Weekend Long Run - 22km (a PB in reverse!)

dannewton just finished a 22.16km run, that lasted for 137 minutes.
This run helped dannewton burn 2323.5 calories.

Description from Strava: Yet again, its time for the standard 'weekend long run'... time really is flying by at the moment.

Once again I chose to do the 22km route I have previously completed the last 2 weekends, but with encouragement from @steevc I opted to run it in reverse this time around.

The main reason predominantly was to put the 'boring' bypass section at the start of the run, so that this time I would finish with some more interesting 'urban' running. which might be easier. @steevc also mentioned I would appreciate the hills differently as I would be running up the ones I usually run down and vice versa.

And he was right!

The sections on Wragby road which I usually run along quite happily, when running in the oppostite it turns out that it is on a small but noticeable incline, which was obvious when trying to run up it today. Conversely the route down and along Monks road which before seemed ok, was an absolute breeze today as that has a slight decline that I hadn't picked on either.

But the biggest difference was the hill on the edge of the village. Bracebridge Heath is on a hill, and in simple terms my route is to run down the hill into town, up to the top of the hill in Lincoln, back down that hill, and then finally back up the hill into the village. Both routes into the village feature a big hill, but they are quite different even though they are nearly the same elevation.

The bypass hill is a long continuous but fairly gentle climb, but the route on Cross O'cliff hill is shorter, and therefore much, MUCH steeper!

And so today, due to me running the route in reverse I had to run up Cross O'cliff. It features an increase of 65m in elevation over 0.7km... its pretty steep, and even harder when I consider that by the time I arrived there, I had already been running 19km over nearly 2 hours.

that was hard work!

By sheer will, I forced myself up to the top, and my legs were like jelly when I made it haha. It took the remaining 2km for that to wear off, and then I was home, phew!.

For that reason alone, I had decided that I was not going to run this route in this direction again, the hill was awful.

...until I looked at the details of my run on the strava app.

It turns out I completed a Half-Martathon PB on this route. At a time of 2 hours 10 minutes, its the quickest I had ever completed that distance, and I wasn't even trying to beat the time lol.

hmm... guess that means I'm gonna have to do this route again at some point to see if that was a fluke!

If you would like to check out this activity on strava you can see it here:
https://www.strava.com/activities/7965666620

About the Athlete: Living in the UK, I am an intermittent Runner, but always striving for more consistency. When I'm not training I can be found photographing insects or listening to really loud angry music (which is the best type of music obviously!)

This is an automated post by @strava2hive and is currently in BETA.