Matt Gets Running

So, tomor­row I should do another run, if I’m going to keep up my nor­mal pat­tern. And I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do.

It’s time to tackle some­thing dif­fer­ent. Some­thing terrifying.

A hill.

Those of you who know Bris­tol know that it’s mainly hills, in fact. There’s not many flat bits, and you can rarely get from one bit of Bris­tol to another with­out going up or down a hill.

I’m lucky, being down by the har­bour, that there’s a few flat routes I can take from my place. So I stuck to those for the C25K. One chal­lenge at a time, I figured.

But now the hills are call­ing. Specif­i­cally, Bridge Val­ley Road, which the Bris­tol Run­ning Resource calls “a fan­tas­tic hill”.

But then that was prob­a­bly writ­ten by some­one who can already run up hills :)

Bridge Val­ley Road runs from the A4 Port­way, where I’ve been run­ning recently, right up to the Downs, a huge area of pleas­ant grass with all sorts of nice routes for a run­ner. The only teensy draw­back is that it also runs from river level up to the height of the Clifton Sus­pen­sion Bridge.

This might be a bit more than I can chew, even if I take it in slow, bite-sized steps¹. Nev­er­the­less, if I can even­tu­ally get good enough to run up it, then it’ll (a) make for some bloody good train­ing, and (b) add the whole of the Downs to my poten­tial run­ning area.

So, tomor­row morn­ing, I’m going to give it a go. If it goes well, I’ll report back. If it goes badly, please donate what’s left of me to med­ical science.

1. excuse my mixed metaphors [↩]