Rat Race Run Britannia - Week 3, day 5 - Carlisle to Lockerbie


Over the edge

Distance: 45.33km (total so far 879.92km)
Total climb: 348m (total so far 15,758m)
Steps: 52,387 (total so far 1,056,550)

Number of bagpipers on route: 1

This was billed as border day, and the idea was that at the border crossing about 20km into the route we would all come back together again and celebrate together. However, the first thing was to get there. We were running directly from the hotel, although road works made assembling a little more interesting!


The first stage of the run took us past Carlisle Castle - this is also the start line for Rat Race's "The Wall" event, which we have both done. However, it was nice to see it without the scaffolding.


After that, it was just a question of following the route out of Carlisle to the north. We soon ended up in the fields looking out over the Solway Firth, and I soon realised I'd made the wrong shoe choice - I'd gone for road shoes as I knew the afternoon was road, but I should have gone for trails and switched at lunchtime. We ended up going down an extremely muddy lane, and the more slippery road soles were no help at all.

We got through in the end, and worked our way through some fields. This part of the route followed the new English Coast Path, which seems to be sections of path that join the existing coast path long distance routes. 


Because of the heat of the day, Rat Race had added some additional water stations - we hit the first of those, and then headed out of the fields onto where I always thought the border was - the motorway bridge. However, we were still in England on the north side of that, so there was still more to do. One assumes that couples heading for Gretna Green were well past the "are we nearly there yet" stage at this point!


I wasn't doing well this morning - I'd had a throat and lung thing that was hanging around, and with that and a couple of minor navigation errors we were two of the group of three at the back when we did approach Gretna Green - which meant that the whole group was there before us, and we were welcomed with a lot of noise (which then had to hang on for a minute while we actually crossed a fairly busy road!).


At least half the noise was coming from the resident piper!


It was a nice stage to have got to - somewhat over half way now, but still another mark past.


Still, there was a reminder that we still had a fair way to go.


They fed us well (on square sausages, of course) and then we were back on our way. The afternoon was less interesting - we knew that the whole section from the Scottish border most of the way to outside Glasgow was going to be road, but we also hit this in the middle of a heatwave. It was just a question of cranking up the side of the road - fairly easy in that for most of its length it had a cycle route, which made passing cars easy.


For only the second time in the trip so far I got my headphones out and just cranked along to some music - like most runners, I use the bone conductor "Shokz" type of headphones so that you can also hear what is going on on the road. They worked very well, and made the miles go quicker.

We passed through one town, Ecclefechan, which had a sign that amused me - when I was growing up, Bruce had a conveyor belt. Up here, he gets a cave!


 Journey's end was Lockerbie.


Lockerbie is very much a sheep town - we passed the agricultural centre and show/auction space on the way in. And the finish outside the town hall also came with added sheep.


Song of the day - again, a fairly obvious choice. "I'm gonna be (500 miles)" by the Proclaimers. 500 miles and 500 more would be about right for the overall distance in our case, but we were starting to eat into that second half now.







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