Today was hot. Ridiculously hot for England. And humid. Not great conditions for running, but I had a child-free couple of hours at about 9.30 this morning and it was a case of “now or never”...
I put on my shortest shorts and my ultra-breathable running vest and my cap to keep the sun out of my eyes, and then began the usual hunt for the “safe” sunscreen.
I am allergic to about 70% of the sunscreens on the market, but can never remember which ones! Being a family of 5, we buy a lot of sunscreen… the children each need a bottle in their schoolbags, and we have some in the car, in the baby-bag, in the cupboard… we have baby sunscreen, kiddie sunscreen, water-proof sunscreen, coloured sunscreen, high-factor, low-factor, in-between-factor. We have bottles from last year, the year before, the year before that… half-empty ones, half-full ones! You get the idea. Every year I buy more sunscreen, as I can’t remember which of the previous year’s bottles I reacted to, and which are safe. I even posted on my Facebook page this year when I discovered one that I reacted to, but that was weeks and weeks ago, and I just don’t have the will to scroll back hundreds of pages to find the entry!
My arms are still recovering from a reaction to the yellow Asda bottle of sunscreen I tried the other day – at least that’s one bottle I now know to avoid. So I grabbed the next one available – Nivea Kids, factor 50, waterproof, coloured green – and sprayed it on, internally flinching at the potential itchiness and soreness I may or may not be inflicting on myself. Talk about Russian Roulette! But at least I wouldn’t burn…
My plan was to try a new running route - the Rochester Riverside area. This is a huge area of formerly industrial land, about a mile and a half from my house, that has been cleared to make way for a new development of luxury houses, bars, restaurants, hotels and green spaces. The recession caused plans to be put on ice for a while, but the land is cleared and has pathways and riverside walks, but no actual buildings yet. I wasn’t even sure how to get onto it, as it is behind an industrial estate and railway lines and not accessible by car, and I had never explored it before.
I powered up the GPS on my iPhone, plugged into a new episode of the Smartmouths podcast, and set off clutching my running bottle of water. It was so hot! I made it down to the industrial area of Rochester behind the railway lines, and could see the riverside area, but there was just no way that I could find to get to it! I tried several roads, all leading to dead ends and I had to keep back-tracking. I didn’t mind really, as it was all adding to my mileage, but it was a little frustrating. I kept following the direction of the river, feeling closed in by all the industrial buildings, and eventually I came to a tiny narrow entrance to a footpath and, squeezing through, like Alice in Wonderland, I suddenly found myself in a huge green open space, with beautiful pathways, level ground and wonderful breezes off the river – I had found it!
I wasn’t sure whether to go left or right as the pathways appeared to stretch for miles in either direction, so I randomly picked the right-hand path and set off wondering where I would end up. As it turned out, the path followed the river for only about a mile, and then another tiny footpath entrance brought me out to an area of Chatham that I knew, and from there I ran the long uphill route home. (Next time I will take the left-hand path and see where that leads to.)Reaching my house, I checked my iPhone, eager to see the distance I had covered, and was surprised and delighted to find it was 10.1 miles! However, it took me about 5 seconds to realise that that couldn’t possibly be right! The whole run had taken 47 and a half minutes (according to my watch and the iPhone), which would mean I had been running at 12.8 miles per hour to cover 10.1 miles in that time!
Something had seriously messed with the GPS. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the fact that I was constantly back tracking, trying to find my way to the riverside area, but either way I had no idea what the distance actually was. I couldn’t even calculate it on Map-My-Run or any of the mapping websites, because the whole riverside area didn’t even officially exist yet and the pathways and routes are not up to date on Google Earth or Maps.
So… for the purposes of my blog and my mileage records, I will have to estimate it the best I can. Based on the time of 47:30, and my recent running speeds, and the parts of the route that I can measure, I would say the distance was somewhere between 4.5 and 5 miles. Shall we say 4.7? I think that’s probably fair enough!
And I guess I’ll find out tomorrow if the sunscreen was “safe” or not.
Distance run (in miles): 4.7
Total distance this week: 19.9
Total distance for July: 4.7
Total since starting blog: 54.6
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