You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You...

But I can run like the wind blows. I just suffer for it afterwards. I'm going to make a request that my sister, the trained massage therapist, fly over from Texas to meet me at the finish line in three weeks. If 17, 18, or 20 miles hurts this much, 26.2 is gonna be agony. Now, the reason I'm not sure whether it's 17, 18, or 20 that hurts this much, is that I got mildly lost on my run today. With incredible levels of forethought and planning, I mapped out a route Thursday night online, in preparation for being out of town and disconnected for the weekend. Nineteen miles through the Cotswolds, Childswickham to Little Buckland, to Aston Somerville, Wormington, Dumbleton, Ashton-under-Hill, Kersow, Elmlea Castle, and Hinton-on-Green. The clever plan being to run my scheduled 17, and then walk the last two back to Gran's. All brilliant, and all went accordingly. For the first five miles. Then I made a wrong turn, or rather, didn't make a right turn, or rather, didn't make a left turn, as I came out of Dumbleton. And I ended stalled at a gate stating 'Private, No Entrance.' But undaunted, and unwilling to run back the half mile since I went wrong, I skirted a fence and followed, or tried to follow a public bridleway.

But it didn't go the way I wanted it to go. So I had to strike out cross country. I just had to. Note that dried, ploughed fields are bloody treacherous running. But, after startling a white-tailed dear in the hedgerow, I finally came to the right road again and carried on. Or so I thought. A mile long stumble along the motorway, two wrong turns off it, and I found myself cross country again, seeing Breedon's Hill and Ashton ahead of me, but unsure how to get to them. I'm yet to find how many extra miles I ran over fields, rather than the easy roads I'd planned, but I'm kinda curious.

The moral of this story, is that perhaps it's not the best idea to base your route solely on the memory of an aerial photo you saw online. For one thing, they don't show you hills, of which there were a lot, and for another, memory always seems to fail one at the worst times. Next time I have to run 17 miles, which is hopefully never, I'm going to drive it first.

That's a tip kids. Write it down.