Richard D. from our club is having a birthday on Monday so in order to celebrate it he's organising a handicap race over the low level route in the Pentlands for tomorrow. Well, more of a handicap run I guess. No timings unless you time yourself and you get to choose your own handicap. Because we are trying to entice people from the club to join in who don't usually run in the Pentlands we sought the blessing of the Pentland Rangers to put some flour arrows down to mark the route.
We wanted a hillier run today so combined the major junctions of the route we were marking with a run of our own that took in some of the high tops. As we were cresting West Kip we saw an old man with one eye who was taking his time coming down a steep bit. We stopped and chatted for a while just to make sure he was alright. It was only 3pm but it was a gloomy day and quite dark and the sun was setting as a low band of orange over on the western horizon. He said he was fine so we moved on. It was a slow, atmospheric sunset. Very subtle colours and light.
We watched the film Troll Hunter last night which showed a lot of shots of wild Norwegian landscape in grey and dank weather, not unlike today, and the landscape today was reminiscent...right down to the evidence of trolls which consisted of fallen trees and scattered stones...It was a pretty diverting film and got better as it went on. If you watch it use the subtitles not the dubbing.
Anyway, it ended up an 11+ mile run in the hills and we got our last arrow down just as full darkness was upon us. I'm a bit apprehensive about having another 11+ mile run tomorrow but I guess its a way to "ease" into ultra training again. I'm away to refuel on wine and pizza.
Today's take home lesson is if you're going running with bags of flour in a rucksack, put them in a plastic bag too...
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