Happy New Year!!! 🎉🎉🎉
It's been nice to come back and see everyone after the Down Under Trip, but I haven't enjoyed the readjustment to the UK weather. Not at all. Although I'll say one thing for a UK winter, as compared to an Australian summer, and that's that there's been no need to wake up at 5am in order to get a run in before it gets too hot. Although, in hindsight, that doesn't seem really like it was actually such a big deal.
Head out for a run here at 5am, or anytime before mid-day really, in December and you'll be lucky to see anything, such is the gloom of it all. All of my December and January runs have been either a) dark, or (if between the hours of 12-3 pm), b) grey. Take this morning for example. I was in Aberdeen, and thought I would go to the parks to explore. I hadn't even got to the park, but already had slipped on a treacherous corner of ice, dunked my foot in a freezing puddle of water, had buckets of hail dumped over my head, and had almost been engulfed by the greyness of the granite houses against the stormy skies. The parks were a particularly devious mixture of mud and ice, created perfectly to foil progress at every step. Even the trees stared moodily down from the greyness, plopping great drops of icey water down my neck as I ran underneath. And then it hailed again. This isn't a slight on Aberdeen, that's just that's where I happened to be, but pretty much everywhere I've run in the last month has looked remarkably similar. A bit grey.
The only run I can think of that's been nice and bright was a run around Ord Hill in Inverness just before new year. It was beautiful; soft white snow blanketing the pine trees, while the sun shone on the ice crystals and sent shimmering shards of light sparkling against the clear blue sky. Photos of it would have won prizes if it had been warm enough to take off two pairs of gloves, to find my phone hidden beneath somewhere in a pocket inside my inner jacket, sandwiched between a thermal layer, and a extra warm outer jacket. It was so cold that the icicles shivered, and the snowflakes huddled together for warmth.
Anyway, that's enough of all that. I could go on, but it's January the 4th, and that is my annual rant about the winter weather and mud out of the way for a whole another year. Well, probably not, but at least for the time being.
And on to more important things! Including.... my Mum, who this time last year was just getting over her breast cancer surgery, has got the all clear at her 12 month check up and is doing great. Thank you to you all for your support this year, both with your generous sponsorship, and kind words of support. It has all been amazing. We even made the news in the Rosemere magazine!
As soon as all her results came back clear, my Mum pressed 'enter' on her 100 entry form, and along with my Dad will be lining up at the start of this year's 100! I will be trying to do as good a job of supporting them around it as they have for me many a time.
Meanwhile, the longest run I've done for a few weeks has been an hour or so, so it seemed a good idea to enter a 6 hour event this Sunday, and then agree to do a half marathon training run the day before. So not to worry then, that all sounds fine.....
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