In the interest of public decency no photos exist of the following....

Having missed out on the Isle of Coll half Marathon on Saturday I announced this am that I would like to see if I could “go the distance”. What a good job that I did the rooms first…Garret and Toby have marked a 10k route out from the house which winds back to Inveraray and then turns along the shore for most of the route ending in Furnace, and then you turn and come back. This in a way is the problem; my poor body had already been pushed to its limits, peeked over the limit edge and run away in fright at what it saw there. There was a point with 3kish to go when I could have given in to the increasingly urgent cries from ankle (L), toes, lungs, groin (think I will stop there) and had a big, big paddy by the side of the track but that would have been embarrassing in front of the dog so I tried to enter a higher plane and slogged on. Garret was meantime offering points of training and advice all along the way as he bounced jauntily and irritatingly from one foot to another effortlessly covering the miles whilst I gasped and panted my way along the route, which I can now appreciate but at the time made me long for a small but sharp knife to sink between his shoulder blades…mind, I would have had to catch him first which would have been a challenge. We arrived back home eventually and I met my friend the gate with cries (well, actually more sobs) of delight and clung onto it for a few minutes in haze of relief, exhaustion and, with quite painfully a very hot head. Garret began to wave something under my nose which when the mists had cleared turned out to be his stopwatch, I know that you are waiting with baited breath… One hour and fifty-three minutes. No wonder I felt as though someone had shaken me up and re-arranged the body parts at random. Of course Lucy needed only a quick lie down and a slurp of water to render her as good as new, jumping around begging for her balloon to be bounced on her nose. For me it took two mugs of water, lots of tea, several Bovril sandwiches and a hot bath, I am still not really feeling up to the balloon on the nose thing.