Another holiday in France, this time with added 36 degree weather! In the UK, we were protected mostly from the fierce weather happening on the continent. This meant we set of for France with temperatures of around 17 degrees, to driving past Paris in 36 degrees. Luckily for me, I was in a car with air conditioning, so barely noticed until we got out for lunch along the route. Scorchio! Poor old Jim, Lolly and Dave weren’t so lucky, having…
What an odd year for running and climbing. Reflecting back on it, I feel like it’s been a bit of a crap year for my running. Running Reflections Except, it really hasn’t: One of my targets at the start of the year post was like the past 2 years, to run the year again in km. Yep, did it: 2023km in 2019. Then, in mid June, I destroyed my 5k time while testing the new Loxley Lash 5k course with…
Aaah! Holiday time! Yeah, I’m well overdue a blog update, but I’m still not in a blogging mood. It would be a shame however not to capture some notes of how the climbing went while in sunny République française. Day 1: Beauvais Nainville We’ve never made it to Beauvais before, despite it being on Liz’s hit list for a while. It’s a littler further north than we usually head to based on where we’ve been staying, but being in 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. …
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…