Peculiar start to the day, as the hotel we were in last night had three beds in the space where one would have been fairly cosy, so the three of us ended up inventing peculiar square dance moves in order to get to the loo, kettle, door etc. Which in itself would have been vaguely amusing had 2 of us not be able to actually move our legs, so it was a sort of robotic morris dancing with screaming. Not sure what the room below of us would have made of it. Speaking of which, who builds a bloody hotel without a lift in this day and age? French budget hotels next door to airports, that’s who.
Had a fun interview with Marathon Talk which hopefully will make it onto their podcast #66 which should be available here soon…fame at last!
Also had a lovely time with the blister which has been plaguing me since day one – if you want to see the gory truth, click here. Although according to Cath, there is still some way to go before it attains the true mark of a real ultra injury. Can’t wait.
Anyway, set off after the usual feast of porridge/banana/marmite/tea, hobbled to the car, drove for 45 minutes and set off into the chilly Normandy countryside. And set off at a fair old whack, as it happens. Given that neither of us had been able to move our legs past 90 degrees the previous night, we were fairly skipping along. All pretty hilly stuff, so with fairly knackered quads the downs were worse than the ups, but we still managed to trot along reasonably nicely. The little sod with the sharp teeth that I mentioned earlier moved his attention mid-run from my quads to my lower back, and sank his teeth in fairly hard for the last 10 miles, so I’m afraid I wasn’t much company for Simon.
However, according to Simon I wasn’t much company for the first hour either, as he failed to laugh at any of my jokes. For example:
An American tourist is walking through a Norfolk farmyard, and meets the farmer.
“How long will it take me to get to the next village”, he asks
The farmer completely ignores him. He asks again, and gets ignored again, then again, and eventually walks off. After a couple of minutes, the farmer shouts out to him:
“About 20 minutes”.
The tourist is furious, and shouts back:
“Why didn’t you tell me before when I asked?”
The farmer says:
“Because I wanted to see how fast you were walking”
As you can imagine, the miles just fly by.
Oh, and we did 29.5 miles in a tad over 4 hours, saw our first fellow runner, who we tracked for a mile and finally caught him, at which point he looked surprised and turned off the road in a different direction, encountered several menacing dogs and a relatively aggressive bull, and in all our conversations, not one person mentioned Eddie Izzard. All in all a good day.
TTFN
Just heard the podcast. Brilliant interview. Good luck for today.