This week I am taking a break from reflecting on footwear.  But don’t worry – I will be coming back to it I’m sure…

One of my key learnings from the amazing 3 Peaks experience, was that I need to stregthen my poor old knees.  They were the only part of me that gave me problems.  Dan Parnell and I found ourselves as “tail end Charlies” more than once on the descents of Scafell Pike and Snowdon, sharing each other’s discomfort. and helping each other to keep laughing, groaning and swearing in equal measures.

So to give my knees more serious impact conditioning, I have been doing more running.  Now, after experiencing the magnificence of the 3 Peaks, pounding the mean streets doesn’t appeal that much, so I try to go off-road whenever I can.  I am lucky to have some lovely countryside around where I live and one real bonus facility – the Downs Link path (featured in my last post). I go out every other evening for 45 minutes or so and usually end up at some point running along part of the Downs Link.  Now the Downs Link for a lot of its 59km runs along the course of a long disused railway track, and along the way there are various railway features to add a bit of interest to a walk/run/bike ride.

One of those features is West Grinstead Station, which is on the path south of where I live.  It was closed down in the 1960’s and is quite an atmospheric place.  I have been through it riding my bike, but I never considered how far away it was.  So last Saturday – I thought “I’m going to run to West Grinstead Station!”.  It was a lovely afternoon, so I jogged along quite happily until I found myself at the station after about 40 minutes (see the header photo – quite spooky, right?).  I had a breather and a walk round and headed for home….

Imagine my surprise when I got home feeling a little tired…..I checked my health app and found I had run 11 km!!

I had been considering how I would build up and prepare for that 10k milestone – but somehow I achieved it completely by accident!

I will be looking to put a 10k run in every week now – and I’m sure I will be visting West Grinstead again.  But not on Hallowe’en.  I’m scared of cows for goodness sake!