Not deep but crisp!

The last few days being extremely cold and frosty makes you aware of how difficult it is to choose what gear to run in. One minute it's mild, next it's windy and driving rain, next slippery under foot! Yesterday was a slight shock when I got up fairly early to prepare to meet club members to travel over to Temple Newsam in Leeds for race number 3 in the 2011/12 Peco cross country league. Having celebrated my son's 30th birthday the previous evening with a scrumptious meal and a drink or three I'd had to prise my eyelids open to peer out of the curtains, everywhere was white, no snow, just severe frost. Brrrr I really could have climbed back into bed, 'I'll probably end up walking most of it or even worse I can see my lamb shank et al making an unscheduled reappearance' I thought as I shuffled into the bathroom! I knew though I couldn't let the team down with such a lame excuse, so I told myself I'm turning up to make up a team and if we had a team without me I could sit this one out and cheer them on. Alas, Gill, Shirley, Amanda and me made up the team of four we needed to score! I needn't have worried about having my excuses ready though, the ground was so frozen, at times slippy, rutted, tree roots, tractor tracks frozen so solid they were difficult to negotiate, all manner of obstacles in the way that I had a mountain of excuses for being even slower than normal, not least waiting for what seemed like an age in a queue to get over a stile.

The highlight of the day for me though was when we emerged from the woodland and got to the bottom of quite a steep incline and the lady marshal at the bottom was repeatedly shouting (in her German accent I think it was) 'up past the temple and go straight forward' - temple? I thought - are we heading back towards the house? Upon getting to the top of the short but steep incline, behold, there it was, 'The Little Temple' - a small stone built structure, I obviously couldn't hang around to read the tourist information board but I definitely intend to return some time soon to have a closer inspection of that and the surrounding area of Temple Newsam. One of the beauties of running is that you get to places you wouldn't normally get to near and far!

Another frosty evening awaited us for tonight's club (Enterprise) session, speedy and active though it was, the arrival of my number for the Brass Monkey Half Marathon today reminding me to take it slightly easier than I normally would, it failed to even warm an inch of my body! So with the half marathon in mind this weekend I'm planning to take the rest of the week easy too, rest tomorrow, club night Wednesday, my first yoga class on Thursday and club Friday, and a sports massage tomorrow should ensure I get to the start line confident of my target, a sub 1:50 half marathon, whoops, that's twice I've said it now......