Rat Race The Isles - day 4. Bogs, Harris and a white van man.

 Today was originally to be a couple of islands, Harris and Lewis. However, I'd realised there was a bus (pretty much the only one of the day) from Tarbert to Stornoway at 14:30, which gave me a chance to get up and see Andy. So the plan was simple. Leave at 8am, complete the first three stages of the day (34km to Tarbert) in 6.5 hours, and hop on the bus. That ought to be doable, I thought. As usual with the Hebrides, I got it wrong.

The first stage, we had been warned, was going to be more bog. There's a thing about bog running - you know that you are going to be ankle deep all day, just like you were yesterday and will be tomorrow. However, there is always the wish to postpone the stage where your feet get wet for the first time for as long as possible. This morning, I didn't last the first km.

This was the worst so far. On the side of a heathery hill, with no path in sight and the route given only by the line on your watch (difficult to look at when trying to spot where to put your feet) and the very occasional white post, it was a fight to get anywhere. At one point, having spotted a waymark on top of the hill, I was climbing up on hands and feet and hanging on to the heather to avoid falling backwards. Meanwhile, the weather decided to help out with the occasional 40mph gust and some driving showers.

It did occur to me, as I fell over for the 19th time, that my taking an ankle out as well to match Andy's, although a romantic his'n'hers gesture, would make the next few weeks rather more complex. In the end, I got through without injury to anything but my pride. It took 3 hours to cover the 11km to the first checkpoint, which wasn't helping my personal schedule to get to Tarbert. When I looked at the feedstation, I realised that I hadn't touched either food or drink during those three hours. In running, you need a few metres of clear path to be able to take your eye off the road and grab either water or a chocolate bar - and I'd never had the luxury of being able to take my eyes off the terrain once.

So I had some mileage to make up on the next leg - and fortunately, although wet, the going was vastly better:

Yes, that's the path - but at least the ground underneath was firm, and you could move along. The path ran down a rather nice valley, and although the wind hadn't stopped the rain mostly had, and we even saw the sun once or twice. Progress was better, nutrition was happening again, and some of the views were stunning. I felt much better as I came into checkpoint 2.

After a refill of my pack, the sum was simple again - an hour and forty minutes to do the 11k  to checkpoint 3 and my bus. The first few km were road and I could shuffle along at a useful speed, but it was still a hilly route, and then vanished overland again. Whatever I tried, the speed was falling off. I gave it what I had, but the clock was getting ahead of me. Even with a final burn down the road into Tarbert, it was 14:33 when I came into the car park, and the bus had gone.

 I knew by then that Andy had had a cancellation slot for her operation that afternoon, so I was keener than ever to get to Stornoway. OK, let's look at other options. No other public transport. No taxi companies in Tarbert. But there was a hire car company. So I hired the only vehicle that they had available.

Try parking that in a hospital car park!

Still, I got there in time to see Andy before her operation, so it was all very much worth it. I'd also been tasked with some shopping for her, which I decided to do while the operation was happening. She needed shorts that would fit on over her cast or boot.

"Two pairs of ladies shorts", I said to the shop assistant. I could have been ordering pickled dinosaur for the look I'd got. I gather that there is not a big market for shorts in Stornoway. Particularly not once the Scottish summer (August 9th to 11th) is over. She vanished into the stock room for the items that had been considered too unlikely to sell to even make the sale rail. She did, to her credit, come back with two pairs of shorts. I didn't even ask about the colour. I'd pushed my luck far enough.

Saw Andy when she came out of the op, delivered the shorts and headed back to the accommodation in my van. Didn't think when I woke up I'd be spending the day as a delivery driver in the Outer Hebrides, but it made a change from the bogs!