The Road to the MK Marathon (not the A5 ho ho!)...

Although I'd been aware of it for years as it's so very local to me (I could have walked to the start - although I didn't OBVIOUSLY!) I'd never done the Dirt Half - but I'd heard really good stuff about it. It's a trail Half Marathon with a mixture of fields, woods, towpaths and hills - OH THE HILLS - but we'll get to them later!! It's a proper old-school race with a HQ in a school hall (where you can get a cup of tea) that's bustling and smells of deep heat - and it's a good size too - the field is getting on for about 1000 - just enough to make is feel busy and exciting, but not so big that you spend half an hour shuffling towards the start line (Royal Parks Half I'm talking about YOU!!!). Before you get to the towpath, you have a lap of the school field to spread out a bit and get into a sensible position as it's not easy to overtake large numbers of people on the canal. Normally, I start a race at slower than race pace, let ever...

It's Cross-country season again - hooray! As a "relatively" new runner I'm still finding my feet - but last year, just after joining "THE MIGHTY" tm Leighton Fun Runners I got swept up in the excitement and ran a couple of cross-country races. I didn't know what to expect, but was frankly astonished at the level of competition - the fastest runners in our club were only just scraping into the top 50, and I was barely scraping into the top 200. But that was last year - and I've done a fair bit of training since then (and bought some spikes as I am a terrible trainer tart!).  The first race of this season (we're in the Three Counties League which seems to cover an absolutely huge number of clubs) was Dunstable. I ran this last year and properly enjoyed it - the course was amazing - rolling countryside, a HUUUGE hill (I walked a bit last year - sorry!), breathtaking views over the Dunstable Downs - and loads of burnt out cars for comedy relief...