We’re all finding ways to cope with the current situation and I hope sharing some of my recent ideas might entertain or even inspire you if you’re struggling for motivation at the moment. Of course, why would you be struggling in Edinburgh? With at least at least 7 hills within running distance, plus the Pentlands close to some of you, maybe it’s pretty much business as usual, except for going to races. Speaking of the 7 Hills, surely someone is taking advantage of the streets being quiet to put in a record time! Obviously the 7 Beers record is safe for a while. Alternatively, if you had plans to run a marathon today why not have a go at my challenge of running to each of the 7 hills out and back from a central location. Someone could take at least an hour off my time, or just go and ‘enjoy’ it.
So what have I been up to in York? Coming up with increasingly stupid challenges to explore the city and also find some ascent. The latter is quite tricky given there is roughly 25m between the highest and lowest points, and very few of these inclines are particularly steep. Now, there is Clifford Tower and its 55 steps which I’ve done a few times, but as I’m sure Angela and anyone else who did that stair climb 3 peaks will tell you, stairs are not much fun. That led me to Baile Hill, which although a mere 40ft of ascent (something I’ve verified as best I can with a tape measure) is almost as steep as the Craiglockhart climb on 7 Hills. Last Saturday I had a go at doing 75 reps for a ‘Munro’. Not content with just any Munro, yesterday I went back to do Ben Nevis. Having miscounted the number of reps on the Munro and doing 77 I thought I’d better come up with an improved counting system. A bag of 111 m&m’s – with one to be eaten every time I got to the summit – would mean I wouldn’t need to think about numbers and would also be well fueled, or something like that.
What did I learn from this?
After 2 hours you get a bit sick of m&m’s. A mixture including a few jelly babies and salted nuts would be better.
A bit like climbing a hill without an altimeter, with the bag of sweets you can always see roughly how far you have to go, and there are no false summits if they’re in a transparent bag. However, unlike on a hill where you can usually see the bottom, it’s hard to remember how full the bag of sweets was to begin with.
I don’t like playing guess the number of sweets in the bag, and may not be very good at it either, although at some point my repeated guess of 30 must have been correct.
On Strava one of my friends in York commented that she no longer thought I was crazy, but a misunderstood genius. I’ll take that compliment!
What else is there to do? Inspired by a conversation with Olly and his friends Spyke and Jude after C5, at the start of the month I had a go at running round all the named hills in York including all 4 of the William Hills. In Sheffield they have a 7 Hills run where you have to collect a betting slip from each. Since then I’ve come up with various orienteering style challenges of going to all the streets within the ring road that start with the letter Y or have Queen in them for example. This week I’ve discovered and learned enough about Overpass Turbo https://overpass-turbo.eu/ to make it easier to plan such runs, leading to ‘Seeing RED https://www.strava.com/activities/3343109491‘ and ‘Going for a RUN’, all the streets containing RED and RUN respectively. When you’ve stopped groaning at the names, here’s the code if you’d like to experiment with the map centered on your area.
way[highway][name~"Run|run"]({{bbox}});
(._;>;);
out;
Seems I’m not the only one doing this, with my friends Nicola and Richard having completed the National 3 Peaks (Snowdon Close, Scafell Close and Nevis Way) and the Yorkshire 3 Peaks (Penygent Avenue, Whernside Avenue and Ingleborough Avenue) among others. Anyway, enough from me, go and plan a route and get out there!
Jeff Roberts