Rat Race Run Britannia - Week 2, day 6 - Frodsham to Whittle-le-Woods

Suburbia

Distance: 62.96km (total so far 654.18km)

Total climb: 624m (total so far 12,815m)

Steps: 71,600 (total so far 789,507)

Also:

Number of towns with Rugby League teams: 4 (at least)

This was going to be a very different sort of day, after the wilds of the southwest coast and mountains and river valleys of Wales. Today we were heading straight through the industrial corridor between Liverpool and Manchester. And we started with Runcorn Bridge.

We climbed up from Frodsham straight into Runcorn, dodged a few railway lines and navigated through the residential back streets until we popped out near the bridge. Its been a good trip for bridges, and this was another good one to add to the collection.

After the bridge, the next few miles were canalside - you realised rapidly how much the canal system was used a hundred years ago, and a fair amount of that still exists in various stages of repair.

Due to the length of the day, we had an extra feedstation built in, which brought them slightly closer together. I ticked off feedstation 1 at a sailing club and cranked on along the canal - I didn't have much run in my legs today, but the going was good and I could get my walk up to a fair speed (9 min kms or thereabouts).

On the way, we picked up another bridge for our collection.

And, for those who read the introduction to this event on the blog, I need to confirm that we were actually in Warrington. Its beauty speaks for itself.

We were following the Trans-Pennine trail at this point, but due east is not a good way of getting to Scotland, and in due time they turned us off onto the Sankey Valley trail, which was going in a more useful direction. This is the route of an old canal, but all that is left is a nice valley park with a sequence of lakes. 

We followed this for a long time, and it was certainly a change from what I had been expecting today. 

And whoever does the marketing for their industrial heritage has a Tolkein bent and a sense of humour!

Finally we were routed off it and through the roads to our lunch stop in another church hall.

We'd now run out of the Sankey Valley, and the next part of the day was straight through the towns. You can't grow up in Hull without knowing the names of the main rugby league teams (in the early eighties, from a sporting point of view, Hull really wasn't very good at anything else!), and walking from Warrington through Widnes and St. Helens certainly brought back memories of sports results on newspaper billboards.

This was now a fully urban walk - I've no idea what anyone local thought we were doing, striding through St. Helens in our running kit, but they kept their comments to themselves. I can confirm that there is no truth in the suggestion that if I'd stopped for too long in St. Helens I'd have been up on bricks with my running shoes being sold halfway down the street.

Finally we broke out of the towns and headed back out to the fields. Somewhere in the town I'd obviously forgotten how to navigate, though, as I made the wrong decision and ended up at the end of a long thin field with no exit. Where I should have been was about a hundred yards to my left, which was now behind two barbed wire fences and a small valley full of brambles and nettles. The logical thing to do was to retrace my steps a km or so back to where I lost the route, and I kept telling myself that was the logical thing to do while working through the fences and the nettles. I'd just about made it when I caught my foot and ended up successfully on the footpath, but 90 degrees off the vertical. Ouch.

(It did prove that my fall alert on my watch worked nicely - if you fall heavily, the watch senses it, and you get about 30 seconds to cancel before it sends an alert to your selected backup person, in this case Andy. Its a good safety system, but on this occasion not needed, and I was able to cancel it in time.)

The terrain then changed to a more wooded park next to a reservoir.

It was starting to feel like a long day, but when I hit feedstation four I only had 10km left. I also found out that Andy had left that only 5 minutes ahead of me, so that gave me someone to chase. The route was obvious - one more small town, and then straight up the big hill. Just what I needed in the last 10km!

The route took us past a couple of reservoirs, and finally into the hills for the last time today.

And, after another navigation error (it seemed to be a day for them) I finally caught up with Andy on the hills above Whittle-le-Woods.

We could walk down the roads to the finish together. It had been a long and very varied day.

And that was week two, or at least 4.5 out of 6 days of it. In distance, it had been a beast of a week, but we'd come from Bristol to Preston in a week, across a huge variety of different countryside and town.

Song of the day - a very easy choice. "Suburbia" by the Pet Shop Boys. What else?

Last: Back on the road again

Next: Rivers and canals