Land's End to John O'Groats, LEJOG, B
Cornwall proved to be the most testing county, with an almost inexorable series of ascents and descents to negotiate. At Mousehole, I was glad of the descent into the pretty fishing port. The support car, a brand new S-type Jaguar purchased by my father to celebrate his 40th wedding anniversary, had got stuck in the one way system and my he was attempting to reverse back past a line of irritated tourists. Another valuable lesson from Day 1, the car was not designed for a trip along the back roads of Britain and suffered numerous dents and scratches over the four week period.
It also became apparent that the atlas I was using to navigate the daily routes, ripping a page a day to carry easily in a back pack, was very different from my father’s atlas in scale, detail and village names. Although funny at the beginning the errors between the systems of navigation became a daily fuse for disagreements. A simple problem to correct, the purchase of two identical atlases, became a point of principle that neither of us was prepared to compromise on. We would rather follow different roads, miss meeting points, make long and irritable calls and add daily miles than agree which atlas was the most accurate. When my father was asked, during a radio interview, what he had learned about his son during their time together, the immediate response was that he was reminded how very difficult he could be!
The first night was spent in St Agnes and we were treated to dinner by the hotel owner. This marked the fist of many kind and generous acts we accounted en route. The days became more routine as we worked our way out of the west country. It would start with a hearty breakfast, a massage and painstaking application of foot creams, Vaseline and plasters to tender friction points. It would end with a long, hot, deep bath, further massages and lights out at around 9 pm. The nights were usually disturbed by sweats, as I flushed the toxins from an exhausted body, and my father’s snoring. I managed to cure the snoring by forcing him off his back, only to find this precipitated bouts of sleep talking.
I kept the running to approximately three two hour sessions a day, never running more than 15 miles in one session to avoid depleting glycogen stores and risk “hitting the wall” as the metabolism shifted to fatty acids. A diet of jelly babies, chunky KitKats, dried apricots and Ribena were consumed liberally throughout the day, followed by a high protein meal each evening. Four pairs of shoes and socks were rotated each day to minimise the risk of injury and a Gore-Tex jacket proved invaluable during a very inclement May. A bright yellow cap was used primarily to wave to oncoming traffic and probably prevented serious incident on several occasions.
The high points of the trip included crossing the Severn Bridge, the descent through Glen Coe after a treacherous climb in appalling conditions to the summit of Rannoch Moor and running along unspoiled stretches of the Lancaster and Taunton canals. The low points? These I try to forget: a torn vastus medialis muscle and ankle sprain in Bristol jeopardised the trip, but I was fortunate in having a well stocked medical kit from a good veterinary suppler to nurse my injuries through several critical days. Deliberately being sent 5 miles in the wrong direction during a thunderstorm when navigating towards Church Stretton in the Welsh Borders and fending of a dog attack on the outskirts of Glasgow. Other memorable moments were a run along the Great Glen with an old school friend and the visits by my wife, Rebecca, in Bristol and Lancaster. However, Rebecca will not want to remember the visit to Bay Radio in Lancaster, where she was mistaken for my mother during a live Saturday morning broadcast!
