The long and winding road

Day:         48

Distance: 22.1km

Time:       2:02:11 secs

Calories:  1,746

The plan called for "120 mins 20 mins easy 20 mins steady x3". I translated this into a run of around 25k and duly set about working out a route which you can view here. As we were back in Essex for a friend's 30th birthday this weekend I was accompanied by my brother-in-law Ravi. Now, Ravi's new to this blog so allow me to introduce him briefly. Ravi is very much a natural runner. He ran his first marathon in 2010 and did virtually no training for the event. Since that marathon in October he reckons he's been out running twice and yet I never had any doubts about his ability to run with me for 2 hours. In fact, I wondered whether I'd end up slowing him down.

As you may have noticed, the statistics from this run show that we didn't actually complete the full 25km that I'd mapped out. I think there are three main reasons for this.

Firstly, it's fair to say that the weather conditions weren't ideal for a long run. No matter which direction we were running in we found ourselves battling against an incredibly strong wind. Given that the route I'd worked out was essentially a rather large loop logic would suggest that at some point we would benefit from the wind pushing us along rather than holding us back, but although there were moments of respite neither of us could remember a time in which the wind had made the running any easier for us.

The second difficulty we had to contend with was the long and winding country roads that we spent much of our time on. It would appear that the good people of Doddinghurst have something against pavements, because there really aren't a whole lot of them in that particular part of Essex. This meant that Ravi and I were spending a fair amount of time nervously looking over our shoulders and jumping on and off the verge at the side of the road so as to avoid traffic. Sometimes this meant that we had to stop completely. I'm always keen to get a good time on these runs, but I'm also quite keen to avoid becoming road kill. Speaking of which, lying on one of the verges was what looked very much like a wild boar. Given that the only knowledge that I have of wild boars is that which I gleaned from the Asterix books I loved as a kid I may well be wrong, but it certainly looked like a small, hairy pig.

A wild boar yesterday.

The third difficulty we encountered is related to the second. One country road looks pretty much like any country road and, as a result, I managed to get us hopelessly lost. In my defence, I haven't lived in Essex for about 5 years now so I don't know the roads as well as I could. When we ran past one turning I did wonder whether we should be following that road rather than the one we were on. Unfortunately, I decided not to listen to that little voice in my head and so we went on a magical mystery tour of a hitherto unexplored rural part of Essex. There were a number of times on this unplanned detour when we had to stop, not because we were tired but because we were both scratching our heads trying to work out where the hell we were at that point. Around the 18km mark, Ravi recognised our location and he suggested that we carry on until the only landmark he could think of in the area - a BP station. So, on we ran ... and ran ... and ran, until 4km later we finally reached our new destination. 

I've plotted our actual route and can see quite clearly now that things went awry at the 13km mark when we didn't turn right onto Hall Lane as I had intended. If you have a look at the route map you'll note that our start and end points were some distance apart. To run back to our starting point would have added some considerable distance to an already long run and, so, with metaphorical tail between legs I had to phone up for a lift home. How embarrassing.

So, although we didn't complete the 25km I'd mapped out I feel pretty satisfied with this run. For one thing, this was 2.5km further than I ran last week which seems like solid progress. Now I think about it the planned increase from 19.6km to 25km seems like too much of a leap. I think I had it in my head that I'd done a half marathon distance (that is, 21.1km) last week, so the 25km sounded right at the time. The other key reasons to be cheerful are that this is officially the furthest I have ever run (up until yesterday a half marathon was the furthest I'd done) and it's also the longest amount of time that I've been running for.