It gets tricky, reporting on events more than a couple of days old. What do you say? Yesterday’s day before yesterday? Hence, on a fweezin’ cold and dark night, I’m sitting in my study punching away at the keys so that I don’t get that far behind.
Yesterday morning seems like an age ago now, but the memory lives on. It was a perfectly still, clear and dark morning until the sun woke up to the aroma of my making coffee (pictured above) and spread a blue glow around the perimeter of the eastern horizon. I was gazing out at this big, deep blue sky waiting for the coffee to finish gurgling when it struck me that there was a huge star hanging up there, like a Christmas star in waiting (apologies for the camera shake which make it look as if it were travelling). It really was very impressive, most especially as there was not another star to be seen in the firmament.
Nick arrived and as I welcomed him through the front door, the -5C outside temperature turned the inside of the hall to ice, Oh boy, was this going to be a cold run!
Kitted up in our warmest gear, we set out into the stillness of the morning and despite wearing gloves, my hands were already painfully cold by the time we reached the end of the road! It may have been cold, but it was a beautiful morning and that always makes a difference. The ground was crispy and my still-sparklingly-clean runners crunched along merrily.
We headed out past the Royal Oak and around the back of St Georges Retreat and somewhere here my sparkling trainers did a neat disappearing act… cracking through the frozen top layer into a puddle of mud. Amusingly, Nick did the same in synchronisation, but we hardly had a chance to laugh as our breath was taken away by the view to the south-east. With moments to go before the sun rose about the hills, it gave us a stunning display by running a glinting highlighter pen around the silhouette of the hill. Simply stunning!
We headed up onto Hundred Acre Lane and then I pulled a neat trick, by not taking the tight turn for home, but rather following the path that returned the long way around through the wood and back through Wivelsfield. By the time we got to open fields, the sun was streaming down and it was easy to imagine that it was warmer… apart from the numb sensation at my extremities!
We returned to the house having achieved a reasonably sedate 6.4mph over a time of 1 hour ten minutes, which meant we had covered 7.5 miles… not bad for a mid-week run. I must be getting used to it as I suffered no aches after at all.. mind you, since returning I seem to have been running from one meeting to the next, so I’ve not had the chance yet!