One of the things about training for a marathon is that it becomes increasingly difficult to fit in anything else. Training swallows your life whole, like a snake digesting a mouse. Thusfar I’ve chosen to prioritize my life over my training, but with less than eight weeks until D-day something had to give.
And so I found myself hatching a Master Plan.
Invited to Monday night dinner in Finchley? Not a problem, I’ll run to it: putting in the miles, saving time and arriving for supper with a healthy glow. Genius.
A quick look at walkit.com suggests a route of 8.2 miles from my office to my friend’s house near Finchley Central. So far so good: Quick change at work. Back pack on. Ipod in. And we’re off.
One of the great things about running a route you've never run before is the sense of freshness: the thrill of taking in new sights and the slightly sick feeling when you worry you're getting lost.
One of the not-so-great things about running a route you’ve never run before is that it’s fairly easy to underestimate the amount of pollution or the number of hills you’ll encounter.
And hills and pollution there were aplenty. In fact, this entire route was on an upwardly-tilted main road.
Setting out up Gray’s Inn Road in the sun shine I felt pretty positive. Cutting down the side of Kings Cross Station, the route took me past disused London Underground station York Road – which sits between Kings Cross and Caledonian Road on the Piccadilly Line and closed in 1932 – and into the hinterland of “redevelopment” that sits behind Kings Cross.
The long and not-particularly good-looking Brecknock Road made up the next stretch, delivering me to Tufnell Park tube station, which is encased in that distinctive and very attractive Edwardian red tiling that I like.
After that the super-hill set in. Dartmouth Park HILL is a hill and a half. A long, protracted, seemingly never-ending beast of a hump.
After what seemed like eternity, I reached Waterlow Park – one of London’s most underrated green spaces, perhaps because of its steep hill location. It’s 26-acres and was given to the public as a "garden for the gardenless" by London’s then-Lord Mayor, Sir Sydney Waterlow in 1889. To the south, the park borders Highgate Cemetery, resting place of a plethora of famous dead people, including Karl Marx. Passing up through the park I paused for breath at Lauderdale House, a neoclassical style building which took its name from the Earl who first lived there. Now an arts centre and tea room, its hill-top location affords visitors a jaw-dropping view over London.
Onward and upward, through miles of residential wasteland and across the hellish North Circular, I eventually landed in Finchley, just in time for sausage and cabbage mash, bracingly strong coffee and a white chocolate chip cookie. Yum.
Ran: 8.2 miles, mostly uphill.
Felt: The burn of those hills, Over full after supper.
Ate:
Porridge with banana and honey
Hot cross bun
Niçoise salad (no anchovies)
Apple, grape and yogurt salad
Sausage and cabbage mash
White chocolate chip cookie
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