Friday 31st July 2015

Salle d’opération, personnel, chirurgien, consultant, Anesthésiste, Anaesthesiologist… Eh?

Qubecan French I was coping with but American English, nah that was the straw that broke the camels back; I really needed to use the flexi time I had built up; and with the weather having been rubbish since sometime around March a small window of good weather seemed to have arrived and a quick e-mail off to the club list found Titch to be up for an early morning trip up Lawers before a “Disco” shift in A&E and more than happy to make it a run rather than a hike.

Since I don’t really do early even on work days, I finally found an excuse (as if the excellent view of Schehallion over Loch Tummel wasn’t enough) to make use of the parents caravan.

So much for the weather window though, after a cracker of a Thursday spent sitting in the office, my morning view of Schehallion was disturbed by low cloud and fine drizzle; this meant we soon lost sight of Loch Tay and pretty much anything more than 5m away from us as we trotted up into the clouds from the Ben Lawers car park.

This was my first attempt at actually hill running having stuck to low level paths and tracks before, and my lack of hill training showed as I ground to a walk regularly on the way up while Titch fresh from a Marathon disappeared into the mist.

We summited Beinn Ghlas in 55 mins and Ben Lawers 20 later with a good path and a few rocky steps allowing decent progress before descending down through boggy ground to Lawers village via the path beside the Lawers burn which proved to be a fun descent with a few obstacles such as low trees and a slippy rock with Titch not noticing either of these as much as me! (I slipped on the rock and caught my walking pole on one of the trees).

Running the hills certainly made up for the lack of visibility; and I really enjoyed it; I think I may be doing a bit more hill running in future, particularly since I’ve entered the Clova Extreme Duathlon!

Anaesthesiologist though…

 

See the club photo album and also see Niall’s Photos