Running from Zombies

I’ve come home to visit my parents for the week. I haven’t been home since I stayed for a few days in February, so I thought it was about time. Running here is very different to Shelton. For starters, the town is named after a hill, which should give you some idea of what the terrain is like.

Finishing the 7th km in Brighton

I know the area pretty well so I’ve been thinking up routes and then using Map It on the Nike+ website to see how long they are. It would appear that the easiest routes, as in those that don’t require me to run on the road or repeat the same road over and over, average at around 8kms. You’ll get the whole story on Monday anyway.

Monday and Wednesday I ran in and around the town. Thursday I decided to try running the promenade along Brighton seafront and invited Matt along. I’d always fancied running along there, it’s wide and flat with some breeze off the sea and it goes on forever so you don’t need to do laps.

I thought it was an ideal opportunity to have another go at a 10k, but Matt isn’t quite there yet so he decided to do the first three with me, have a break while I carried on to the 5km point and then join in again on the way back.

Taking a break at the 7k mark before Matt joined in. Don't let the clouds fool you, the heat was suffocating!

We started pretty slowly but I soon got into a good pace. The breeze coming off the sea was slightly against me on the way out there and gave a bit of a boost on the way back, but mostly just blew my hair into my face :-)

We finished in an hour and 7 minutes, according to my iPod, although how accurate the route was is up for debate (I ran about 100m past the half way point before turning around but it didn’t register as 10k until I had run back into the car park – 100m past where we’d started). On my own I reckon I could keep it to 1 hour 3 minutes, possibly less if I measured the route with my Garmin.

It was a good run, which I’m hoping to do again on Sunday, and will have to make sure that I do again whenever I come back to these parts.

6kms into the run and the hill to the windmills starts (they're there on top of the hill).

This morning I decided to run to Jack and Jill, a pair of windmills that sit on the South Downs. Why I thought of this I have no idea…they’re over 8kms from my house and up a ridiculously steep hill. Either way, I set out this morning with my water bottle belt on and ran 3 towns over to get to the windmills.

The run to the bottom of the hill wasn’t too bad. I had to dodge some traffic and do some smaller hills before I got there but I was still feeling good. The pavement runs out at this point (one assumes that no one is stupid enough to want to walk or run up there) so I spent the next couple of kms attempting to avoid cars and lorries doing 50mph…

My run had degraded to a sort of shuffle by the time I had got to the top of the hill but I was just so glad that I had made it I didn’t care. I spent 5 minutes sitting on the grass and doing some stretches and then headed back down the hill again.

The view from the top of the hill looking back the way I had come.

According to my shoes it was 16kms, according to Map It it was 16.4, but either way it took me 1 hour and 50 minutes. Quite possibly one of the most physically exhausting things I have done, my legs are aching, my back is aching and the twinge I’ve had in my knee is looking to annoy me. Tomorrow is going to be officially declared a rest day :-)