Another trip down the river after work – I met J down by the river for a jaunt around the lime heaps before I picked P up from work. We did a total of 4km, but had to do a couple of loops around the car park to get the last 0.5km! We did the same loop around the Spetchells we did the other day – heading round the back and then when we came back around to the river side we headed up the side and over the top. The hill up the side of the hill is deceptive – it starts shallow-ish, then has quite a steep bit, but what you can’t see from the bottom is that from the top of the steep bit is another long stretch which is about in the middle of the other two stages in pitch…
J, feeling really ambitious at the bottom, decided that we’d try and run up it and see how far we could get – we walked this stretch last time and carried on our jog at the top. I’d headed up first, and made it all the way to the top – but only because the point when I wanted to give up and walk again, I was within about 20 metres of the top and there was no way I was baling out that close! I also sneakily knew I’d probably be able to gasp a breather at the top if J was moving slower than I was up the hill. J made it up about 2/3’s of the way – and this is a biiiiiig hill so that’s a great achievement! She’s been enjoying the odd hill training session but I haven’t got her persuaded to do the Blackhill ParkRun yet…who needs hill training sessions in Consett?! It’s difficult to get a training session in that doesn’t involve at least one somewhere!!!
We walked a short stretch across the top before breaking into a jog again, and we kept this going until we reached the steps at the end very end, which are an accident waiting to happen if you try to go down them at any speed above a cautious walk I suspect! Safety first and all that 😉 Achieving ground level again, we ran back to the carpark – keeping going even over the loose gravel of the temporary footpath that we normally walk across as it’s a bit more uneven – compared with the No Ego run last weekend though, it’s smooth sailing!
I had the heart monitor on again today, and you can see by the graph below that I obviously wasn’t walking any huge stretches as even when I was walking it wasn’t for long enough to get back into the active recovery zone, and for a brief 13 seconds only scraped into ‘endurance’! You can also see where I got up that hill…that would be the 1 minute 17 seconds in the high intensity zone… the rest being pretty comfortably in the middle, which is not really unexpected. I’ve still not tried this kit out on a faster paced or tougher route – I may try it on the parkrun tomorrow and see how much of it ends up in high intensity with the hills and (sometimes at least!) quicker pace – a good runner learns to take advantage of the downhills whenever presented!
Blue Runnings 
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