River Deep Mountain High

Once more, it was time for something different. last Saturday I had met Gary at the parkrun, and afterwards he asked me if I wanted to join him on a trail run the following weekend where he could show me round the local trail options.

Of course I said yes immediately.

The only slight problem is, Gary is a 2:30 marathon runner. In fact, if you search for the Top Irish marathon performances for 2017 at the AAI website, you will see his name there as the 19th fastest Irish marathon runner that year. Which means that he would have to slow down for me to keep up - and even so, his easy pace is probably closer to my tempo pace, and at times I'm sure he wasn't even aware that I had to work to keep up with him when he was just jogging along.

Anyway, we met a 9:30 in Shankill and immediately went uphill, and uphill, and uphill, and the up a bit further. On the plus side, teh views were amazing. On the downside I was fairly quickly wondering how long I'd be able to keep going. My climbing legs have completely gone awol this year, undoubted related to a distinct lack of climbing after I moved away from the Windy Gap, which did not help.

However, eventually I managed to settle into the effort and we made decent progress, though I'm not sure how Gary would have seen it. Going through a wood past Enniskerry the footing became very tricky and we had to climb under-over fallen logs, cross a couple of streams and not mind too much the drop to our right on a tiny trail. All that was fine. The horror came on the road in form of teh climb up to Glencullen. I know a few cars that wouldn't make it up that hill, and for a while I wasn't sure if I would either.

Well, I did make it up there, but form then on my legs were gone, and on each following climb Gary ran away on his own and had to circle back at the top waiting for me to catch up. Also, his repeated announcements of "yet another lovely climb" started to sound a bit less lovely with each repeat. And as for the "all downhill from here ..."

Anyway, I survived the run, but was grateful for the lift home because I didn't particularly care for the additional 4 miles run home. I guess we'll do it again. I've always been a sucker for punishment.

20 Nov

4.67 miles, 37:52, 8:06 pace, HR 145

21 Nov

10.21 miles, 1:28:32, 8:40 pace, HR 142

22 Nov

7.2 miles, 1:05:07, 9:02 pace, HR 134

23 Nov

10.2 miles, 1:27:03, 8:32 pace, HR 144

24 Nov

8.5 miles, 1:13:20, 8:37 pace, HR 141

25 Nov

15.87 miles, 2:33:39, 9:40 pace, HR 143

   mountain run with Gary

26 Nov

6.33 miles, 59:37, 9:25 pace, HR 128

   VERY easy recovery run