devil's dyke
I'm using up my leave; today I indulged and ran the whole of the devil's dyke from Reach to Ditton Green and back.
It's a total of 14.8 miles in an almost precisely straight line in two dimensions, but with a lot of niggly ups and downs (often at 45' or steeper). It's also ferociously uneven terrain at the Ditton Green end; there's sections where you're running up hill, on a path that slopes 45' from side to side, but even worse are the sections of rock-hard bumpy ground with criss-crossed tree-roots. I had three extremely near misses from spectacular face-plants. The nice flat section overlooking Newmarket racecourse is a pleasure, but the uneven bits are brutally tiring on the lower legs.
On flat roads (and without having to open and close at least 40 gates), I'd be a bit disappointed at 2h12 for that distance (it's about 8m55 per mile), but there's two things I'm pleased about. Firstly that I was pushing myself for the entire way; and secondly that I managed perfect 66m/66m splits for the two halves.
Just before crossing the railway, I saw another one of whatever bird this was, but with a possibly blue-greyer head. First caught it in flight, but then it settled on a fence-post (until the daily train passing by disturbed it). They do have a very paranoid looking posture.
The devil's dyke's great to run (or indeed walk) along; it varies hugely in kind-of-countryside; you only hear traffic over a couple of quite short sections; I only met three people the entire time (an awful lot of stupid sheep, though).
It's a total of 14.8 miles in an almost precisely straight line in two dimensions, but with a lot of niggly ups and downs (often at 45' or steeper). It's also ferociously uneven terrain at the Ditton Green end; there's sections where you're running up hill, on a path that slopes 45' from side to side, but even worse are the sections of rock-hard bumpy ground with criss-crossed tree-roots. I had three extremely near misses from spectacular face-plants. The nice flat section overlooking Newmarket racecourse is a pleasure, but the uneven bits are brutally tiring on the lower legs.
On flat roads (and without having to open and close at least 40 gates), I'd be a bit disappointed at 2h12 for that distance (it's about 8m55 per mile), but there's two things I'm pleased about. Firstly that I was pushing myself for the entire way; and secondly that I managed perfect 66m/66m splits for the two halves.
Just before crossing the railway, I saw another one of whatever bird this was, but with a possibly blue-greyer head. First caught it in flight, but then it settled on a fence-post (until the daily train passing by disturbed it). They do have a very paranoid looking posture.
The devil's dyke's great to run (or indeed walk) along; it varies hugely in kind-of-countryside; you only hear traffic over a couple of quite short sections; I only met three people the entire time (an awful lot of stupid sheep, though).