I’ve been getting seriously bored with my daily cycle into work, it takes so long and the route is ugly, but for some reason I thought running home would add the spice missing from life. So today marks the inaugral boring running commute. I was mistaken in thinking that running the route at a sedate 5mph would be more exciting than cycling at 16mph with homicidal car drivers thrown in.
I’m getting ahead of myself, before I could run home I had to brave plebian transport again. Uugh! Firstly it cost me £8 for my ticket - why would people pay that? Why isn’t everyone cycling to work and living it up in Waitrose with the mammoth saving? Then I had to allow two trains pass me because they were full. They arrived at the platform full but I stood mesmerised as 50 odd people managed to cram themselves into tiny crevices. The driver had to walk up and down the platform pushing bulging arses out of the gaps in the door so he could set off. If I ever do that again I’m gonna take a video of it, its quite amazing.
Eventually a nice quiet train arrived and I was counting my blessings and thinking that I’d only end up being about 2 mins late for work which isn’t bad at all and only half an hour slower than cycling, when I noticed that the train had just whizzed past my stop. Then it whizzed past the next two stops and I began to feel a little less lucky and a lot more pissed off. It finally spewed me out into Slough which I suppose has to be better than Reading. Back I trogged to West Drayton vowing never to leave the bike at home again.
Set off running home, again for some reason carrying my umbrella and this time a couple of grapefruit. Starting flagging and looked at the garmin to see if I’d gone far enough to quit, decided 1.14 km was probably not sufficient. By 8 km I had cheered up considerably and thought I could probably run for ever. At 9 km I spotted a bus heading to Hammersmith and chased it down to the next stop where I hopped on. Here I had a 10 min breather while it shunted me along the A40 - a heck of a lot of people vacated after I climbed on board. Got off near Brentford and picked up the latter half of my old familiar running commute and managed a little stretch along the river.
No gels, gu’s or even a solero ice-cream, I was running on the promise of a cool Stella. Today I am trialling out Joggerbloggers drinkabitathon rules and as the weather brightens I may try out Jogblogs version.
In total I ran 15 km in 1:58:00. Admittedly I had a breather in the middle but I’m really chuffed with that, and it looks like my target of 2 hrs for the Cabbage Patch 10 is feasible.
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