Early
Early this morning, I drove out to the showground at Hope in The Hope Valley. I had risen at an ungodly hour to take our son Ian there. He had signed up for a gruelling running event and you needed to be there an hour early for the purposes of registration, picking up your running number and tracking device before receiving a pre-race briefing. I was witnessing a sub-culture of which I knew and still know very little. The runners around me were dressed in their special and ready to go - all with little backpacks containing electrolytes, special energy gels, basic first aid kits and of course their obligatory smartphones. There were around three hundred runners in the first tranche. Like my beloved son, they had all voluntarily signed up to run 50km - but not on flat roads or running tracks. The course of this event would take them up hill and down dale, arcing around the Upper Derwent reservoirs. I know this terrain very well having walked most of those paths tho...