Running On Empty

I'm writing up this run pretty late. Like, 4 weeks late. (Even if the publish date is the day of the run.) So yeah, for some mad reason, I decided to go for a run at 10pm about a month ago. I must've been feeling pretty good to have been up for a run at that time and the weather was decent enough that it wasn't freezing. I even aimed to do 7.5K instead of the usual 5K, heading up to and around Burradon pond, in the hopes of working up to a 10K event later in the summer. Unfortunately, I messed it up on two counts. First, I got my bearings completely wrong on the tracks skirting the housing estates by the pond. This is a perennial problem with me and this area. I simply can't get it in my head to map the trails on a map (before the run) to the real-life tracks that I run. Anyway, it meant I was accidentally cutting the run short and I had to improvise a bit to get back on track. Even the swans at Killingworth Lake had called it a night Secondly though, my left knee start...

No, not that Colton Herta , but yes, he is the reason I named the run that. Herta in his IndyCar days. Photo blatantly pilfered from the BBC Sport pages. So, last weekend saw the family visiting my father-in-law in Leeds and we ended up staying overnight in Colton, on the eastern side of the city. The weather was glorious — maybe a little too glorious — and I knew that Temple Newsam was within reach of our hotel, so a route was planned for the Sunday morning: The route, as planned on onthegomap.com, which is still my favourite route mapping tool. As it turned out, while it was only 16C at the time I ran, when the sun was on you, it was sweltering. In the end, I only just managed the 5K before the heat and the jarring nature of the run, with hard, rutted paths, took its toll on my left knee. While I did hit 5K, I cut the run short by about 250m to give my knee a break and to cool down a bit by walking the last bit back to the hotel. The Avenue at Temple Newsam, heading downhi...