Day 58

Week 9, Tuesday 11th of September

Normally on weekdays the longer run is on a Tuesday and the shorter one on a Thursday but luckily for us, for some reason, that order has been switched the other way around. That meant that our run on Tuesday was only for 4 miles but of course those 4 miles had to be tough.

This was one of the routes that I did myself. It seemed like a good route when you sit at home mapping it on a computer but when it comes to run, particularly just a few hours after we had completed our very wet 11 mile run; it was a bad idea.

We started off OK, running along Leek Road to Lime Kiln Bank but that's when it begun to get tough. Neither of us has ever ran all the way from the bottom of Lime Kiln to the top of Potters Way and I must admit, I'm not in a hurry to do it again. It was tough, very tough. When we eventually got up there, we turned right and had to climb up even further.

Just where Potters Way plateaus off, we accidentally went off course and ended up doing a slight short cut to Town Road. We decided that it didn't really matter as the route we were doing was more than 4 miles anyway. We ran past Birches Head Road and was looking for Kelvin Avenue. However, we never saw it so we ended up at the bottom of Barthomley Road where we carried on straight on. At the end of the road, we saw Kelvin Avenue. It did exist but it changed name to something else before it reached Hanley Road and that's why we didn't know where to go.

We joined on to Chorlton Road and turned left on to Birches Head Road. I put this detour in so that the run would be at least 4 miles rather than being a bit short. That's just annoying if you want a particular distance and then you have to make it up by running back on yourself.

It was lovely running down bank. We caught up with quite a few of the other Trotters as well, so it was nice all of us arriving round about the same time.