Summer Running

I made it through the rain!

Here's me at the end of the final stage in the Castles Relay, a 20 stage two day race across Wales which starts at Caernarfon. I ran 10.7 miles from Caerphilly Castle to Cardiff Castle in fairly good conditions until I came into the park at the end when the heavens erupted and I got very very wet. Still we (Denbigh Harriers) beat Prestatyn Running Club which is the important thing.

Storking in Steinhuder

Ornothological spot of the week was a stork with chicks on her nest near Steinhuder Meer. We saw two or possibly three storkettes poking their heads over the edge of the nest which was built on top of one of the nesting poles erected in the marshes close to the lake.

The natural lake of Steinhuder is very popular with the Germans, it's about three times the size of Rutland Water and attracts plenty of visitors from the Hannover area - however they were virtually all locals scoffing Frischbrotchen and ice cream. Fish butties or fischbrotchen as they're called in German, seem very popular here and the favourite is with smoked eels (from the lake) and onions, although Bismarck and rollmop herring are both much in evidence. I had a fried fish brotchen and Vicky went for the Bismarck!

Tastes better than it looks!

And that was Germany - and this is me standing by Steinhuder Meer next to a chunky looking sculpture. As Lou will not be based in Germany any more there will be less reason for us to do any touring over here but we will come again. Driving is slightly more complicated than in the UK - wrong side of the road for a start - and you need to watch out for bicycles who seem to have right of way everywhere. One useful tip is , if you hire a car, get a bright coloured one. Most Germans own cars that are black or silver and our bright red Golf was easy to spot in a crowded car park!

http://marathons.ahotu.com/calendar/germany is a very useful website for finding races overseas and next time I really want to try to find a mountain or trail race. We did spend a night in Bamberg last year and do want to go back for more - the reason being that Bamberg, although a small city, is the real beer capital of Germany with several medieval breweries still producing such specialties as Rauchbier (smoked beer - fabulous!)

Could you please arrange a top up!

On a much more serious note we visited the Bergen-Belsen Memorial - this is the site of the infamous Belsen concentration camp. From 1940 to 1945 Belsen  housed many thousands of prisoners of war, Jews and other minority peoples. Around 70,000 are thought to have died there, around half of

them from an outbreak of typhus just before and after liberation. This was a comparatively modest number compared with some of the other extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka (over a million people are thought to have been killed in each) but Belsen was particularly well documented  and photographed by the liberating soldiers at the time and the resultant evidence was publicised widely - at the time this was shown to the British public in cinemas in contemporary newsreels. What was particularly horrific was the huge number of unburied corpses lying around and the photographic evidence is especially harrowing - you can look this up, I'm not going to upload any here but the museum and the site have quite an impact on visitors. The British soldiers demolished and burned the camp buildings to try to eliminate the typhus epidemic and almost all that remains are the mass graves where up to 2500 bodies at a time were interred.

She's there somewhere!

Bergen-Belsen is close to the Hohne garrison one of the largest British Army garrisons in Germany and we were very pleased to attend the parade of the Desert Rats, the 7th Armoured Brigade to which Lyndall's Military Working Dogs regiment is attached.
Over 400 troops received their Afghan medals on a very warm day and Krombacher, Bitburger and Herrenhauser all pitched their beer tents to provide post parade sustenance together with a hog roast!

While we were in this part of Germany we stayed at a lovely town called Celle which is full of half timbered buildings and fine parks and Vicky was very taken with a life size sculture of a horse and trainer in the grounds of the local schloss so she took a chance and stood beneath the big beast! We also managed to sample some of the local ale - it's not all pils and lager and we tasted dunkel (a brown beer), dunkel weiss (a brown wheat beer) and alt which is a very tasty speciality originaly from Dusseldorf. The tastiest of the lot in my book is the somewhat stronger doppel bock style which is from Munich but now found all over Germany - we were able to sample the Paulaner Salvator and Andechs versions....mmmmm! Won't say too much about the food but we had various schnitzels and sausages in ample portions - and the ice creams were pretty good.

What happened to the second girl?

And guess who made the podium - third in her age group in the Bentfelder Abendlauf 10K in a best time for two years of 67.55. Lou got 4th in her age group with one second slower than her pb in 52.31 and I sneaked onto the top of the podium rather struggling to get round in 42.14. Running is not the same in other countries - or is it? We saw the same early birds warming up and getting their entries in on time, runners from various clubs milling around together, competitors of all ages and wise cracks in the showers afterwards. Refreshments were a little more interesting though - each finisher had a pint of wheat beer thrust into their hand (this was non-alcoholic but the best non alcoholic beer I've ever had) and the barbecue sausage hit the spot!

Follow the Pied Piper

As we all should know from Robert Browning's poem, Hamelin was full of rats until the Pied Piper came along and led them away. However when we arrived there were rats everywhere including hundreds of brass rats all over the place set into the cobbles. Hamelin (Hameln in German) is a few kilometres west of Hanover and is a medium size medieval town. We drove down through delightful countryside and parked up outside a baker's shop for lunch - and that was full of rats too, these ones being made of bread! In fact we only saw a couple of pied piper statues in the town centre, the natives of Hamelin preferring to major on the rat theme with rats, rathauses and ratskellers everywhere. 

Phooey! Can't catch me.

Hanover has been described as a boring city probably because most of it got obliterated during the war but it does have some redeeming features such as an excellent tramway system which goes underground in the city centre and lots of open space including parks and gardens - in one of these we found some very well stocked glasshouses - this one featured amazing tropical flowering plants with small birds flying through the creepers. And Smurf found the turtles - he had to wait until there were no Germans in sight as he thought they might be very disapproving of this type of levity!

Oh go on turn your head round so we can have a better look at you!

Heading down to Bielefeld we visited a quite remarkable zoo spread over a large area in a forest. We found packs of wolves, rather large chunky bears which wouldn't turn round for the camera, lynxes (is that the plural of lynx?) and various other dangerous animals all of which exist in the wild in Europe today. In fact I was astonished to find out that bears can be found in more than a dozen European countries including Spain, Italy, Sweden and Greece. When you consider they can weigh over three times as much as me and can run at a speed of over 20 mph perhaps it's best to stick to road running on those countries!

Heading back up north

Here's a lovely snap of Vicky in front of the Palace Hotel in Torquay. This was quite something because we were originally booked into a crummy B and B but I decided to cancel and we found a last minute deal in the best hotel in town for less than £60 a night including breakfast (well done e-bookers!) We had excellent weather - look at that blue sky - and we walked up to Babbacombe village up the hill. Now here's a thing - John Babbacombe Lee lived there, the man they couldn't hang. An accused murderer he survived three gruesome attempts at hanging him at Exeter prison and apparently lived another 40 years making a living lecturing about the story of his remarkable escape (was he an ancestor of Stephen King?).

Next shot is off the cliffs at Babbacombe - here she is again looking through the bins at a huge landslip which occurred two or three years ago. The bit at the top left is the remains of a big house that someone had just bought at auction (a bargain I think not!)  a few days before they moved in the hillside moved towards the English Channel, if you blow up this photo you might just see bits of furniture among the debris falling down the hill. Lovely views though which explains the high property prices. And a very nice pub overlooking this tragic scene - The Buccaneer (and where are your buccaneers as the actress said?)

So we have to keep on running and on the way back we found a delightful 10K-ish off road gallop near Bristol at Tyntesfield House - a nice evening run round the grounds of this Gothic mansion. The race actually started outside the chapel pictured above (OK it looks more like a mini cathedral!) I got along in 46.50, Vicky was 4th L60 in 75.38 and we were joined by Katie F who followed up her excellent performance with Anton in the Bristol 10K by running a creditable 70.55. Not only that but she fed us on some tasty oriental grub back at their very quiet backstreet house in St George. 

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!!

Devon - a slightly bigger county!

Onwards to Devon, the fourth largest county in England, also home to the only town with an exclamation mark in it's name - Westward Ho! This is part of a little tour we're doing of the South West and in my hurry to get out of the front door I neglected to notice that I'd packed an odd pair of running shoes - I've another pair like this at home! Just as well I didn't pack two rights or two lefts. First race of the trip was the Beer Blazer organised by Axe Valley Runners http://www.axevalleyrunners.org.uk/index.htm, a friendly enough event. My 10K (55.30 - note the interesting time) involved beach running on loose shingle and climbing up steep cliffs.

You can see the cliffs in the distance behind Vicky who is looking upwards for some reason. The harbour is at the fishing village of Beer which I thought we just couldn't miss seeing. The event itself had all the elements of a category A fell race so I was pleased to find that the winner only got round in 43 minutes. I managed the first V60 and Vicky had an excellent run in the 5K coming in first LV60. And the one person to notice that I had odd shoes on was another runner who is the proprietor of a running shop, we had an interesting discussion about the comparative grip properties of Innov8 versus Adidas.

We had to spend some time on Dartmoor of course - this is me with Saddle Tor behind me and Vicky posing in front of Haytor Rocks. Very lucky to have nice weather and not many other tourists (Torists?) around.

Plenty of skylarks and ravens on Dartmoor plus stonechats and whinchats. I wasn't quite sure which chat was which but I bagged a photo of the stonechat which I was hoping was the rarer whinchat. Dartmoor also has many remains of prehistoric settlements, we saw stone rings, stone rows and ruined villages - not many seem to have been excavated in the manner that we saw in Cyprus (see our blog from last month!)

And finally a real rare bird, this being one of the black swans of Dawlish which have been breeding here for many years - they were originally introduced from Western Australia. Dawlish is also where Devon Violets come from - not the sweets but the perfume which was invented here. There are apparently hundreds of varieties of violet grown locally! Next stop Cornwall.