This year I managed to sign up for the full Spring Trail Series hosted by Dark and White Events. This is three 15k-ish up and down the hills in the Peak District during the spring. I’ve run a couple of their events before, and was really looking forward do this. Last year, I ran the last event in the series at Low Bradfield and came well into the “Gold” pace bracket, setting me up for what I hoped would be…
I’m out in Portugal on another Embrace Sports running holiday. I’ve been out here twice before, but never managed to really write about it beyond the odd mention in summary posts. Let’s see if I can do the holiday a bit of justice. Liz and I flew out yesterday (Saturday) after a pretty over crowded train journey to Manchester airport. Why can’t Virgin trains get their act together so getting to the airport with luggage isn’t a complete nightmare? The…
I’ve been really bad at doing any updates here, with the exception of the splurge while I was out at Fontainebleau. I’m not really sure why the blogging died off, as I was enjoying, it, but I suspect it’s just a factor of being so much more busy recently. In the last year, I’ve gone 3 days a week in my desk job, and then filling in the rest of the time doing Sports Massage (under Rock Run Relax) and…
I’ve mentioned Le Circuits Des 25 Bosses a couple of times in my blog now, so I thought it might make sense to give you all a better sense of wha it was like. When we went out and ran it on our rest day during our climbing holiday, Andy took his GoPro and took rather a lot of footage. He threw this video together with lots of interesting clips of us running it. It’s a bit long at nearly 27…
As Friday was our last day climbing before we had to go home, we decided to try and get out a little earlier than usual to maximise the climbing. We were original considering heading to l’Éléphant as that is a favourite of quite a few of us, but changed our minds as the easier circuit is set away from the main area meaning we’d be all separated. Instead, we decided to head to Rocher Guichot which suited me fine. I’ve…
Back to the climbing! After our ‘recovery day’ which left quite a few of us feeling quite tired, we decided on going to Cul de Chien. This tends to be one of the sites we go to when the weather doesn’t look quite as good as it’s basically a big sand pit with decent exposure to the wind. After the 20 minute or so walk in, we found the central area and walked pretty much straight into Lolly and Jim. …
Ah the rest day. Do you remember what happened last year? Well, Martin, Andy and Liz really fancied checking out the Circuit des 25 Bosses after my stories from last time, so that become the aim for the day. Something went a bit wrong in the planning though. I’d done it before and so I was expecting it to take is 3-4 hours for the 14km. Everyone else though was just looking at the distance and thinking it would be…
When in Font, we tend to follow the same pattern. This means day 4 is our last day before a rest day to give the fingers and toes some time to recover from the torture of climbing shoes. This means it’s usually an attempt to squeeze in as much quality climbing as possible. By now I’m usually really struggling with my feet, but a combination of being much more careful with taking my shoes off (well, pulling my heel out…
Woo, my toes hurt! Second day of climbing was a good one. Jim challenged me to climb blues at La Canche aux Merciers which was a great little bit of motivation for climbing hard. It was a bit of an warm and overcast day, so the rock was a little sweaty, not helped by our greasy fingers I guess, but after a bit of a warm up with Lolly on some yellows, we got cracking on with blues. Suddenly I…
Day 2, first day of climbing. We had a slow morning (like we kid ourselves any morning will be quicker) opened with fresh grapefruit, fried eggs on nice toast and lots of coffee before heading to our first climbing area of the holiday. Jim and Lolly suggested we all meet up at La Ségognole which turned out to be a few minutes up the road from our gite. I’d never been here before as it wasn’t in any of the…