On Sunday 18th April 2010 I (mainly) ran the 64k (40 miles) of the 'A Coventry Way Challenge' a big circular footpath route round Coventry. I did it because it was a stupid challenge I set myself and to raise money for the reconstruction of schools in Haiti. Read about my progress below (and donate!)
I am working on Saturday and by Sunday fresh snow has fallen and Jan still has a cold so I do not ask her to do the drop and pick-up routine on the Coventry Way. Instead it’s a run from home up the Radford Road, Brownshill Green Road, Wall Hill Lane and back via Hawkes End and Coundon. With no mid-week run I am feeling rusty and it is not one of my best. They are a few runners around and I eventually follow their lead and run on the road rather than the path as it seems safer to brave the traffic than risk a slip up in the slush. My Garmin foot pod once again demonstrates that it does not like getting wet.
Just 13.3k this week as I am on a taper ahead of the South Devon Coastal Half Marathon next week.
First things first: thank you to Jane, Louise, Paul and Julia for your generous contributions. The total is now up to £425 with a further £120 of Gift Aid. The people of Haiti need to rebuild with confidence, so if you are reading this and have not already donated, please click the link on the right.
The Basque sailor Juan Sebastián Elcano, completed the first navigation of the globe in 1522 after his captain Magellan had been killed on route. Last week I completed my first circumnavigation of Coventry arriving at the Queen’s Head in Meriden, climbing the steps and seeing ahead of me the kissing gate where I started back on 28th November.
Map 18 involved a fair bit of FM, but also some pleasant run’s across fields where I encountered serious walkers out on what, as the sun came out, seemed like the first spring morning of the year. The final stretch was mercifully down lanes and largely down hill. I reckon that I completed the first circumnavigation in a total of 7 hours 40 minutes. If I do that on April 18th I will be quite satisfied, but of course then I will be doing all in one day.
However the 5k of Map 18 was not enough at this stage of my training schedule, neither do I think that one circumnavigation is sufficient to make me sufficiently familiar with the Coventry Way. So, almost without pause, I was off again on my second circumnavigation (can you tell how much I like that word?). This time without the benefit of maps, trying to test my memory and the trail of waymarks to keep me on course. And I am remarkably successful; it all comes flooding back to me with just the odd moment of apprehension.
So its across Back Lane, down to Carol Green (where I have to check with a local that I am on the right road), down the Kenilworth-Berkswell Railway (where some tree felling has happened but no other work on the Connect2 scheme), through the back end of Kenilworth (the only serious uphill stretch on the whole route as far as I can recall), across the Kenilworth golf course (which this time has flying golf balls to beware of), and up to the Stoneleigh junction.
This week maps 18, 1, 2, 3, 4 completed
21k at a pace of 7.05 min/k (an improvement on recent weeks)
When I decided to run for Haiti reconstruction last week I tweeted my intentions and got an immediate response from Marc in Coventry, who I do not know. So a big thank you to Marc for getting the ball rolling.
It was then quiet for a few days until I got round to sending out an email to friends, family and colleagues. Since then I have been surprised by people’s generosity.
So another big thank you to Carl, Andy, Chris, Sue, Joe & Millie, Crispin, Jan, Rob and Ryan. You have got my total up to £355: 71% of my target. Another £100 will come via Gift Aid. If this goes on I shall have to raise the target.
If you have not already donated, just click the link on the right.
I am fed up with it. And fed up with myself moaning about it. So I will not even write its name: M. F’ing M. FM.
Jan dropped me off where I left off at the Rose & Castle car park in Ansty. I crossed the road into the first kissing gate which was just a well of FM. Entering the first field which adjoins the Oxford canal and I find the canal has invaded the field. I run backwards and forwards trying to find a dryish way through and just have to content myself with splodging through the least wet bit. Turning off from the canal I try to ascend a 2m slope. It takes three attempts as there is so much FM I just keep sliding back. There is all manner of FM: the slimy sort that sends your feet sliding sideways, the deep soft sort that your feet sink right into the and sticky sort that makes your shoes double in size and treble in weight. Approaching Corley I enter a wooded area where the path has been totally lost in a mass of fallen branches and FM. That’s enough about the FM.
It is a bit warmer this morning than last week, but only just, and there is no sun. I go for two layers above and two below, but I soon regret it. With the damp air and without the regular burst of solar energy it feels a lot colder than last week. So as I finish each map I stuff them up my front as a street-dweller might layer their clothes with newspaper.
On this misty morning and as a ran through the badlands of Bedworth, turning off a short arm of the Coventry Canal and onto the track bed of the former Newdigate Colliery railway, the atmospheric conditions made it easy to see how this place may have once looked. Black faced miners guiding emaciated ponies to pull coal trucks down to the canal for loading. A landscape pock-marked with pits; colliers trudging to work across causeways through the marshy land. An old coal truck has been left as a reminder of what once went on.
Through Bed’th my navigation goes a bit awry and I have to ask a passer by whether I am on Tower Street. Stupidly I had not looked up, for there is a magnificent water tower. I assume it once had a waterworks around it but all that appears to be demolished now and housing surrounds the tower.
My work includes trying to improve the quality of new housing developments by promoting the use of the Building for Life standard, and in Bedworth I find a terrible example of what we are trying to overcome. There is a phenomenon called the ‘multiple flush syndrome’; the idea that you have to build sewers big enough to cope with everyone flushing their toilets at the same time. When this is applied to housing developments it means having roads so over-specified that if the refuse lorry was doing it rounds, a fire engine could break down, the water main could burst and there would still be room for a car to get by. This housing estate has been built on the assumption that every household would have four cars and they would all leave for work at the same time. It has roundabouts that would not disgrace a motorway. I resolve to come back and take some photos to illustrate what not to do.
Along the way there was plenty of the horsey-culture that seems to be one of the main industries on Coventry’s periphery and a couple of fisheries; the odd car or tent dotted about a landscape of small ponds, with an occasional glimpse through the mist of a solitary ghostly angler.
Progress is slow, what with all the FM, but I finally make it to the Bull & Butcher at Corley where Jan has been briefed to pick me up. I have almost completed my first circumnavigation (love that word) of A Coventry Way.
This week the remainder of map 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 & 17 completed
I do not normally run for charity. In fact I am sometimes mildly irritated by the way that charitable collection dominates certain large running events. People ask “What are you running for?” as if it is compulsory to collect money. I am usually running to stay fit, stay sane and achieve some spurious sense of accomplishment.
However… one cannot help be moved by the plight of the people of Haiti. Indeed many of us have already been moved as demonstrated by the massive sums raised by the DEC appeal. Yet we all know that once the immediate emergency has been dealt with there will be a massive job of reconstruction to be done and there will be a need for more money at a time when Haiti will no longer be in the news.
So I have decided to ask people to sponsor me to do the Coventry Way Challenge with the proceeds going to Article 25, the architecture charity who are beginning to get stuck in to supporting reconstruction in Haiti, as they did following the earthquake in Pakistan. You can sponsor me online via my JustGiving page. See the link on the right.
If you have been reading this blog you will appreciate that the Coventry Way Challenge is just that (a challenge) for me. But knowing that every kilometer I run is bringing more support to the desperately unlucky people of Haiti will spur me on. Please be as generous as you can.
Running down Northbrook Lane in the rain tonight. Dark. My iTunes excluding any sound. So near to the city and highways but so very separate from them. There was nobody around. It seemed almost illicit. Or perhaps just abnormal.
I thought I would share with you my daughter’s tweeted response to my remark that I was running out of ways to describe mud: it's like poo but less smelly. It's like Nutella but less sticky. Like soil but gone slimey- come on Vati, think outside the box.
A 7k street run in midweek, well short of what I should be doing but it still seems like an achievement to squeeze it in. After these regular cross-country runs running on streets just seems so easy.
It is time to start cranking up the distances as my training schedule says I should do 16k this weekend. So I copy no less than six maps from the little green book and squeeze them into my running belt.
It is 0°C as we leave the house but the sun is shining so it might be quite a lot warmer when I am under its glare. The question is: how many layers do I wear? In the end I opt for two below and two above the waist.
Jan drops me off on the A423 so I can pick up where I left off. So it’s through the high barbed-wire-topped fences that once protected Peugeot’s Ryton plant but now just encircle an empty wasteland. I inveigle myself into the back of Ryton; the first of five villages to be traversed today. Each seems to have a compact and often picturesque medieval core and then a splurge of suburbia surrounding it. Ryton’s old bit is tiny.
Unfortunately the route has to take us through a pedestrian subway under the A45. I hate these things, they symbolise the subservience of walking in our transport system. I always think it is a shame that the Godiva Half Marathon includes a subway (again under the A45) at Green Lane: a nice impression of the city for visiting runners. I understand why Rytonians must think the subway is the only safe option for a village dissected by the A45.
A short run down the A45 towards the new(ish) big round about (which is not in the old book) and its off over the fields again. I am soon approaching the River Avon and as I enter the next field I see there is not trace of the footpath. The field has been ploughed and planted and no walker has gone before me to tread out the path, perhaps because there is an alternative ‘fisherman’s path’ along the river, which is more attractive. So I chart a course across the field where the path should be. The next field is the same but more difficult to work out where the path should be, so in that one I too use the riverside path. Many of the fields have mud with a thin layer of ice on it. I am grateful for the ice because, if you move quickly enough you can skim across it with out sinking into the mud.
Approaching Wolston the path takes you beside two football fields both in use for girls’ matches. In the village the route does a quick detour to the village hall which on April 18th will be one of our ‘checkpoints’. I do not bother with this today.
Past Wolston its right at the Priory, under the railway line and off over the fields again. The path takes you right through a farm yard. It’s a scruffy Grundy’s type farm with bits of machinery lying about everywhere, mud, manure and straw intermingling underfoot and groups of indolent cows staring at me like feral teenagers.
There is another close encounter with the River Avon and then I am on the busy A428. Many motorists are inclined to use this minor ‘back-route’ to Rugby as driving down to the A45 and then back up again is such a pain. Consequently it is very busy. I had been tempted to run along the road, ignoring the Coventry Way route which takes you into a field and back out again 100m later, but the traffic persuades me otherwise.
Over the Avon again and through Bretford where I enter what looks like an ancient Warwickshire track. There is an old hedge with mature trees on either side of this bridleway indicating it has been here a long time. I muse that some ancient routes, perhaps by accident of history became incorporated into the road system; tarmaced, adopted, maintained; while others are left behind much have they have been for centuries. There is a long stretch of this, nearly 2k, and it is very muddy. Many horses have been down here and judging by the shoe-prints they were not lithe racing horses or diminutive ponies. In fact I believe that the young women of Bretford are in the habit of saddling up and trotting out on dinosaurs.
On the outskirts of Brinklow the route takes me into a field-side path where the mud has a different quality: a thin layer of slime on otherwise hard ground. This brings a new difficulty, the tendency of my feet to slide outwards as I run. At the top of this field a single waymarker has been attached to a sapling. I later discover that either this marker has been turned through 180° or the route has been changed. Either way I end up not quite following the map, but I am grateful, as it means I can run along Brinklow streets for a while, rather than muddy fields. Good, I am running out of different ways to describe mud.
After Brinklow I turn off the road into a field so rutted with vehicle tracks that it is impossible to run. The book says the ground may be uneven. It is not wrong. I note that I am climbing up towards a small body of water, which does not seem to make sense. Water should lie at the bottom of valleys. At the top a farm track takes you into the next field but it is a rutted quagmire. To the right of this, through a kissing gate, a small strip of land sloping towards the pond helps you avoid the worst of the mud. I later read on the website that this kissing gate has been newly installed by the latest volunteer working party and that the stile at the end of this 5m strip is also to be replaced and the slope to the pond shored up. It also tells me that this body of water is a relic of the Brinklow arm of the Oxford Canal. That is why it is not in a valley.
The Coventry Way takes a contrived route around Brinklow the purpose of which seems to be to make you run through the motte & bailey of the former Norman castle. This spot, which is both high up and sheltered has retained its frostiness and the ups and downs present new challenges to a runner who wants to keep upright.
Past Brinklow I am in open fields again and I develop the delusion that I have only one map left to do. Unfortunately when I go to take the last map out of my pocket I find there are two more to go. I phone Jan, who is meeting me in Ansty to tell her I will be a bit later than predicted. It has been tough today what with mud, ice and uneven ground and my expectations as to pace where overambitious.
A short stretch on roads and then I am on to the towpath of the Oxford Canal, although I have to double check that this is the towpath side. In places it has become so eroded that it is more canal than towpath: a victim perhaps of the cuts in British Waterways’ budget. I hope some maintenance can happen here before April 18th, but I will not hold my breath. Jan texts back to tell me she is in the Rose & Castle pub. Good for her.
There is a couple of kilometres of Oxford Canal including one of those history-of-transport points where canal, railway, and motorway coincide, and of course there is me, taking the oldest and most sustainable form of transport. I want a plane to fly directly overhead to complete the picture. The path leaves the canal and takes a more direct route towards Ansty. Once again I am crossing fields and in places there are two or three inches of water lurking beneath the grass. But I am now past caring and charge on through the fields thinking of my goal of warm car, warm shower, warm soup, warm wife. Unfortunately the water sends my Garmin foot pod doolally and it later tells me that this last half kilometre has taken over 30 minutes.
Jan emerges from her lone wait in the pub to drive me home, convinced that the other customers and staff think she was stood up.
This week the remainder of map 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and most of 12 completed
