Today should have gone smoothly…

… but it didn’t

Today was meant to be a nice easy run – just a three miler after yesterday’s 14 miler and associated fuel tank problem.

The idea, as I was on the PT course in Southwark was to knock off there at 5pm and head to Hyde Park for a 6pm meet and run with Andy who is taking over the challenge and Damo, his pal, who will be joining him on some of the runs and trying to do 1095miles in the year but as a cummulative total rather than an every day challenge.

All well and good until about 4.45 – we’d even been doing some stretching techniques on the course and I was more than happy to let most of the group get in some pracitice on my hamstrings.

Then, just before we left, I noticed the Garmin was at about 5 per cent charge…. I was about to go on a run with nothing in place to record the fact I’d done it.

iphone in hand, I Google mapped the nearest running shop, London City Runner on Ludgate Circus, over the Bridge from where I was. I decided to run over, switch the watch on to get some mileage under the belt and pray they had a Garmin charger in stock.

A mile – or eight minutes later and I was in the shop. Great, a charger was found and I stumped up an extra £16 – only to discover it was a USB charger with no plug.

“Please tell me you have the adaptor,” I begged. The Aussie girl behind the counter started to root around… “I’m not sure we do she replied,” before finally locating one. Another tenner thank you very much.

Then I was off to the local Starbucks for a cuppa and some charge. At 30 per cent, I thought I was good to go and went for a pre-run number 2… only to find half way through there were only two sheets of loo roll in the john that necessitated me using them before heading out for some more tissues and back in.

Great – 30 minutes to get across London to meet the boys – jump on a bus I thought, failing to take into account rush hour traffic.

Ten minutes later and we had crawled a few hundred yards and so it was out of the bus and on another run… I was doing all this by the way with my backpack with normal clothes and school books in. It weighed a ton and running with it through rush hour commuters was no fun.

By the time I got to Hyde Park, I already had 2.5miles on the clock.

Thankfully, meeting the boys was a great idea – despite the fact I still had to run three miles with them. They’ve both got some great ideas for where we can take the site when Andy takes over in September…

More to be revealed in the coming days and weeks.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 6.18
Target: 1014
Miles to date: 1,415.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

So, there are some perks to running a running blog

One of them is that occasionally people get in touch and ask me to try stuff. So far, I’ve had things like nutritional stuff sent from Maximuscle and some smellies from the people at Dove… but this week, the big boys came knocking.

Adidas are launching a new running community/hub at www.testadidas.co.uk – you need a special access code to get onboard at this stage that I was supplied by one of the PRs for Adidas and I signed up.

I had to answer loads of questions about running habits and the like but they also took all my sizes, so it will be interesting if I get some new kit to try out.

Today’s run was a perfectly pleasant one around the backstreets around Eric, the father-in-law’s house in Kirk Deighton outside of Wetherby. I wish I could have gone out for a bit longer but we had a 9.15 appointment to have suits fitted for Laura’s sister’s wedding in two week’s time.

I’d tried to factor in for this and was up at 6am and ready to go but then couldn’t get out of the house, which was locked and I couldn’t find the front door key. Ordinarily, I would have gone out of the window but my trainers were being held captive in the porch, which also required a key, so I had to hold off until someone was up who could give me a key.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 6
Target: 903
Miles to date: 1,209.63

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Running the Whitby coast

So Laura and I came to Whitby yesterday, booking into a lovely little b&b called The Woodlands Sandsend, about three miles from town itself.

This morning, despite being on holiday, I was still up around 6am and managed to busy myself till around seven when I went out.

It was a grey and angry morning, waves crashing on the sea wall and spraying water up onto the road. I started off by heading up onto the cliffs that separate Sandsend and Whitby, turning off the main coast road onto a cliff top path when the expanse of the Whitby Golf Course began to separate me from the water.

I’m not sure how high the cliffs are here, but there is a steep drop, maybe a couple of hundred feet to the beach below, which was obscured due to it being high tide.

The path took me into Whitby itself, where I could see the Abbey, famous from the Dracula novel up on another cliff on the opposite side of town.

To come back, I dropped to the slim path by the waters edge, fringed by brightly coloured beach huts and let jets of spray wash over me and mingle with the sweat on my brow.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 6.2
Target: 897
Miles to date: 1,198.63

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here