Isle of Wight adventure (Hannah)

Last Saturday's training session was a bit of an adventure...

My parents have a house on the south coast - in Milford-on-Sea. It's near the Hampshire/Dorset border and overlooks the Isle of Wight and The Needles. It's where we go to relax and we head down there at least once a month. It's also where we got married earlier this year.

Even though we've spent many hours looking at the Isle of Wight we'd never actually been there. So, when a trip over seemed like the best way of combining a long run and a sight of the Olympic torch, we booked our ferry tickets.

It was an early start but we were able to have our breakfast on the ferry and so we went ashore ready and raring to go.

The first thing we noticed when we arrived in Yarmouth was that the island still seemed to be asleep. Which is a reasonable thing given it was 8.20 on a Saturday morning.  But throughout our time on the Isle of Wight we noticed how much quieter and more relaxed it was than the mainland. Everyone we did see was really friendly - in the cafe where we had lunch all the tables ended up having conversations with each other and finding things in common!

On the OS map it looked like the first part of our run along the north of the island to The Needles would be relatively built up, running through villages and along roads at times. In reality we were rarely out of sight of the sea and the only sign of life we saw was the postman doing his early morning rounds.

As The Needles came into view and we approached Alum Bay things became a bit more exciting as people were starting to gather for the torch celebrations. One of the things that had been done in preparation was to erect a set of prayer flags which were blowing in the sea breeze - someone had written a hope or a thought on each of them.

The Needles themselves were an impressive site and we were pleased we'd included a visit in our route. It was great to see them so close after having looked at them so many times from afar.

From here our run along the southern part of the island was much more rural and incredibly peaceful. We were thankful that the winds were lighter than the last time we'd been down when we'd both been blown off the coastal path over at Lulworth Cove. And unusually for this summer we hadn't yet had a drop of rain - in fact the sun even came out and I changed into my vest! That was all to change though...

At the point where we only had 3 miles to go and thought we were on the home straight we found ourselves entering a field with a 'beware of the bull' sign. Luckily there was no actual bull but the field was very squelchy and he'd left behind a lot of evidence that he'd been there recently. So we were glad when we got to the edge of the field and moved onto a more solid path. Except that that path didn't seem to go anywhere. So we checked out the map and decided we needed to go back into the bull field and look for another exit. While we were squelching around getting muddier and smellier we noticed the familiar build up of cloud and it started to rain. And then pour. 

We never were able to find the path out of the field so we went back to where we'd entered it and had a pretty miserable run along the road in the rain.

Thankfully it had stopped raining when we reached Yarmouth and so we had time to wander around and locate a good tea room where we were able to get warm and dry. Luckily this weather is getting depressingly familiar and we'd been running with a change of clothes in our packs (always be prepared!).

The torch relay was a really British affair complete with marching band. I was quite amazed at how many people turned out to see something that passed within less than a minute. It will be interesting to see how this experience of seeing the torch in Yarmouth compares with its visit to London in a week's time.

And in terms of our overall thoughts on our adventure? Brett was exhausted from a 48k run two days before and I was hatching a throat infection so we didn't really feel we were able to do it justice. But we liked what we saw and so we'll definitely be heading back to the Isle of Wight to explore some more. Not least because we spotted a couple of spots for food that we'd like to take advantage of!