Running on the Moon

So there we were coasting round Cornwall starting to
wind down a bit and looking forward to a nice trail

race at St Austell. Although I had known that the run was on the old china clay workings at St Austell, I hadn't realised that this was on dusty gleaming white tracks .....and the sun was getting hotter and hotter. The extraction process has resulted in an extensive and dramatic landscape of waste tips and quarries with many of them still in their original white colour, although some are now covered in vegetation. Where tips remain white and adjoin flooded quarries, the contrast between these and the turquoise colour of the water is spectacular.
But therein lurks danger, the china clay dust when combined with water forms a deadly quicksand. So for those unwary trespassers who decide to go swimming in the blue lagoons there is no escape and they are sucked down and down. Hence the reason that the public are not allowed on this lunar landscape - except for one day of the year for the Imerys Trail race - and wasn't I glad I just did the half marathon distance and not the full. The clay workings were originally moorland 1000 feet above sea level and the first 7 miles were an undulating switchback on white dusty trails reaching to the highest point where there was not a whiff of a breeze to cool us as the sun glared angrily at us, the bleached white trails reflecting the heat back up at us. Still I got round in 1.50 (1st V60) - just to indicate the difficulty of the course there were only two finishers under 1.30! The full marathon competitors must have really felt it with no one coming in under 3 hours. As with last week I was wearing the odd running shoes - getting quite used to them now!!