wow...hills hurt and thankyou iphone!

Great day today, both janathon wise and just in general... except that is until I discovered the repair garage had disconnected my fuel cap opening mechanism when I was 50 miles from home and my fuel light had been on for 15, maybe 20 miles!! thankfully due to the wonders of iphone, forecourt lighting and sheer determination over 45 minutes I stripped out my boot, opened it manually and am looking forward to the very angry complaint phone call in the morning!

Today's run was fabulous. But oh my, I live in a flat place! I went out with the running obsessed friend. They went off 3 minutes in on a half marathonesque nutter route once I was on the correct bit of the coastal path, and I was complete with instructions. I did fail to listen to them all perfectly however and did a fabulous 1/2 mile detour. This took me through lots of bracken and thorns, using a discarded xmas tree as a step ladder to get down a 5ft drop onto a train line verge and then climbing through a barbed wire covered set of railings to get back on track... Great fun! I walked a lot of it due to uneven ground and the close vicinity of said train line... Having watched 12 hours last night I was a little concerned for my safety!

Back on track and some great hills to conquer. I had to walk up some of them, just way too big and too long to do in one go at the moment. Once on the flat (or long slow downhill) I felt good and strong. concentrating on stride length, big toe pushing, arms going forward etc etc. Can you tell I'm becoming obsessed??

This is a diagram of my incline today... how cool is runningfreeonline and their mapping software. I had measured on a map that today's route would be about 3.5 miles, but that's straight line distance not including hills. My pedo read 6.4 when I'd finished but that did include the (now measured) half mile detour and an extra 0.7 miles once back at the start to keep me out running till half past the hour... I know, silly personal target! I knew this would be way off due to my considerably shortened stride length up those hills. The total mileage according to running free maps was 5.7 miles! Chuff me, fantastic!!! Slow yes, but hey, those hills were hard, I did bits of walking but kept going, happy today. Tomorrow was going to be a rest day but I am reliably informed by the running obsessed friend that I will be sore tomorrow after hills today (actually I'm already sore tonight!) so I should go for a slow easy shortish run tomorrow. Oh, and I managed a hillside walk this afternoon too... just under 3 miles, some rock hopping, stone scrambling, and a nice cup of tea and a toasted teacake!

janathon, you rock!