We’ve finally come to the last of the Orkney phone boxes from last September.
(Coordinates 58°78’91.7″N, 2°95’88.1″W.)
No phone in this one and it is a bit unloved, but there was a bonus cow!
Back to the mainland next week.
A slightly damp morning but the rain stayed off during parkrun and it was fairly still too. A good day for pacing 30 at Town Moor!
Kept a few people on target for the first couple of miles and they were all able to sprint off during the last bit. Really enjoy pacing 30 minutes as so many people are aiming for it.
Possibly a new-to-me location next week…
Here’s one that Mum and Dad found at the fossil museum in Orkney!
(Coordinates 58°85’82.1″N, 2°91’11.3″W.)
It’s in the yard of the museum, which perhaps makes it an exhibit!
One more from Orkney next week.
Another lovely parkrun morning. Clear and cold but not frosty, so the only slippery bits of Jesmond Dene course today were the muddy patches. Lots of friends there too as Town Moor was off!
Geth and I took it easy for 30ish minutes, which was the perfect start to a quiet weekend.
Probably back on the Moor next weekend but we’ll see!
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…