Club Night Run

Hello blog lovers.

Well, it's finally here.  The first of the full pavement club runs for Autumn.  It's way to dark to think about taking the group through the woods, so it's going back to our 'winter' routes.  Now it has been a while, I am already missing taking my group through the woods, but I still can't believe I short changed everyone by half a mile!  I did, I somehow forgot a road somewhere, and I know exactly which road it is that I forgot.

But anyway, lets start from the beginning.  There were 18 of us in this evenings group, including my team, J.J. LittleJ, K and Tracy!  Illustrious Leader was running with us too, helping to sweep.  We are a group with some very varying paces, so it needs a great team!   Some of our group are coming back from injury (so probably just as well it was just a tad shorter than usual) and some were coming back from a long absence for other reasons too.  It must be kismet, that's my excuse! My route took us up Birchwood first.  That's right straight into a hill, just as usual really, but when we are in the woods it just doesn't seem as tough as running up hill on pavement. And we did some hills today!

I went a tad too fast up Birchwood running with the front of the pack, but sometimes hills just get to me, and I want to get up them as quick as I can before I realise that I am hurting! My sweepers let me know that I was going a tad fast, but I did say to the faster ones that if they wanted to do some loop backs, to keep on running then they could run back to the end of the group and then run back up!  I think they were all just pleased to have a little breather and wait for the others.

I was taking them to Tillingbourne Green, it's a nice route, once we get to the top of Birchwood of course.  What am I saying, it's another hill!  It's the short hill that takes us to the top of Tillingbourne and then the long down hill, which of course is nice, and then that longer uphill back to the beginning of the little loop! It's a tough little loop and a good challenge for group 1.  We can put in as much effort as we want.  I sent off the faster runners, with the option of either waiting at the beginning when then get back, hill reps or running back to the back of the pack!  Jenny was the only that that ran back! Like I said, it's quite a cheeky little hill and it can be a challenge!

After that we had to run up the short hill to Petts Wood Road, it's the little hill that I do hill reps on, but today we only ran up it once.  We continued to run down to Crossways.  Now this is where I got a little confused.  Instead of running all the way up to the memorial hall, which is what we should have done, I sent them back to the rec along Crossways and so therefore cutting our route short!  I was really annoyed with myself about that. I don't like to cut short my planned runs, especially club runs!  I shall have to double check on my routes before I take my group out!

So here is our geeky stats.