I may have mentioned that I’ve recently lost weight and occasionally experience periods of insomnia. Obviously I need toughening up a lot more…both physically and mentally, to cope with the worst that life dishes out (yes I am being sarcastic!).
Did two runs today, 40 mins round the Heath at lunch with my mate Steve, and a hard 5 mile training session on Moel Famau this evening (see map).
Hopefully some demons will rest, and I’ll sleep tonight!
Did the “Town Park” run yesterday in my fastest time. It’s a 6.84 miles loop heading out of Runcorn on the Bridgewater canal and back again through Town Park. I got round in 47:40, which makes for 6.58 min per mile. This is the fastest I’ve ever run over this distance so quite pleased. Looks like running up big hills is paying off.
Last saturday I also did a nice fell run along some of the Clwydian range. A map of the route can be seen here. It was a very windy day and also quite cold, so much in fact that I could hardly see where I was going as my eyes wouldn’t stop watering!
I keep a record of all my runs on the Run page.
It has been an eventful weekend of sorts. On Saturday morning I repeated last weeks fell run up Moel Famau, but this time in reverse, meaning it was a hell of a lot harder! The really steep climbing (1100ft) is done in the first 2 miles then the easy 4 mile descent at the end ;). The route I took can be viewed here (although it should be reversed). There was rather an unpleasant headwind which made going up even harder, but despite this I did the whole thing without stopping, oh yes. I was pleased to see some people on the way to the summit. It’s always nice to give them that knowing wink and a cheery “good morning!”, as though I do this sort of thing every day (then get around the next corner and practically have a cardiac arrest as my lungs are bursting through my chest!). I somehow managed a little sprint up the last vertical section, which was followed by a huge wave of euphoria as I reached the trig-point. There then followed a few moments of standing on the tower before the starting my descent. The descent was actually quite good fun for a while as the ridge drops sharply and then continues up and down for a good mile, before hitting the boring vehicle track and roads all the way back to Cilcain.
Also tried adding ginger (about an inch) to a smoothie yesterday which gave it a nice kick. May do that again, as raw ginger is very good for all sorts of things.
Saturday afternoon wasn’t as good as the morning as I managed to effectively render my 1.6TB Buffalo Terastation useless. At the time I was trying to free up space on its system partition by moving /usr to the larger shared array. I obviously moved something I shouldn’t have, as now it won’t boot. That was essentially the rest of the day wasted and resulting in my lounge floor getting covered in bits of terastation and PC components. I believe the problem can be solved by first mounting the RAID1 partition on a linux box, fixing the problem (or wiping the system partition), then flashing the terastation firmware. This issue is still on going, and the safety of over a terabyte of movies and music is hanging in the balance…
Today I looked around some houses in Chester with a friend who is thinking about buying there. Chester is a nice place with plenty of good shops, pubs and restaurants, and the prices seem to have gone up nearly 15% since I looked there two years ago - not so good news for non home owners or first time buyers. Looking for a home is also something on my vague and crumpled to-do list, but for now I’ll stick with rental and the maximum flexibility in case I want to bail out and leave for distant shores or far off lands sometime soon.
Shortly afterward I found myself walking on Moel Famau again and this time found a new alternative route to return to the Llanferres car park. Its actually signposted “Loggerheads” from the summit but is possible to turn off and follow a forest track (for a few miles) round the side of the hill and back to the starting point. It was well past dark when I got back at 6.30, but a nice warm evening and many stars in the sky to look at.
Felt like watching a movie tonight but then realised the terastation is still in bits all over the lounge floor.
After another restless night I was up reasonably early this morning, and as planned set off for a run in the Clwydians up to the summit of Moel Famau. It had been raining heavily during the night but this morning was just overcast and not too cold, considering this is still January!
The route I took can be viewed on gmaps-pedometer by clicking here. The altitude gained was 1100ft (335mtrs) - not too bad considering I’ve done nothing like this for a long time.
Starting and finishing in Cilcain, the route first heads up to the col on gravel/mud tracks, gradually gaining height without being too steep. Up on the ridge the path gets a lot muddier and very (very) steep in some places. Shortly before the final ascent up to Moel Famau the path loses some height then begins a killer climb up to the summit (had to walk a few paces going up here as it was ridiculously slippy and couldn’t stop falling over!). The summit was in clouds but I went through the usual conquering motions… The descent is around the edge of the nearby forest, heading towards Loggerheads before swinging back around to Cilcain. This was where the mud was at its worst and my poor trainers with their road-suited grip made it like running on ice. I really need to get some fell shoes to cope with this terrain.
Got back home and celebrated with a fresh smoothie and some breakfast. Trainers went in the bath after me. Still buzzing from the run and I’m actually feeling good for change, which is nice as I’ve been feeling pretty crap about everything lately.
Could this be a new narcotic…
Apologies for the legs photo, but thought the quantity of mud was amusing.
