Run for Shared Lives

I guess before tomorrow's half marathon (eek) I should give you an update on the first run of the year back in January.

Well, what can I say. The idea was to ease myself into the year with something nice and gentle. There was a 10k not far from my Mum's place in Cambridge when I was going to be visiting her for her birthday, so I figured it would be as good a choice as any.

The course was supposed to be twice round a loop in Hinchingbrooke Country Park, but it had rained so heavily for the few days before that some of the route was currently swimmable. So the organisers rejigged things, meaning we did 4 laps of a shorter circuit instead.

Of course, even the bits of the course that were passable were still a little on the muddy side, to put it mildly. I ended up calf deep in a puddle at least twice, and was exceedingly grateful that I'd put my waterproof socks on - what a marvellous invention those things are!

Also, the swap from doing the route twice to doing it 4 times meant that we were faced with an actual hill as soon as we set off.

A HILL!!

One of the reasons I chose Cambridge for the first run was because it's one of the flattest places on earth. And yet Hinchingbrooke Country Park appears to be in a deep hole that we had to climb out of and run back into 4 times.

And while the climb out was on well-maintained paths, the downhill section was essentially a mudslide. I saw more than one fellow runner who had clearly taken that section on their bum, whether intentionally or not.

And the last minute change in route ended up creating a course that was almost 12km long instead of 10km. Not quite the easy start I was planning on. But a heck of a lot of fun.

It took me just over 1 hour 40 to complete the route. My back of the envelope calculation says that would be about 1hr 24 for 10km. Which gives me a nice slow benchmark to beat when I do the tunnel run in a couple of weeks.