Juneathon 1 - And so it begins...

First Juneathon run out, and a very pleasant day it was too! I'd spent various bits of today staring at Google Maps trying to work out where to run, what mileage I was aiming for, whether to go hilly or flat, tarmac or singletrack, high or...

...And then I remembered that those decisions, those hours of poring over maps and stressing about mileage, were the things I enjoyed least about Janathon, and that my best runs came when I sacked the maps, the minimum mileage and the agonising and just did what I wanted to do.


Hill #1 - Newlay Locks
With that in mind, I got home, stuck my shorts on, chucked a bottle in the bumbag and headed out. 1:20-ish later I got back, having had a lovely bimble from the house, down to Kirkstall Abbey, onto the Leeds-Liverpool canal, along to the Abbey Inn (where, reputedly, there is the exit of a secret tunnel from Kirkstall Abbey. Presumably so the Monks could nip out for a cheeky pint without the public spotting them), and then along the edge of the river, up onto the A65 and up through Hawksworth Woods, Butcher Hill, across the playing fields, and back home.



Hill #2 - Hawksworth wood
Final distance clocked in at 11.4km, which seems pretty respectable. Very glad of being able to dump the .gpx files from the Sport Tracker straight into Memory Map for the route plotting, because there's so many little snickleways and uncharted little bits of singletrack to nip through that I wouldn't have a hope in hell's chance of plotting these things without it. Oh, and in the name of StatisticalStans'sTesticles, my average pace worked out at 7.07mins/km, which is a little quicker than I was averaging in January, though it didn't feel any faster. That's probably a good thing, I reckon.

So, 29 more to go. Woo!

Juneathon route 1 - WestPark - Kirkstall - Bramley - Hawksworth - West Park.

Comments

Anonymous said…
What a beautiful run kick off with. You do live in a lovely part of the world.
June 1, 2011 at 12:34 PM
Unknown said…
Definitely a beautiful run... I love the area around Kirkstall Abbey... a great start to Juneathon, you'll have to keep up that element of surprise for yourself of where you run and how far :-)
June 2, 2011 at 1:03 AM
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