Siberian LaSanta

It occured to me cycling up the road to meet Michael for his local 10 miler (13.3miles) that this life I am leading has all the ingredients of a holiday in Club La Santa except instead of that warm weather poofery, we are doing the proper hard version, the concentration camp equivalent, the no frills variation. So you can put away your sun block and chain up your bike in the rain, and we'll do this muddy hilly windy run while even the camera is squinting it's one eye into the roaring gale.

We leave the canal and head up the WoL path where it's at least a bit sheltered. Michael decides we should get the hilly unpleasantness out the way first. Which given the wind direction (in our teeth up on the hill) is probably a mistake. 

This path I remembered from last time. It was the reason I dug out some old trail shoes, as last year we skated this downhill with no brakes, like running on buttered polythene. It was the first time in ages I'd worn non-Hoka shoes over a few miles of Tarmac and something of an experiment in an attempt to injure myself out of this coming Sunday's jaunt. They worked well on the mud and splosh. And on the tarmac MG was going so fast I was on my toes for most of those miles so probably didn't do sufficient heel striking damage to get me out of Sunday.

The wind was howling and had spitting rain in it which bounced off our eyeballs. Michael said as we left this field that the next 2 miles would be bad, (knowing they were high and exposed to the wind.) He wasn't kidding.

So the camera stayed away as we fought our way along Harlaw Road and down to Balerno and onto the WoL Path again. A lot of this route is similar to the Harrison Pk run. There is something liberating about getting so wet and muddy that you go beyond the point of avoiding mud and puddles and just cruise through them. Even though I cycled through deep puddles on the way home to try and clean most of the mud off, I still had to use a brush to comb it out of the hair on my legs in the shower. In fact I got into the shower wearing my shoes, socks and shorts because they needed a rinse before going in the machine.

I love how gloomy this photo is. You don't really notice when running - especially as we were running at nearly race pace by this point. I have cranked up the contrast and saturation in most of these pics as they were all a bit grey and colourless. Whereas in "real life", in Siberian LaSanta, we were having a whale of a time.

If you don't finish feeling this wrung out you aren't doing it right.

And the pace of the last few miles explains why I was breathing hard.