All my Trails!

Come on - dig in!

Here's me puffing away towards the end of the Radcliffe 10 mile trail race on Sunday - this took me 78.09 - a tough course as even the winner took just short of an hour to get round. I thought I did quite well and came in 63rd with 200 runners behind me. This was a 'Good Value' race in my book - only £7 to enter with a free buff thrown in - it's that yellow thing wrapped around the top of my head. You'll also see that I was wearing shorts for the first time this year. I must be acclimatising to this from winter weather - just in time for 30 degrees in Australia - eek!

Life is full of curious connections and coincidences - regarding our big LEJOG bike ride, as we started off at Land's End things were very quiet, we were met by some big seagulls in the vast carpark which is clearly there to accommodate all the charabancs full of tourists desperate to see the bottom end of England and buy all the fairly tacky souvenirs. At 8 30 am in the morning on a wet August day there was hardly anyone around apart from someone picking up yesterday's litter, but we did meet an enthusiastic mother and daughter from somewhere in the midlands - they were clearly well prepared, lots of top gear but looking at doing a steady 18 days of cycling. We met just one other cyclist en route -  a very determined thin fellow on a fast looking bike who dashed past us in mid Wales -  we spotted him a few hours later at Church Stretton about to check in to his B & B. No other end-to- enders until we got to John O'Groats where we checked in to see some anxious relatives waiting for a father and son who were shortly supposed to arrive. And indeed down the hill they sprinted high as a kite (as indeed we must have seemed half an hour earlier!)