Tapping into something new

Morning fog lifting over the Cotswolds ridge

This last week I have tapped into something a little bit new.

 

I have been commuting home on the intergalactic cycle highway that is the Route 4 route between Bristol and Bath with a big grin on my face; pedalling away through the gathering leaf mulch and transfixed by the steady bike-light that picks its way through the fog that is creeping steadily now, up from the banks of the river Avon.

It's not exactly an 'Adventure' but its near enough the closest I can reasonably get with the hours that I seem to be making my way home from school at.

A one up on this is the sneaky 16 mile round trip commute I made on foot to work and back last Monday. I had been coming home over the Cotswolds all last Spring and Summer but getting the double in whilst taking advantage of a training day really set the tone nicely for these last ten days of training that I sat down tonight to write about.

On the return leg, with night long since fallen, I first dropped down into the lower school playing fields and was immersed in an eerie, cold sea mist up to my waist. The moon hasn't been up too much recently and once again my bike light was all I had to cut through this as I made my way up onto the Cotswold Ridge via the medieval tracks cut into the hillside by ancient feet on the flanks of North Stoke Village. With but a few chinks of orange light illuminating the cobbled streets of the small hamlet on the hillside, these brief torches to the dark were set in sharp contrast once on top of the ridge itself, and beginning to cross Landsdowne, with the glinting metropolis of Bristol and the Severn Bridge beyond.

For a time it is possible here to turn off the light when crossing the racecourse if you position yourself so that you are running with the luminescent white barriers for the horses in the periphery of your vision. And it is running like this that I discover that my arms don't swing high enough that they can be seen when looking straight ahead, thus giving the impression, once running on the even flat grassy surface, that you are floating along through space, with only your breathe to hint at the effort.

After this comes a technical rabbit's warren of a traverse along the flank of a different hillside that rolls sharply away to the south, and down now to Bath Spa. Completing this, by finally crossing through Victoria Park and emerging back into streetlamps again and with night vision fading, all the unnecessary straggling pieces of my working day seem to have been relinquished, like some moribund confetti, to be pressed by heavily clodded foot into the leaf mulch and be reincarnated as something productive and reenergised: perhaps to be picked up in the passing there once again sometime hence.

With all this tooing and froing at strange hours and another good effort at the weekend with my new running partner James, I clocked a new highest weekly total of 67miles. This is by no means outrageous for anyone who has aspirations to run a few more ultra marathons, as I think I do at the moment, but I hoped that it would get me to the start line of the Endurance Life event on the Gower this weekend where I hope to run the marathon.

I think I have tapped into something a bit bit new these last ten days, alone, floating along in the dark, and I'm looking forward to finding out exactly what It is when I toe the line at Rhossili on Saturday morning...