When will I learn? Don’t try and make runs fun!! Just put in the miles. This weekend I had a simple task – run easy for 80mins. The weather was beautiful. I was by the seaside (or at least considerably nearer to it than I normally am). I found a seaside town with a 1.6M esplanade. I figured I could just plod back and forth for as long as I needed to.
Only, I got drunk on the power. Learning that I sometimes quite enjoy running has had a strange effect on me. I didn’t want just to get it done. I wanted to explore. To run somewhere beautiful. To run with joy.
So I decided not to plod back and forth along that lovely, tarmac’ed, flat-as-a-pancake esplanade, and instead I hatched a crazy plan. I would run the coastal path.
I would be beside the ocean. I’d be in nature. I could run out for 40 and turn back. Where was this plan going wrong?
Wiser folk than me already know where this plan was going wrong, I reckon. And if you said “for fuck’s sake, Tucker, think of the hills!” you’d be right. Or part right, anyway. Because in truth I’d thought of the hills. Or at least I’d thought of the first one. I knew it was going to be a chunky ole climb to go from esplanade up to clifftop path. But I had thought it’d be more or less flat once up there. This is what happens when your topography is based on 20 odd years in London.
Alas, no. The path from Exmouth isn’t flat once you reach the top. Or even flattish. It’s decidedly undulating. But even that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that my picturesque section of the Jurassic coastline between Exmouth and Budleigh is actually a massive static caravan holiday park. Oh, and a MOD firing range.
Now, I have little against a static caravan park, but it wasn’t quite the rugged, sweeping vista of prehistoric coast and crashing waves I imagined. Plus, the path disappeared here, and I ended up picking my way round the very edge of the park, trudging up steep hills of lush green grass that was slippery and soft underfoot, or through bogs and ridges of thick cloying mud.
My 80mins of running yielded less than 9k of ground covered. Once again my attempt at a scenic run left me moving at half pace, cursing my misplaced ambition.
Next weekend, I’ll spend my prescribed 90mins pounding the pavements of London. I may venture as far as Clapham Common but even then I’m making no promises here.
Before then though I’ve got to get through the most terrifying interval session tomorrow which I fear may well leave me puking on the treadmill.
Onto the next one. X
me and the moo 