It’s minus 4 degrees Celsius

I check my phone and it tells me that it’s awful cold out there. It doesn’t say that I should stay at home and snuggle down in my nice warm bed but I can read the subtext. I know that this phone is a lot smarter than I am and if given the choice it certainly wouldn’t be doing any sub zero running around Cambridge. I add an extra layer of clothing, a hat, some gloves and a determined expression and step out into the weather.

Sunday is my long run day so I’m looking at doing at least half marathon distance today. I’ve repeated this distance several times over the last few weeks but am still finding it quite tough. I have several targets on my way to Race To The Stones and so in a desperate attempt to look as if I am organised let’s put together a target table.

• Target 1 – Cambridge Half Marathon 3rd March
• Target 2 – To reach marathon distance in training or to enter a race, to reach this by sometime in April.
• Target 3 – Last week in June – to have completed a weekend that contained 2 sessions of 30k back to back.
• Target 4 – Race To The Stones.

That looks easy enough doesn’t it? Isn’t it always so that things that are several months away can look as if they will present no difficulties at all. Now let’s go back to chilly Cambridge and see where my very cold feet will take me today.

The road down to the Cam is frosty but not too slippery. I run over the railway crossing to reach the river and cross by Baits Bite Lock. I’m not enjoying myself but know that this is always the case during the first 2 or 3 miles of the run. I haven’t really warmed up and am still thinking about my nice warm bed. As I get further away from that bed then maybe my mind will reconcile with being outside and moving and so can start to appreciate the joy inherent in the experience. Currently my brain feels that it has been abducted by a gibbering lunatic who intends pain, masochism and mayhem.

The sun hangs heavy in the East, looking absolutely glorious but giving me no warmth. I run toward it and then over the fields, describing a lovely wide arc that eventually curves back toward Fen Ditton before stretching out on to a cutesy little path through the trees that leads me to splendour that is the Newmarket Road Park and Ride.

This gives me a decision to make. If I turn left from here I go toward the beautiful villages of Stow Cum Quy and Lode and if I turn right I go back towards Cambridge centre. The obvious choice is Stow but I went there a couple of weeks ago so I choose to run down Newmarket Road and then on to Coldhams Common. It may be less pretty than Stow Cum Quy but running down here I do pass Cambridge Airport which is owned by Marshall’s Aerospace. It is a gorgeous art deco 30’s building that looks such a glorious statement piece of architecture that I just cannot pass by without photographing it yet again.

The Common is the home of Cambridge’s newest parkrun which I attended a couple of weeks ago. It’s only been running for a short time but already has hundreds of runners. I didn’t find it a very exciting course but am pleased that we have another parkrun in Cambridge that has a very different feel to the one in Milton Country Park. Variety is good.

While running at Coldhams Common I got into a conversation with a chap who caught up with me and asked about my running shirt. It was a Town and Gown shirt with a list of places and dates that this event had taken place. He had read it as marathon times and was a bit surprised at how much I must have slowed down for each consecutive event. Looking at the t shirt again and seeing that the first 2 numbers are 05:03 and 14:05, I must assume that he is pretty good at this suspension of disbelief lark. We got chatting about marathons and marathon times but then I started to feel the strain and suggested that he might like to push on as I was definitely going to slow down a little before I completely lost the ability to breathe.

It was during one of my runs around the next Common across, Stourbridge Common that I encountered something of a surprise, just next to a railway bridge crossing. Someone had built a shrine consisting of a cup and a few glasses to a man who was murdered on the Common in July 2018. He had been involved in an altercation over drugs and his life had been snuffed out. It felt like such a brutal reminder of the fragility of our most precious possession, life itself.

Back to today I glance at my exciting new gadget (A Garmin Forerunner 35 – that’s a running watch) and see that I’ve done around 10 miles and so maybe should think about heading home. I ran 25k last week so part of me thinks that I should try to equal that but I can feel a deep down cold inside of me and know that I need to get home to warm up. Once I feel that deep down cold then it can take several hours to rid myself of that internal pain.

So, just 22k today but I managed to recover fairly quickly and am happy that I’m making progress. Onwards to the Cambridge Half Marathon and then Race To The Stones.