Hellfire in the woods

To High Wycombe, west of London, home of the 18th century Hellfire Club. Not the purpose of my visit, of course :)

Another early morning run. My feeling going out of the front door was an adapted line from the new Harry Potter film... "Who are you, and what have you done with Simon?" However, my normal pattern of behaviour soon established itself: I got badly lost.

This is partly a long-recognised hazard of running in English woodland. It's a magical environment, teeming with footpaths, bridleways and barely-discernible animal pathways that just BEG to be explored. Diving off down an inviting green, sun-dappled tunnel can end in near-disaster.

One of these tunnels opened out into an old drover's road. These are the freeways of ancient woodland, having been worn down by hundreds of years of feet and hooves so that the center path drops tens of feet below the surrounding tree-lined banks. This particular road soon reverted to a normal footpath, but it was so overgrown that I was clearly the first person through it for at least a year. Soon I was breaking trail through stinging nettles and brambles. It became like a horror film: as I looked behind, the vegetation was growing back over the trail to cover my tracks.

Long story short: I've been running five-six miles each morning. Today I ended up doing 12. It got so desperate that when I hit a main road I had to look at a bus timetable to get my sense of direction back. Then run into the town centre, find a tourist map on the wall, so that I could navigate back to a waiting cup of tea.

Running in English mixed woodland is one of the few things I miss about Britain; so I can't say I was too bothered that a 45-minute run became a two-hour epic. What I wasn't too pleased about was my Garmin GPS's "return to start" feature. This is an emergency, get-you-home button, which I activated for the first time. Sure enough, up came a direction arrow -- but also a "miles to go" read-out, from which I realised that what the Garmin does is enable you to exactly retrace your steps. I was after the shortest route back to the start, not the meandering, explorative path I'd taken.

Back at last, I realised the soft going and easy pace had `at last enabled my body to catch up with itself. The last few days my heart and lungs have felt as if they have been on holiday, because my body has been so feeble that I haven't been able to run fast enough to stree them. Tomorrow I should be finally able to do some sea level pace work.