A slightly tatty one from Orkney today.
(Coordinates 59°06’17.5″N, 3°02’10.3″W.)
This one has no door (though it did a couple of years previously, as can be seen in the Street View image linked above). It could do with a bit of TLC, but it does have a phone in!
A trip over to west Newcastle today to keep working on the p-index!
All remnants of yesterday’s storm (save for a few twigs on the ground) were gone and it was a beautiful morning for a parkrun. I decided to push it a bit to see how recovered I am post-Dopey and came in at 25:33.
This is a couple of minutes slower than my PB at the moment – I reckon this is due to other winter-related factors in addition to recovering from the challenge – but it was really nice to put in a bit of speed after over a month of slow/steady running.
Might be somewhere new to us next week, might not. The nice thing about being at home is not having to decide until the last minute!
We’re still in Orkney (there is a Twatt in Shetland too!).
(Coordinates 59°09’80.4″N, 3°27’47.0″W.)
Another fairly rural box that still has a phone in!
Following our adventures in Disney World, Geth and I returned to the more familiar environs of Town Moor parkrun today!
We had been annoyed by Florida being colder than we expected, but going out the door at 8am to scrape ice off my car so that I could drive to parkrun reminded me what cold really is. It was a frosty morning on the Moor! Absolutely beautiful but pretty chilly, though we did warm up when we were running. Took it easy for 30ish minutes today, and it was lovely to catch up with friends and tell them about our adventures. We even met a runner from the visiting Bournemouth AFC fan group who’d also done the Dopey in Florida last weekend!
Next week isn’t finalised yet but it’ll be another local one! No more travelling for a while…
Here’s another phone box from Mum and Dad’s Orkney trip.
(Coordinates 58°96’88.9″N, 3°22’90.7″W.)
This is another one that still has its phone in, which appears to be common in Orkney!
It’s the fourth and final day of the Dopey Challenge… and while we always planned to take the pace easy today, a marathon is a marathon and it’s always hard, especially when it’s the fourth day of racing in a row!
It was cold again this morning and it got colder during the first few miles. We were taking a walk break once per mile but I found this section the worst, as the cold was making me lightheaded and it was just long boring road again.
Once we got into Magic Kingdom at about 10 miles and the sun started to rise, I began to feel better. The fatigue was really kicking in and so I now needed two walk breaks per mile, but I was able to keep this pattern going for the rest of the race (which surprised me, as after yesterday I thought I’d be solidly walking from 20 miles if not before).
We did visit a few of the parks, but again most of the route was road in the middle of nowhere. Disney is big! I found this quite hard, as the parks were good for distraction and the road bits very definitely were not.
We worked hard for a sub-7 finish, which is my second slowest marathon ever. This challenge has been so tough and I’m really proud that we’ve got through it.
From the start, I treated this challenge like a multiday ultra. What I have learnt from it is that I won’t be doing any multiday ultras in the future! It was an incredible experience and I do want to come back to Disney for other race weekends before too long, but my Dopey is most definitely one and done.
Onto training for the next race now. But I do need a week or two of recovery to start with…
Day three of the Dopey Challenge, and now the hard work begins! While 5k and 10k are comfortable daily distances that we do all the time, a half marathon and a full marathon on back-to-back days constitute the real challenge of this event.
It was much warmer this morning (16ish degrees Celsius, which is normal for Florida nights in January) but it rained heavily while we were waiting to start, so we felt just as cold as the last two mornings! Should have worn a plastic covering – a bit of rain never normally bothers us at that temperature but it hits differently here for some reason.
We took the half marathon very easy, but I am starting to feel extremely fatigued from the cumulative race days. It’s not just the mileage but all the rigmarole around it (runners who do races will be very familiar with this). I am a bit anxious about the marathon as a result, but we’ll take it as easy as we need to, with lots of walk breaks.
It’s the final day of the challenge tomorrow… but in terms of mileage, we’re not even halfway there yet!
Day two of the Dopey Challenge saw us running the 10k!
Knowing the logistics made it easier, and we were a bit more prepared for the cold conditions this morning. The race itself went by fairly quickly again – once you get into Epcot there’s a lot going on to distract you – but I don’t really feel in race shape despite the training. Christmas has left me feeling sluggish and overfull and I felt a bit ill for the first couple of miles today. Hopefully I’ll feel better for the big two races over the weekend, especially as we’re planning a more restful day today.
For day three tomorrow, it starts to get a bit harder, as we press on to the half marathon…
Here’s one that Mum and Dad found in rural Orkney.
(Coordinates 58°92’96.2″N, 2°76’28.1″W.)
It’s a bit tatty but it does have a phone in! Most likely because it’s in the middle of nowhere.
Here we are in Disney World, Florida, for the first day of a race weekend that’s been years in the planning!
Geth first started talking about doing the Disney races in 2019, when I did my first London Marathon and he spotted the RunDisney stall at the London expo. At first, he wanted to do the Star Wars Stormtrooper Challenge (a 10k one day followed by a half marathon the next), as he didn’t believe at that point that he would ever run a full marathon. He was going to be turning forty in 2020, and he thought it would be the perfect way to celebrate his milestone birthday. Then 2020 arrived, and the pandemic happened… and plans just slowed down for a while. During that time, those plans morphed into the full Dopey Challenge (four back-to-back days of races: a 5k, 10k, half marathon and full marathon) as we became more confident in our running.
It took a long time to get here. But here we are now! For Geth’s 40th birthday trip… in my 40th birthday month.
(He’ll be forty-five this year. We’d better start thinking about his 50th birthday trip now in case we get derailed again!)
We arrived in Florida two days ago as we needed to go to the expo yesterday to pick up our numbers and t-shirts (which was a fun experience in itself!). This morning was the first race morning, and I was glad that the 5k acted as a bit of a trial run for the next few days, as it meant we could see how all the logistics worked without needing to worry about the distance. We’re now set for tomorrow onwards and know what we’re doing.
It was very cold (not what we expected from Florida) and we were shivering at the start – it took us most of the race to warm up. After we were done it was fine though as the queues for the drop bags and buses moved nice and quickly. It just felt like the race itself was gone in a flash and over too soon! I doubt we’ll have that issue as the distances increase…
We continue tomorrow with the 10k for day two!