Tuesday 11 April 2017

Club Run - Initiating A New Leader!

Hello blog lovers.

It's a lovely evening for a run, and I was looking forward to it.  Having been stuck in doors waiting for deliveries and boiler men to come I was eager to get out and stretch my legs.  Although, my legs were aching a little from wearing high heels yesterday, and the girls I went out with yesterday all have lovely long legs or flat shoes and could walk a mile a minute!  But I still felt like I needed to get out and do a bit of a hilly one.

I picked up Tracy and we drove to Jayne's.  After a little chat we all walked over to the rec and met up with the rest of the gang.  Also we met Charley.  Now Charley has been a group 1 runner before, but she has been out of running for a few weeks.  But she recently completed the LiRF course and will be a second leader for group 1!  Well you know what that means, after her first time as leader the next time she leads it leaves me to a) either stay in group 1, chat with everyone, sweep, or take the middle section or......b) move up a group! Start to push myself, take myself out of the comfort zone! At least I will have that option! So back to our run.  I stood out the front and introduced Charley to everyone!  Well, she wasn't expecting that, but it's good to get that 'first time out the front' out of the way!  Because next week she will be there by herself!  Then I gave out the route!  Or a least I tried to, for some reason my teeth and tongue were not working in harmany with my words this evening!

I think I gave the gist of the route, and after everyone had given out the info we all went to our posts to have a count up! Twelve in our group!  A nice number, bigger than it has been for a while!  We ran out of the gate and turned left and ran to the end of the road and turned right.  We headed up our first hill, Birchwood.  It's a long stretch out hill with no flat bits to ease things a bit.  I ran with Charley and Michael and Becky in the front group, J.J. and Auriol were running at the back with K and Tracy while LittleJ took up the middle with Illustrious leader!  We were well covered for leaders and sweepers in our group this evening.  This evening there is no chance of anyone getting lost, left behind or forgotten......not that has ever happened in our group.....I don't think.....no....never!  We have always been a tight group!

We had a bit of a break to catch breath and to catchup and then we walked over to the crossing to cross the road.  Once over we started running again.  Up to the first  turning and then turned right.  This is a good route, it challenges you somewhat, and if it doesn't then there is always the short little hill....that we do two or three times!  To get to the little hill for hill training we first have to do some undulation. First it's a nice downward slope, it feels good, but you just know that we got to get back up to where we started. Once the downhill has finished, straight away it's going back up, it's just a gentle slope up, and then back down again until we get to our right turn.....which is another slight hill going back up.  As I said it's a challenging one for us in group 1, because just as we think it's finished, just by the little grassy roundabout is our little steep hill for training.  We waited on the grassy roundabout where I came up with my cunning plan.  Once Tracy and K had caught up, they will run all the way to the crest of the hill and down again and then back up to wait for any that were behind.  And how will there be anyone left behind, well, that will be because the others will run up the hill and any speed they want and see how many time they can run up and down before Tracy and K had completed twice up the hill!  Some did two, and others did three!  By the way, I did three!  Lead by example I thought, and it was me that everyone was waiting for to finish!

We ran back around to the main road that led to the roundabout on Petts Wood road and then we ran down hill!  I was planning to go all the way down to Crossways and then continue up towards the memorial hall!  I was all set for it, as it has been done on a group 1 run, but not today.  I didn't realise that the time was moving on! And with all the loop backs that everyone had done we had actually covered 3 miles!  So it was straight back along Crossways to the rec where Charley led the cool down stretches!

A fabulous run, and a great route!  It was what I needed to wake up my lazy 'waiting for deliveries' legs.  Here's the geeky stats, love this route.....it looks like K9





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