It is quite a challenge to fit a training schedule into a busy life. With the weekend taken up with sorting out my mothers old flat, and a visit from my sister, I identified Friday morning to take two or three hours time off in lieu and hit the Coventry Way. So with this my only chance of a long run this week I mustn’t let a bit of rain stop me.
I drive down to Stareton and find a place to park on a triangle of tarmac that looks as though it is not private in front of a cottage. Stareton is an attractive little hamlet but just beyond it is the large UK headquarters of AGCO, the firm that took over Massey Ferguson. It seems a strange location for such a large employer, generating loads of traffic on the fairly narrow roads. I suppose with the National Agricultural Centre nearby someone had an idea about a cluster of agriculture related businesses in this area, but I just seems like a corporate building parachuted into the rolling Warwickshire countryside.
The run involves a short stretch on roads and then it’s off over the fields again. After the ‘holiday on ice’ we are back where I started, slipping and sliding through mud. Doing 12k on roads last week for the Not the Roman IX made me forget how much more difficult cross-country running is and I make slow progress.
Soon I am crossing over a sheep field with such a profound ridge and furrow pattern in it that it’s virtually alpine. Ahead there seems to be two styles set in the middle of nowhere, but as I approach I see that they take you over two electric fences, invisible from a distance.
Crossing the road a sign on the field ahead warns me about the presence of a bull. I am nervous, but note that the exit from the field is only about 20m away. The bull is not in sight so I reckon I am safe. Out of the bull field and I run a few meters along the side of another field of mud and now the route is sending me back into the bull field. This time I have to cover another 100m looking over my shoulder and all the time working out escape routes in my head in case I hear the pounding of hooves. I could vault a barbed wire fence couldn’t I?
At Bubbenhall the route is convoluted, taking me round a deep disused quarry with a quantity of green duckweedy water in it. I go down a road and then double back through a hedge before set off across another sheep field towards the church yard. These twists and turns bit unnecessary but I guess if you cut them out it would not be 40 miles.
After Bubbenhall the landscape seems to change significantly. I am in big arable fields running along tractor tracks. There are no kissing gates and styles as there is no need to keep animals in, just big hedge gaps through which the tractors can swerve.
The last 100m or so is along a fenced muddy footpath which seems to have been undermined in several places by creatures (rabbits?) digging their homes in the middle of it. In the final field before I turn back is a single sheep. It stares at me and repeats a low bleat. I am sure it is saying a single word over and over: “berk…berk…berk”.
At the Banbury Road, before the former Peugeot factory site, it is time to turn back.
This week the remainder of map 5, all of 6 and most of 7 completed
13.1k at a pace of 7:25 min/k (slow!)
So far (almost) 7 maps completed: 25.75k
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