January Back to Back Day 1 – Dartford and Lower River Thames

January 11, 2015TrainingDartford Bridge, London Loop, parkrunadmin

When I ran my first 100km race in 2007 I took 3 hours longer for the second 50km than I did the first. It was the first time that I had run more than 55km and I had never followed up a long run with another long run the following day. In fact I had never heard of the concept of Back to Back long runs.

The idea of back to back long runs is that on day 2 you are running on tired legs, but because you have had a nights rest in between the two runs, you don’t take as much out of your body as you would if you tried to do the whole distance in one day.

Ever since that first 100km race I have been a big fan of Back to Back training and I try to do at least one Back to Back session before any long race, even as a walker.

So this weekend was my first (and only) Back to Back session during my build up to the Bourges 24 hour race at the end of February.

And as today was Saturday, priority 1 was parkrun. So I decided to drive to Dartford, run their parkrun and then go for a walk beside the lower part of the River Thames out towards Gravesend.

But as you can see in the above map, and the map below, I ended up going in completely the opposite direction.

To say that my navigation isn’t great would be an understatement. But part of the ‘adventure’ is that I go for a walk and just find out where I end up. Today though, I went the wrong way right from the start.

The forecast was much better than expected – cloudy and windy – and as it was reasonably warm when I headed out on my walk I didn’t wear gloves or take a jacket. Two hours in to my walk I found myself sheltering under some trees during a torrential rain shower and seriously thinking of heading back to Dartford and going home. For about five minutes it absolutely poured down but fortunately, just as the heavens opened I came across a tree covered footpath that was in the lee of the wind and therefore I was able to remain 90% dry.

It's raining and I'm lost! — It’s raining and I’m lost!

Five minutes after the rain started and it suddenly stopped and the rest of the day was almost sunny at times.

When I am walking I follow a combination of roads and trails as the mood takes me. There are plenty of walking trails around London and I often come across these signs which mark the London Loop which comprises of 24 separate walks that circle London and today I found myself on various parts of the London Loop on a number of occasions. Sometimes the trails are quite muddy and other times the trails are sealed footpaths.

After getting lost a few times I found myself in Danson Park, Bexley – the site of the Bexley parkrun and the historic Danson House.

Dartford direction sign Eventually (just short of 4 hours in to my walk) I made it to Thameside and the River Thames. At that stage I thought I would head up river for a little while before heading back to Dartford but after a mile or so I came across a sign that said Dartford was 10 miles in the opposite direction and a quick calculation indicated that that was almost perfect for the six hour walk I was planning. So I turned and followed the river down towards the Dartford Bridge.

It was an interesting walk and a very different part of the River Thames to what I have walked before. On the northern side of the river it appears to be mostly farmland and the southern side (the side I was on) was mostly industrial interspersed with housing, and later on to farmland.

Passing Erith I was surprised to find as many as about 15 shopping trolleys in the water/mud.

I was also serenaded by a trio of local kids who sung “walk 500 miles” as I walked past them.

After passing Erith I was mostly on farmland trails through until I turned away from the river not far from before the Dartford Bridge.

In total I covered 30 miles in 6 hours and 8 minutes during todays walk and got to see some parts of London, particularly the lower River Thames, that I really enjoyed – hence all the photos.

And tomorrow I get to do it all again with day 2 of my back to back.

One last thing that I wanted to mention is nutrition. For years, whenever I have run or walked further than four hours I have used coke and sugary foods (Haribos sweets for example) to provide energy for my activities. But as I mentioned the other day, I have been trialling a new sports nutrition supplement called Generation Ucan and today I had two sachets of Ucan, one before I started and one at 3 ½ hours, plus a banana at the start, a mandarin at 1 and 4 hours and half a bag of dried black berries at 2 and 5 hours. And I was fine. I had plenty of energy for the walk and didn’t have the coke craving that I used to have during long workouts.

I have to admit that I did drink two cans of coke and eat a chocolate bar and some biscuits during the 70 minute drive back home after my walk, but that was what I call ‘lunch’.

Frozen!

January 3, 2015TrainingHam House, London Bridge, Mile End Park, parkrun, Richmond Park, UCanadmin

I can’t remember the last time I was so cold. It was a mild 4 degrees when I left home at 4:15 this morning but it was raining, and after a couple hours in the rain I was wet through, and frozen.

To add to my problems I had lost one of my gloves after about an hour (more on that later) and at one stage I was so cold I contemplated stopping and catching the tube home. But today was Saturday, and then means parkrun day, and if I had caught the tube home I may not have made it to a parkrun, so I kept going.

My morning started at 2:48am. The alarm was actually set for 4:30am but at 2:48 my wife, Ruth, woke me to ask if I had turned down the central heating before going to bed (just 3 ½ hours earlier) as she was hot. Our central heating is on a manual system and with the bedrooms being upstairs, the bedrooms are always warmer than downstairs. And no, I hadn’t turned the heating down.

So I got up and went downstairs to turn the heating down and then found myself unable to get back to sleep. Thirty minutes later I decided to get up, have some breakfast, and then get an early start on my walk. This meant that rather than heading west to the Upton Court parkrun as I had planned, I would head north east up through London to Pymmes parkrun – about a 4 hour walk.

Just as I was leaving home it started to rain but I had dressed suitably (three long sleeve layers plus a lightweight running jacket and hat and gloves) so that wasn’t a problem.

I headed in to Richmond Park, one of my favourite places to train in all of London and something I will cover in future blog posts, with the aim of doing a half lap, possibly seeing Rob Young (Marathon Man UK) who runs a marathon a day, usually in Richmond Park in the early hours of the morning, and then exiting the park on to the A3 at Robin Hood Gate.

I have run and walked through the park in the early hours on many occasions before, but I probably haven’t attempted to leave the park at Robin Hood Gate at 5:30am, at least not in winter, and was surprised to find the pedestrian gates locked when I arrived. The gates themselves are probably about 15 feet tall so there was no way I could climb them. I knew that there was another gate not far away that went along a path that I had never followed before. So I decided to find out where that path went – which was to another locked gate. But this gate was beside a low fence that was easily climbable so I climbed the fence and followed the path into what turned out to be the Richmond Park Golf Course.

The problem was that when I arrived at the main entrance to the golf course, the tall wooden gate was also locked so I continued walking and eventually found myself on the 4^th tee in the dark and in the rain.

By this stage I was totally drenched and starting to shiver because I wasn’t walking fast enough to keep warm. I decided to backtrack and managed to climb the stone wall at the entrance to the golf club but as I jumped down off the fence I caught my left hand and tore my glove. I was out of the golf course however, and I headed up the A3 towards London. I had to dispose of the glove at the next rubbish bin which in hindsight wasn’t such a great idea as my left hand became extremely cold and it wasn’t long before I couldn’t feel my figures.

Years ago, whilst watching the Tour de France on TV, I saw that the riders often put newspapers up the front of their cycling jerseys to keep warm and then disposed of them when they warmed up. As a runner and walker I have done similar in the past but used plastic shopping bags as they are much lighter, so when I got to Wandsworth I found a plastic bag on the ground and I turned that in to a makeshift glove. This helped but by this stage I was very cold and nothing was going to make me warm again.

I like to take photos when I’m out walking and one of the reasons for starting this blog is to give me a place to display those photos. But walking in the rain and in the dark, photos don’t turn out very well but the following are a couple photos I took as I walked through London City:

London Bridge taken from Southwark Bridge:

The Great Fire of London 1666 Monument:
This is on the site where the Great Fire of London started in 1666.

And also a part of an ancient Roman wall which is opposite the Tower Of London:

Unfortunately these are not great photos and I’ll get better photos another time – when I am walking in the area in daylight perhaps.

By the time I had made it into London I realised that I wasn’t going to make it to Pymmes parkrun so decided to head through Tower Hamlets and up to Mile End parkrun. I have been trying to do a different parkrun each weekend and Mile End was the closest parkrun that I hadn’t done.

Reading the ‘History of Mile End Park’ sign in the park was interesting and I have added a photo of the sign here:

Running parkrun was enough to warm me up for a while and I caught the tube back to Richmond after the run. An hour sitting on the tube in wet clothes though, and I was shivering again by the time we arrived at Richmond Station, so rather than catching the bus home I walked the last 3 miles along the Thames and past Ham House.

In total I ended up walking 25 miles and running 3 today.

The other great news from today’s workout was that I have been experimenting with a new nutritional supplement called UCan. Normally after any long workout I have a craving for Coke, but not today. Today was the fifth time I have used UCan and I have had the same results each time. Interesting, and something I will discuss further in the future.

Double walk Double parkrun

January 1, 2015Trainingparkrun, Rotherhithe Tunnel, Southwark, Wanstead Flatsadmin

It’s a little bit ironic that today is the first day for this blog – which is all about walking in London – and I ran further in one day than I have since April 2014!But New Years Day in the UK (and many other parts of the world) is a special day for parkrunners. It is the only day of the year in which it is possible to run two parkruns in the one day, and whilst I have become a dedicated race walker over the last 2 ½ years, I still like to run parkrun each week. parkrun is a 5km running event which is free to enter and is held in over 500 locations in 10+ countries around the world each Saturday morning as well as in many of those locations every Christmas Day and New Years Day.

Anyway, today’s plan was simple – drive the car over to Southwark parkrun and then walk up to Wanstead Flats parkrun (about 7 miles) in time for a 9am start, run the parkrun, then walk a little faster to get back to Southwark parkrun in time for a 10:30am start there.

But I didn’t count on getting lost several times on the walk to Wanstead Flats – in fact on the walk to the tunnel to go under the Thames! And I also miscalculated how much time I would have to walk back to Southwark after my first run.

This was my planned route – 6.7 miles which would normally take around 75 to 80 minutes.

And this was my actual route – which took 1 hour and 46 minutes including the need to run the last mile to get to Wanstead Flats just as the run was starting:

As you can see, I went wrong right from the start by leaving Southwark Park in the wrong direction!

Once I finally found the Rotherhithe Tunnel which would take me under the River Thames I found a flashing sign at the entrance advising that the tunnel was closed. But given that a fire engine was driving in to the tunnel at the time I decided to follow it and 500 meters into the mile long tunnel I discovered why the tunnel was closed:

Someone on their way home from their New Years Eve celebrations had managed to roll their car, possibly trying to avoid another car as there appeared to be two cars and about eight fire engines plus ambulances at the scene of the accident.

I didn’t take any photos of the actual accident as I didn’t want to appear to be too nosey, and also was concerned that the photos might show more than I would want to see.

After passing the scene of the accident though, I took the liberty of walking the next 1,000 meters along the middle of the road:

After arriving on the other side of the Thames I followed a mixture of roads and tow paths along the canal and kept a close eye on the clock, eventually having to start running in order to get to Wanstead Flats by 9am.

I completed Wanstead Flats parkrun at an easy pace in muddy conditions in 23:50 odd and as this was the second parkrun in a row that I had had to run the last mile to get to after getting lost along the way I decided that I would catch the bus and tube back to Southwark in order to ensure that I arrived in time for my second parkrun of the day.

Just as well too, as I arrived back at Southwark Park with just a few minutes to spare and then ran my second parkrun in about 23:20.

Having missed out on the walk back I decided to do another 12km (7 ½ miles) after I finished the parkrun and walked out to Burgess Park and back so that I could join today’s walk/run to my previous walks on my ever expanding London map: