with my shiny September pencil-case ready for a new term and a new leaf.

It’s Shilstone Tor, fiddling about with the Dartmoor Runners course that I’m doing the planning for later this month. Jumping ahead, at some point today I meet my new close friend in the picture. Although less of a friend and more of a hanger-on, and I didn’t actually find him stowing away behind my knee for another couple of days…

Anyway, it’s an area that I had a little plod round in July, when we went to the disappointing Chagstock festival, and I escaped from the compound to play on the hills. Today as I recce the first control (which isn’t where you think it is), and I smell the coming rain in the air, it reminds me that I had previously been going to blog about that run too.

I’d left Becki musing on creative ways to smuggle alcohol (wellies, since you ask) and gone through field paths and lanes to the sprawling skirts of Cosdon Beacon. A pause for applause to the ancient builders of a little clapper bridge that kept my feet dry that important bit longer, and then it was up into the bracken to hunt for paths.

I’ve got a theory about bracken paths, that the best-trodden ones are the dead-ends that end in tears. This is because people only tread the correct path once, but the impostor-paths get twice-stamped tersely down on the retreat as well…

Past the bracken and into the gorse, and when gorse is in blossom then swearing is in season. I scratch my way through it, then up and over the bog, and occasionally a little beneath it, and it’s a gentle slog to the top. I had been planning to indulge myself with a quick photo back to where I started, but as I climbed the rain arrived, and the distant festival was washed away by flooding waves of cloud, and it was just me and a waterproof, and mud underneath my fingernails and grit in my socks. Blood on my legs, and rain on my face, and I may fall down a lot but my happiness is in the getting up, however so slowly.

At the top of the beacon I stop to inhale the greyness all around me, turn to survey the invisible world at my feet, and when I nudge myself into moving again it’s like the blindfold game when you are little. Close your eyes, spin around, point and guess. I’ve been up here at so many different times and different angles, and even in the mist I have a quietly confident certainty of the right way down. Except when I check the compass (twice), and realise that I might actually prefer to go the other way, seeing as it has a bit less wilderness, and a lot more tea and cake at the end.

As I dropped down out of the cloud, musing happily about everything and nothing (mainly about the magic mystery of bearings, and the mild surprise and easily-pleased happiness I feel when they take me directly to where I want to be), I find my first company for the day. Have I said I don’t like cows?

There, I’ve said it now. They always knew I didn’t like them anyway. That’s why they chase me. I admit I was wearing red that day, but they (I’m not suggesting they are all the same cows. At least I don’t think so. Although I’m wondering now.) have previously chased me in a whole range of fashions.

As I lumbered down Kennon Hill to Buttern, their interest was aroused. As I reached the valley floor, they began to lumber too. Cows are better at lumbering than me, and they do it with a bit more weighty attitude too. My previous plan had been a nice meander round the edge of the too-green plain, but now caution (ok, fear) told me that the shortest distance between two points was a barely-controlled rush, while not encouraging a cow-race.

Later, I looked it up on an internet, and apparently cows almost always won’t hurt you. I’m not sure they’d seen the same web page though (.cow.uk?), and “almost” is a smaller word than I would like.

And this was how I ended up easing bloodily through yet-more gorse to be wobbling on top of a quaking mire under the baleful gaze of bullocks with an attitude problem. Slowly, carefully, I found tussocks that would bear my weight (I like to think they were the tops of sunken fierce cows), and I made my escape. Shouting ever-more-bravely at the cows, the further away I got.

And that’s a bit of a ramble, but it’s my happy recollection of another muddy day. I’ll tell you in a couple of weeks where my Dartmoor Runners course actually went, and if there were cows and clouds.

Sat here now, I can smell my fell shoes from Sunday sat drying in the hall, because they only came out of the bag today. And I can feel an imaginary itching when I think about ticks, and the echo of adrenaline when I think about cows, and I can still feel the moor, and it’s the same reality as Tuesday evening racing 5k on the tarmac, and loved ones rowing on the river running down to the sea tonight. And there’s more of it all to come. What larks, eh?

With go-faster hanky attached

I’ve always liked to sit and listen to the rain pattering on the roof. The closeness of all that wet, somehow makes you feel extra dry. Unless, that is, you are listening to the rain’s hurried drumming while sat in the portaloo just before the start of the Borrowdale fell race… 17 miles, 7,000 feet, and some sharp stones.

What a long time since I’ve written. Last time, someone emailed me to comment that my sledge-jump looked like “a real coccyx-banger”, and we’ll come back to that one. The whooshing sledge wasn’t the cause of my re-slipped disc though, which happened two days later. The cause of that was using an unaccustomed range of motion. Hoovering, specifically.

Anyway, despite and because of a short period of needing help putting my socks on, I’m back plodding along with hills and words. I’ll do some catching up over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime there is a wet field to make a start in.

The forecast had said there might be some showers a bit later and east-er, but the rain hadn’t seen that, and it joined us in the here-and-now. I’d been nicely chilled in a relaxed sort of way that morning, reading my book on the bus down the valley, but nicely chilled was now turning into mildly cold and mostly wet. Jacket on at the start then, although that did mean one less thing to carry in a bumbag full of jelly babies.

I was irked by the number of people passing me on the early section (I’ve never been one for track-and-field), but I did manage to climb a few places back on the assault of (or by) Bessyboot. A slight struggle from there to Allen Crags, with the elastic stretching and snapping as I tried to hold on to a group going faster than I should have been. I felt a bit short on confidence there, as one of the faster huddle was saying that they probably wouldn’t make the cut-off at Honister on time.

A bit of context here is that I haven’t had the time (or the body?) for proper running over the last few months. I’ve done some long slow distance training, but that has only been turning me into a long slow distance runner, and now I was losing confidence that my lurching plod would be quick enough to get me to the mine on time.

Another fretting runner asked me if I’d done the race before (yes, but long enough ago to have forgotten about the training thing), and when would be a good time for aiming to get to Scafell Pike (my advice is not on an August Saturday, much too crowded).

On to weaving between Ill Crag and Broad Crag though, and I was happily skipping over the shattered piles of three-foot-gravel (it was dry now) and picking up places again. I can (sometimes) do the fiddly stuff and the hands-on-knees stuff much better than I can do the runnable bits. I’m not sure how much of that is in my head.

Scafell Pike was Scafell Pike, and I turned back down to the scree run that the official advice tells you is a Bad Thing, but that experience tells you is Not To Be Missed.

All the lemming-rocks from the top of the pike have been spent some years carefully gravitating all their sharp edges to plummet down a bangy stonefall that clatters down to Piers Gill.  Let go and off you go, remember to breathe and don’t stick your tongue out, Tom.

Tip. There are some marvellous descents you can almost comfortably do sliding on your bum, but this isn’t one of them. As I launched downwards, my feet somehow shot upwards, and I did a cartoon-style fall backwards in a very on-my-arse sort of way. Cartoon falls are slo-mo and funny though, but this was fast and a bit nasty, and very, very sweary. How can I put it? Let’s call it a real coccyx-banger…

Once I’d stopped the creative language, I decided not to check for blood. For one thing, I now had muddy-bloody hands from unsuccessfully breaking my fall, for another thing, based on the pain, I reckoned that if I rummaged around too much behind me, my bottom might fall off.

Onwards and downwards then, and along to Styhead, but with my feet (or my head or my behind) no longer having that bit of zip that you need if you are going to lean forward and tell the downhill where you are going, and let it catch up if it likes. Another slide and a scrape later, and I’m in the world of the much-too-cautious for the rest of the race.

Cropped a bit

But, I did get slowly round, and I’m pleased with that.

Encouragement from the great man sent me up Gable, and in the clouds a compass got me to Windy Gap (happy place), even though I was initially rude enough to ignore what the needle was telling me.

Habit took me to Honister half an hour before the cut-off, and the absence of choices got me over Dale Head. Gravity then brought me as far as Dalehead Tarn.

I did a fairy-like tiptoe through the slippery slate slopes in the quarry, and the pull of tea and sandwiches reeled me back through the fields in a shuffle that could barely be called running but which never did become a walk (there was definitely a walk inside me, trying to get out).

Ouch.

In my house, the feast of Stephen is just a bookmark between Jesus’s birthday on the 25th, and my birthday on the 27th. Nice that Stephen was a Capricorn as well though.

This year though, we were going for carol re-enactment, and Boxing Day found us down by the railway line gathering firewood. The snow was a lot less deep and crisp and even once we had dragged some logs through it….

It was a bit like Christmas morning itself though, rooting through the snowy wrapping to find logs lying beneath like presents (not telling you where). I mentioned to Becki the thought of blogging about it later, and she pointed out that I hadn’t been running, so I couldn’t.

 And that’s why, an unloading of wood later, I was packed up for a run-ette in the darkening evening, down to see the sea.

Yesterday’s sledging bruises competed for attention with where my shins had been scuffling with logs today, and I was shuffling a bit as I went to find the cliff path to Dawlish Warren.

Microspikes went on as the path glazed over, and the headtorch went on as the sun went down. Lights from the warren and Exmouth in the distance stopped at the sea. Further away, sparkly ships had tied up to the horizon for the night.

Down the hill, and upping the pace across the shiny carpark skating rink, slippy people shake puzzled heads at me. Some of my best runs, and my best anythings, have the background music of people shaking heads and worse.

Back along the sea wall now, and the sea is getting wilder. Foaming snowy breakers daring you to sledge in them. Turning back to Dawlish, I run through a last gasp of snow on the beach, before surprising myself with the sand being even harder to run through (and reminding myself that I might want to get some practice in before running the Grizzly beach for the first time in ages next spring).

Spikes off now, and I’m running holding them in a jingle-bells sort of way before ticking them in my bumbag (and getting my hat out as the wind rises).

The snow has stopped reflecting now, so I do it instead. Up ahead, the coast rambles on to Christmasses in Teignmouth, Shaldon and Torbay, and a different lighthouse winks at me way out somewhere less safe. Becki will have lit the woodburner and warned the Baileys, and meanwhile the enfs are tucked up happily elsewhere nursing their own happy sledge-scrapes.

 The snow is going to be thawing now, taking the last days of the year with it. Next year and after, there will be more snow, and more wood too. And more birthdays.

Not dark. Or REALLY good floodlights

One year away from the track, and what a busy year it’s been. Here I am on a mild, dark Tuesday night, stood in mild trepidation in the carpark at Exeter Arena, slightly fretting about the idea of doing twelve-times-300 metres.

Inside, I pay my £3(eek) and get some teasing from the friends I’d absented myself from, not least about my history of going a bit mad on the last effort, and whether a year of doing nothing fast might have dented that.

I’d vaguely hoped that I’d be able to hide in a huddle of slowish people like me, and I was pleased to see P* there, so that she could run behind me exerting invisible go-faster-ness. I find it easier to up my speed at the thought of being passed, than I do at the sight of people distancing me.

But, it turned out she had a wobbly foot, and she was going to be standing holding the watch and making encouraging noises while I tried not to keep people waiting.

Some lurching bouncy warm-ups of stiffly skipping and jumping, then the reps themselves came looming up out of the night…

Scene 1, and I ease into my first 300 metres, with the aim of maybe tapering off a bit later. One minute and four seconds later, and I’m completely fine, apart from the idea of actually doing another eleven of these.

A 100m walk to complete the lap now, trying to regain some composure. Second rep, and a couple of seconds come off, although I feel a bit nearer death as well.

Third, fourth and fifth reps, and I’m down to around a minute. Each second I scrape off equates to beating my previous self by roughly 5 metres. And roughly is a good word for how I’m running, scrabbling at the times.

Sixth rep, and this is the last one before we have a five minute break, and I’m down to 59 seconds, coughing and spitting (nice) as I stagger to the edge for a little lie down.

The start after the break is always such hard work, and as I run the final bend for the seventh time I’m having to think my legs round, mentally willing them to land in the right place and push forwards.  P counts me in at 59 seconds again though, and maybe I’m pulling back a little distance on the others now?

Eight, nine, ten, 58, 58, 59, and I’m leaning forward, pretending I’m a proper runner, trying to keep good form, while unsuccessfully balancing my oxygen debt in a credit-crunch sort of way.

Starting eleven now, and I’m finally believing that I can complete the session (although I know I always have before), and the image of running on tracks (around the track) gets me back to 58 seconds again.

Finally, finally, walking round to the start of number twelve, trying to get my breathing in order, and I know with certainty there is no way I can possibly pull out a fast finish from anywhere. It’s going to be all I can do to dip under a minute again, and I’ll be struggling to do that.  

Strangely though, flurrying away from the start with the others, I tuck in behind Bill and find myself passing Ian. Suddenly I’m up on my toes, and ten strides have taken me past Shaun and I’ve found that extra gear that sometimes takes me by surprise, and now another kick again to take me into the bend.

The bend though, is where payback starts, and many better writers than me have described the detailed suffering of that second awful and unexpectedly-inevitable surprise. Immersed in an absence of energy, blood in my ears instead of my legs, flailing, fading, and FFS Tom what were you thinking of?

What’s nice though, is that my early surge of hubris has taken me far enough past my friends to snap the elastic, and although I can hear hot breath in the straight, I’ve still got half a kick left to push me across the line in 52.

After, in a warm daze, chatting happily as we unwind the track by jogging anti-clockwise, I feel my crampy calves complaining about the last effort (and the other eleven), and a smile outside-and-inside about the fact I can still do silly things on the track if I want.

All that pain for 3.6km? Perhaps I should have done a few more efforts to get better value for my £3…

*I’ve been told I have to change names to avoid getting my head kicked in by a slower woman.

tiddly-om-pom-pom

Sometimes I’ve been mildly musing (self-indulgently as always) on edges and coasts, boundaries and transitions. My unsuccessful art teacher used to hammer into me at school (or was that the woodwork teacher) that  there are no drawn lines in nature. Just places where the colours change.

I seem to have particularly thought about edges when swimming on Monday nights in Teignmouth. As I plosh onwards, mouth open for plankton, my thoughts littorally drift.

Where we swim and run at Teignmouth, there is a rope of flat contour lines separating wet from dry. The paddling waves, the sand, the sea wall, the coast path, the railway lines (I like trains), all hedge up against each other before the cliffs start to rise 

And when we are out as far as where the pier stops prodding the sea, there are still the overlaps where the colours are mixing.

Sometimes the overlaps are my landward thoughts when I should be thinking sea things. Once this summer it was the sound and smell of the funfair reaching out, so as well as the sea-salt and splash, there was a warm fuzz in the air of candyfloss and waltzers.

Today as we swim parallel to the land, I’m experimenting with breathing (and looking) on alternate third sides, like I’ve been told I must. As we move along the string of yellow buoys that somehow delineate sea from sea, the landscape on each breath changes; seacape to landscape and back, horizon to beach and back, with the world pivoting round an axis of swimmer.

I start to play with the blunt knife-edge of the water, where I’m reaching through it, making an unsteady crease as I go. Picasso-like, head half below the water, head half above, one eye in the sea, one in the air, one ear for the fish and one for the seagulls. Mindful. Green to blue and back to green, tracing bubbles and clouds in a mackerel sky.

Getting back to the last of the buoys before we turn in to the shore again, the anchor chain beneath it stretches heavily into darker places I can’t see. I wonder about diving far downwards, and momentarily frighten myself with the sense of exposure. Fell-running on holiday, I had the same flutter as I scrubbed across a bad step on an early wet morning, while the children slept, and shiny slippery rock reminded me how much depth was beneath me.

As I turn though, the perspective changes, and my panic settles. I briefly wonder whether if the chain was lighter, string-like, the buoy would slip its mooring and float helium-like to join all the other balloons and kites that me and the enfs have ever lost.  

Earlier in the summer, I swam on a stormier day, and afterwards as I ran on the cliffs, rain in my eyes, the white horses on the sea blurred with the sky. Ships in the distance lacked gravity, and hovered somewhere in the no-mans-land between a definite sea and concrete sky.

For a moment then, pace increasing as I leaned forward down the hill, the houses on the hills ahead seemed to be part of the sea, or part of the sky, and I couldn’t tell which. I was reminded of a glowing twilight in Borrowdale last year, when I briefly lost track of whether it was spring or autumn.

Running back today though, I’m well aware it’s the edge between summer and autumn. The light is beginning to fade quickly, and there won’t be many more Monday evenings in the sea, or at least not until I’m another year older. I stretch my pace out along the seafront, back to the happy blue lighthouse where it all began. Rainfall, seafall, landfall.

Into the sea, you and me

 Although I’ve dabbled with a quadrathlon (but didn’t inhale), it shocked me the other day to realise that I hadn’t actually done a triathlon for two years. 

I’d last completed a triathlon in Plymouth, as long ago as July 2008, and then a dire lack of training (do I surprise you?) had meant that my always-struggling swim was the high point of a race that went from slow to slower. In September that year, a mechanical problem with a comedy saddle ended my Teignmouth tri, in a cold wet heap soon after the sea. 

So, when I turned up at the Plymouth tri start line again this week, I was planning to exercise some ghosts. And despite those demons (or maybe because of them), I was surprisingly relaxed at the start. I happily racked my bike somewhere memorable, poured myself into my wetsuit, and splashed happily round the swim course in the bright morning sun. 

Now I’ve read the triathlon mags and forums (it beats training), and one piece of advice is always to remember where you put your bike, so you can find it again after the swim. 

Well; on all the tris I’ve done, I’ve had no problem with that. Mainly because a) I’ve left my bike somewhere prominent, even with a big flag on it, and b) mine is usually pretty much the only bike left when I’ve stopped sinking my way round the swim. 

Why didn’t I put my bike somewhere sensible this time, like the end of a rack? I don’t know. Why didn’t I do something sensible like at least make a mental note of where it was? Good question. 

The fact was, when I came out from the swim, a strange fluke meant that there were still 40 bikes left in transition. 

And none of the bikes seemed to be mine. No matter how many times I ran round them in small circles. 

I should mention at this point that I’m a bit short-sighted. So, I have some prescription goggles for swimming in. They are nowhere near as strong as my normal glasses, but they do stop me hitting piers, whales and frigates. The goggles came with a helpful sticker on the lens telling me not to use them for driving. I didn’t actually notice it for the first three times I wore them. Fortunately I walked to the pool those days, or who knows what might have happened. 

So back in transition, settling in for the long-haul of bike-searching, take the time to picture me, still rubber-clad in my wetsuit, bright red swimming hat, all goggled up, running round like a headless chicken on fetish night. 

It was then that I lost my presence of mind. I ran up the racks, I ran down the racks. I ran in circles and squares. I ducked underneath the racking, I climbed over it. I wondered about sitting down and having a good cry. I wondered if someone had stolen my bike. And my shoes. And my jelly babies. And the big blue box that was meant to make finding things so easy. 

The thing was, I could remember exactly where my bike was. Yes, right next to some other bikes. And all the time I was searching, blinded by the endless reappearance of bikes I’d already seen, I was deafened by the relentless ticking of the bloody clock as I beat the record for slowest transition ever. 

At one point a helpful marshal came over, having untangled himself from falling-over laughing, and suggested I take my goggles off because it might help me see better. I explained about the short-sighted thing, and I could see his little thought-bubble saying “well at least take the silly hat off…” 

He asked me what my bike looked like. I resisted the temptation to say a wheel at each end, and we finally, finally, found it (mainly I think because all the other bikes had gone by now, and they wanted to pack things away). 

Reunited with my bike, staggering out of transition, a straitlaced marshal paused me to insist that I did my top up properly. Even semi-bare chests apparently lower the tone of triathlon, though nowhere near as much as sweary blind forgetful people, I reckon. 

And that would have been just the incompetent interlude in my story of triumph over triathlon demons, except that 8 miles into the bike route my back wheel disintegrated into an unhappy clash of broken spokes, bendy rim and bad language (do you see a theme emerging?). 

Limping home, emotionally scarred but not scared, I will be back for my unfinished business. While I didn’t beat the demons this time, they didn’t win either. Nil – nil, and we’ll fight it out in many years of extra time. 

Anyway, I think that, like matter, demons are neither created nor destroyed. Jump on one end of the bouncy castle, and the other end bounces back. And demons can be a useful voice in the ear to spur you on (and me on), higher, faster, stronger. 

Just so long as the demons remember that I’m in charge, not them.

Sheepstor and Burrator. With lots of wood.

Kurt Vonnegut reckoned that, when storytelling, every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action. Clearly I haven’t felt like doing either for a few weeks; mea maxima culpa. And yada yada yada.

The only thing you’ve missed, dear reader, is that a week before the Teenager with Altitude my back decided to do something horrid to itself again. Since then I have been hobbling around even more ungainlyish than usual. That’s not the reason for not having written though. That was just laziness.

Anyway, back at the plot, the days have been lengthening and stretching out, and so, very gradually, has been my tortuous running posture. Most recently, I even encouraged my beloved B to nudge me up a hill or two. We went for a little recce of the Burrator Horseshoe, one of my many favourite races.

It’s based at the Meavy village fair, close to the summer solstice. There is a fancy-dress pageant for short people, a rifle range for brave people (the bullets ricochet a bit, in a refreshingly laid-back way), and ferret racing for small boys.

The race itself has a bit of everything too; three big ups, two big downs (not sure how that happened), and a fair bit of wet (a reservoir to run by, a bog to sink in and a ford to splosh through).

Our first potter back in March was a bit shortened by weather at the top of Sheeps Tor; the ford later on was waist-deep, but it still wasn’t the wettest part. This time we made it the whole way round, even stopping for something illegal between the two dams (not what you’re thinking. Possibly.)

And, at the top of Sheeps Tor we got all excited about a tupperware cake container someone had left, but sadly it turned out to be a letter-box. We stamped B just the once, and solemnly vowed never to stamp again.

Back at Meavy, we nearly bought marmalade from a roadside stall, but we couldn’t agree on liking marmalade, and anyway we had to save our money to buy pies up the road. Another day.

And talking of other days, I’ve been reappraising my running plans for the year, in the dim light cast by my troublesome back. But that’s ok. All I’ve ever hoped for is to be something barely approaching the best I can be, and that’s a very relative concept after all.

Running slower just means I have more time to enjoy it. I’m practising saying that in front of the mirror to make it more convincing…

Some days I see the point

Running back to the holiday cottage and Becki, in the darkening light of evening, I’ve run just about as far as I can. At least, I’ve run just about as far west as I can, seeing as we are staying in Pendeen, where the land fades untidily into the sea in a crumple of mines, sand and spray.

I’ve gone as far as the lighthouse, and I’ve clambered through and over the rocks to get right to the point (not normally good at that). I’ve followed wondering oddments of the coastal path along the cliffs, hanging on to the grass in a couple of places where it began to get a little too coastal. I’ve struggled over ancient stones, and stumbled over stiles.

And now I’m turning inland into a lived-in landscape, running against the tide of the setting sun. As I’ve run, my muddy bloody legs have been imagining Cumbrian hills, trying to work out if they are looking forward to some proper hard work. And as I’ve run, past the glowy embers of lights in windows, I’ve thought about spring, life, love and age.