16th September: Burn

The second long training run for the CTS Pembrokeshire. This time I opted for a 3/4 length marathon distance. Starting from my house it was off on the roads to pick-up the canal at Winchfield, follow it to Greywell then across fields and woodland following the collapsed Greywell tunnel to the abandoned section of the canal and a jog to its terminal point. From here I took a northerly path to get a decent-sized hill under my belt in the form of Scures Hill, through the grounds of Tylney Hall with its golf-course and across the fields of Rotherwick to home.

All well and good in theory but practice proved problematic!.. As I joined the canal, the ligaments in my right knee felt like someone had set fire to them, so I had to stop for a few minutes and stretch-out the knee, which seemed to ease things up. Well it did until I got to Greywell and it flared-up again! When here I decided to move the elastic bandage protecting Bernard to my knee. Whether it was a placebo effect or not, it seemed to do the trick!

I had decided to do this run with my Karrimor running belt and the two water bottles that sit in pouches either side. I had run the Hook 10 miles with these and all was fine so I thought nothing of it. Unfortunately the capacity of both bottles amounted to a mere 1/3L of fluid, which ran-out when traversing the Greyell Tunnel, leaving me parched for the last third of the run in the warm autumnal cloudless skies.

Another un-anticipated side-effect of the running belt was the chafing caused by the full bottles. By the time the run had finished I was red-raw with the top layers of skin removed… The below picture is how it appeared a couple of days later!

Fun when it continually weeps and glues itself to your clothing :(

As I ran through the grounds of Tylney Hall, I passed the air-raid shelter built for the property in WWII. It was very cunningly built into the main avenue from the rear of the house so that you cannot see it from there, the illusion is just a continual stretch of grass! During the war a stick of bombs were dropped around here straddling the railway line about a mile from the property that resulted in the death of a bomb-disposal expert who was killed when one of the bombs that failed to explode detonated whilst he was working on it.

The photos show the view up to the rear of the house and walking through the inside of the shelter, one photo taken without the flash, the other with.

Looking back up at the big house.

Entrance including 'blast wall'

It be dark in here!

That's better!

Built cunningly in to the terrain.