Some people like to exercise first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, some like to leave it an hour or two after a meal, tonight I ran on pizza tummy. P is working nightshift tonight and didn’t sleep too well today – so motivation to clean the kitchen and think about dinner before I got home from work was at a low ebb, and wanting something quick and easy, he ordered pizza for dinner. Dominos doesn’t sit with me at the best of times – high dairy foods never do, and it’s one of those foods like chinese that I occasionally get a hankering for until it actually turns up, and then my appetite for it is sated very very quickly. It’s basically ‘what can I have for dinner which requires the absolute minimum amount of effort from me?’. Normally, post pizza me is not much good for anything for the rest of the evening except groaning and holding my tummy, but today I had told myself I was going out, and going out I was!
I mentioned yesterday I’ve had a craving for new routes and just something a bit different to my usual old haunts, and I had a couple in mind for this week which I’ve been thinking of doing for a while. Normally, if I’m doing a stretch of the Derwent Walk, I park up at where Ebchester Station used to be, and run downhill (I use this term loosely – it’s a very very very shallow gradient) towards Rowland’s Gill and then back again. I’d passed signs for the old Shotley Bridge Station on my way back from purchasing a print from this lovely lady a few weeks ago and knew it was on the Derwent Walk further up from Ebchester, so decided today to head that way and see how far – knowing reassuringly it wasn’t a huge distance further up.
When I first left, it felt much cooler than yesterday and I thought I might be ok for this one, but as soon as I got past the open sided stretch with the fields behind it and headed into the embankment, any breeze disappeared, at least on the way up, and combined with my warming up anyway I started feeling a bit stuffy again. There was a breeze on the way back, but it was the same temperature as the rest of the air, just moving, so either I couldn’t feel it coming from behind me on the way up, or it wasn’t there! It wasn’t a huge amount of help in cooling me down either, but better than nothing!
It turned out to be about 1.5km up to Shotley Bridge Station, and I wanted to hit a minimum of 4km today, so I turned around at one of the bridges a bit further up and headed back from there. It wasn’t until I was halfway back that I started to feel I was cooking again – face very flushed and not able to cool off properly. I really am going to have to look at running in shorts and a vest instead of capris and a t-shirt. I kept going until I got back to the car, about 4km, and walked another half a km further and back trying to cool off a bit! I must have looked like a lobster to any passers by!
I was a bit slower than yesterday – though while out it actually didn’t feel it – but there was very slightly more gradient than the flat-as-a-pancake riverside at Prudhoe so I guess I can blame that as well as the humidity 😉 My pace was still pretty steady at least 🙂 Trying to find the positives 🙂 I’m just trying to push through and get adjusted to the temperatures – I struggled a bit in a similar way when we first started getting warmer weather in May, though fortunately that cooled off again for June but is now back with a vengeance! Bring on the autumn! If I can keep my pace at roughly the same level as it has been over the 5km distance while it’s so warm, I should fly when it cools down a bit!
Blue Runnings 
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