New Forest

I have a few days off work this week and as my wife had a course near Southampton, I decided to drop her off and head to the New Forest.  I love the New Forest, it holds a special place in my heart.  It has been a major part of my life for the last two and a half years, and a fixture for nearly 10 years now.  I am an ecologist by trade and I am managing a big project to survey and understand biodiversity in the New Forest.  As such, I have spent many weeks down in the Forest doing field work and getting to know the landscape.  And I have come to love it.

It s also a great place to go running.  The weather this morning was pretty horrible, a reasonable wind and persistent rain, as I set off at about 9.30am near Burley.  My plan was to run for at least two hours and not to worry too much about the distance.  The Forest was pretty quiet, the ponies deciding sensibly to remain in the woods rather than graze out on the heaths.  There was very few people out and about and it flt like I had the place to myself, which was lovely.

I felt pretty good, despite the continual rain. I decided to run with a pack today in training for the SLMM, but it wasn't very heavy, so I tootled along quite nicely, only stopping to navigate and once to turn the map over in the case.  In the end I covered 18.31 km (11 ish miles) in a time of 2:10.  Not a great pace, but consistent. I achieved my aim of running for more than 2 hours which is good.  I'm pretty tired now, but in a good way.