Club Run

Hello blog readers.

This evening was quite a pleasant evening for running.  Yes it was chilly, and at least it wasn't raining, the sky was fairly clear and I was so looking forward to it.  NaggyNeighbour didn't make it this evening, that awful thing called work has got in the way.  So I was driving and picking up Tracy on the way.

After the leaders gave out the details of their routes all the runners gathered around their leader for a quick count up.  I had 6 in my group, with 3 new people, one of which was a returnee and two were complete newbies (one of those was from our beginners group!)  I was so pleased that we had some more beginners joining us!  It's always great news when we get our beginners joining us.

My route was one of the challenging ones though, but I felt sure that they would be able to cope with it, in for a penny in for a pound, as they say.  Oh that reminds me, our newbie was called Penny and she arrived with the returnee Peter, and the other new person from the beginners course was Michelle. And so with Tracy and K and me that made the 6 of us.

I had forgotten to switch my watch on to get the satellites on my watch!  I just started it and hoped that it wouldn't be too long before it did.  We ran out of the rec and turned left then to the end of the road and turned right to run up Birchwood. That was our first hill, I kind of said that we are starting our 'Christmas toning' runs, meaning that we are running to get into that little black number, or that nice shirt and trousers for the chaps, looking good for Christmas! 

My group was split three ways this week, I had a job trying to keep us all together as well as keeping us all warm.  I had 2 runners up the front, 1 in the middle and two at the back.  I kept slowing the pace down a little, and taking some extra walks to try and keep us all together.  It was working pretty well.  We got to Kevington Road, which is where I like to do a little bit of hill training, just for fun and only for those that want to of course.  Lets see how many time we can get up and down the hill before the sweepers get to the top of the little hill!  It wasn't too long before the sweepers got to the top of the little hill, and just 3 of us had only done the hill twice!  So not too bad.

We continued our run back to the main road, looking at which houses had their decorations up.  Some had, some had some lovely decorations, and one house, OMG, had the most amazing chandelier hanging down, obviously not a Christmas decoration, but it is an absolutely gorgeous thing to look at.  The chandelier was before we got to the little hill training, mind, but I thought I mention it, it was, is, totally stunning! 

Anyway, back on the main road and we have the lovely nice flat bit all the way to the big roundabout at Petts Wood road, where we were running to.  Once there we ran all the way down to Crossways.  It seemed like a pretty swift run, I am wondering if it was psychological because I had forgotten to push the start button on my watch and it seem we were only running for the 38 minutes showing on my watch, but of course I knew we had been running longer than that because we ran up Birchwood!

Fortunately Peter had his Garmin going and it said that we had ran for 2.85 miles, nearly the 3 miles advertised, I usually run all the way into the rec, across the car park, pass the pavilion and just along the path, that takes us to the 3 miles!

So here is our geeky stats.