Classic British summer weather now the schools have broken up, with a fair amount of rain spread across the week. Somehow it seems to have all fallen while I was at home, and it’s been dry whenever I was outside. This surely can’t last.
Tuesday night’s club session was what’s become the annual Slow Paul birthday party, with us all running cross-country-style hilly laps of a course marked out in his field, before recovering with beer, hog roast and cake.
On Wednesday the team from work had another volunteering day, this time at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life) at Stowmarket. The weather forecast was good, so I decided to give my new bike a proper debut and cycle there (15 miles) and back (16 miles, because there was a very strange road junction that funnelled me to the A14 roundabout so I ended up coming back a different, more scenic, but slightly hillier route). The bike behaved itself, and it took me just over an hour in each direction.
The morning’s volunteering involved clearing undergrowth from a patch of ground on the edge of the site ground and laying bark chips round hedging plants. Then we walked down to the Willow Tree for lunch, before returning to sand down the Settling House (a 19th century auctioneer’s hut from Bury St Edmunds) ready for it to be painted. We also got a chance to see some lambs, piglets, goats and Suffolk Punch horses being fed.
I got back just in time to hop back on my other bike and nip down to Kesgrave to give blood (I’d carefully picked a donation session halfway home from work at 5.30pm, which would have turned out better had I been in the office). That went smoothly (armful number 65), but by the time I’d got home and made dinner I was wiped out!
I’d recovered the use of my legs well enough to join Friday morning’s Run for Coffee, then surprised myself by taking another minute and a half off my time on the new Christchurch Park parkrun course. I even managed to do a small amount of gardening on Saturday afternoon, although I think things are still growing several times more quickly than I’m cutting them back.
Sunday was long run day again, with an 18 mile loop up the Gipping Path to Claydon, then back via Akenham and Westerfield. That stupid new giant footbridge over the railway at Westerfield is still closed, but Plotaroute has sudddenly started routing over it again and the footpath diversion sign that used to be on the approaching path has gone, so once again we got right up to it before realising we had to turn back. Someone had leant a pallet against the fence to climb over, but the prospect of piercing my foot on a spike didn’t appeal. At that point we were both feeling worn out, and pretty much out of water, so we were “forced” to stop at the Railway for a pint (although only of lime and soda in Holly’s case) to refresh ourselves for the final three miles.
