More Long

Ate so many jelly-babies my shadow turned into one...

Primitive art welcoming the Sun God and the Mother Goddess back

By now you can probably guess most of this. West wind, need miles, what'll we do? Down the coast to North Berwick. Hoping for 30 miles.

Beautiful weekend but unusually I was at work.  Most everyone else seemed to be racing or lying on the Meadows eating BBQ and drinking beer...so by Monday I was champing at the bit. The temperature had dropped, which was probably a good thing.

I think it would be fair to say we were not perfectly attuned before we left the house so we both took music to while away the miles rather than listen to each other. But things got better, and the music never came out til the train on the way home.

Peter had a niggle in his ankle he was keeping a close eye on. It seemed related to his late season "shinjury" and the cold wind seemed to be exacerbating it. 11 miles in he put on some tights and this seemed to take care of it.

My legs felt a bit empty (I know, I know, they don't LOOK empty) but it was mighty good to be out running and I felt a lot better than I did when I set out on my 40 miler, so I was pretty happy about that.

I have lately become a bit of a connoisseur of the jelly baby. I bought a bag of Haribo jelly babies at Preston Pans and quickly realised they were a bit different from what I was used to - having no pleasing icing sugar on the surface and having what I thought was a rather adult shape. They also tasted a bit garlicy. However, none of this stopped me from wolfing down 2/3rds of the bag without really noticing. At Aberlady I bought another bag. This time it was the more familiar Bassetts variety. Cleverly, Peter put them away in his rucksack and then ran off too fast for me so I had to chase him down the coast to get some more. We also filled up on "Relentless" energy drink which contained enough caffeine to raise the dead...

We definitely slowed after 20 or so miles but part of this was the late afternoon and evening sunshine was making everything look amazing. Also we got lost in the dunes and the spikey bushes a few times and had a few stops to empty our shoes of sand.

At North Berwick we'd clocked up 27.5 miles so I had us set for a convoluted way home from the train station. We very nearly made it to 30 miles but my Garmin's battery gave out at just over 29.5 miles so we called it a day and went to the Scotmid instead.

Photos - Peter B