What the runners saw (Ultra training starts today)

Often whilst out running you see odd or unusual things. Things that the average person in a car completely misses out on! These moments make running that extra bit special. Today I was thinking about this whilst we ran past a local house that has recently erected a giant clock on their wall. Rather quirky I thought.

As we started to leave the leafy housing area, we ran down a road that is linking a new housing estate to a busier main road. At night it's very dark, by day it's a fast piece of road we use for speed work. As I plodded ran along, something shiny in the long grass caught my eye.

On closer inspection, it appeared to be an open jewellery box. Strewn around in the ditch were several pieces of shiny stuff! Of course being a nosey runner wanna be pirate  magpie sometimes bit bored when running a dull bit of road, anything shiny catches my eye. I climbed down and rescued the precious treasure and put it all safely back in the box (M&S standard issue). We then didn't know what to do... I strongly felt we should take it to the police. But, my town doesn't have a plod shop, we were miles away, halfway through our run and the box was completely sodden, Steve didn't look too pleased at the suggestion of running home with it under his arm, like a speedy getaway burglar, this option had lots of problems including if the rightful owners drove past we'd be in a whole lot more trouble.

Steve, hid it under some long grass. We continued with our, otherwise uneventful, short run- although we did see four very cute pigmy pigs, who were very snorty and interested in us, we also saw some horses with polo neck jumpers. Discussing our options on the run, we decided to run home, shower, have a bacon sandwich (we had just run 8 miles) and then hot foot it back to the scene of the crime find and recover the treasure and drop it into the nearest police station.

Anyway this blog is about running so, today's run was the first in our ultra run training. We're planing on back to back longish runs at the weekend, this is to help prepare us for a 30 miler at the end of January. All very exciting AND daunting all at the same time! Especially if we have to factor in extra time for all the civic/community duties with finding stashes of stuff!!

Back to the treasure... There's been a couple of burglaries in my road in the last week. We have a feeling the box and contents were thrown out of a car who was making a getaway.

When we stopped at the Police Station, the Police Officer on duty on the front desk seemed amused as we produced our Tesco carrier bag with the sodden and grass covered jewellery box. He was less amused after asking us if we'd touched it! Er yes, we didn't pick it up with a Jedi mind trick!! He was even less amused as we opened the dripping box and out crawled a spider, which proceed to scale the police station walls!!

So, there's another jolly good reason to run, you never know what you'll find... and you might get to see cute pigs!