Friday 8 June 2012

Running in a Foreign Land

Today I'm 180miles from home, in a foreign land - well Wales but hey its a different country, and they definitely speak a very different language. As always in Wales its raining, and wasn't looking like it was going to stop, so it was 8pm and I figured I was going to run out of light if I didn' t go soon, so accepting the fact I was going to get wet, I stuck my shorts on and headed out.
Monmouthshire & Brecon Canal
I'd look at a route earlier trying to find a 5km loop, and wrote a basic set of directions and then obviously left them on my mother in laws table. Armed with a dangerously rough idea of where I was heading I started running - up hill (there are so many hills, the first 1km had a 39m gain). Quite obviously the original route went out the window by the second turning, and from then I start winging it. After 2km I was almost back again which was never the plan,  so I checked my phone map and tried to recover the original route. I found the woods I was to run along side, past the barracks that were on the planned route, but then found a canal that I had looked for the last time I was here, and so started running along there. As the picture shows its quite pretty, though had I taken the shot to the right, it would of been the M4, but I just kept looking left whilst running, with the music drowning out the traffic, and pretending it was all good. Once I felt like I'd found a bridge to cross over to the other side, I checked my map again and saw that the most direct route was straight up through the woods - easier said than done due to the 'drought' causing the hill to be very slippery and the pond to burst its bank and be flowing across the path

Once back out of the woods, found myself back on the same roads I'd been on earlier so carried on back down the hills throwing an extra couple km's at the bottom for good measure.
This was the story of a damp day 8



8th of Juneathon

7.85km in 49:19 starting at 2022 on 08/06/12

Total 53.14km (using running app, inc all the decimal bits)



Day 8 Jogged Logged and Blogged

1 comment:

  1. It's funny how they built all those canals to run alongside the motorways......

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