The Slacks

I was out with Super-fit Dave, Steve 'The Professor' and Fiona Outdoors tonight.

Rachel (Steve the proffessor's wife) was kind enough to let me borrow her Jalus orienteering shoes for a trial!

We headed out to "The Slacks" the starting point of which is right next to the Erskine bridge. I was keen to christen my new head torch.

This is the route we took, and as you will see from the elevation it's a steep start! These guys are made of tough stuff and the mere thought of doing anything sissy like warming up is out of the question :-) Straight up the hills no bother!

The route and elevation profile

Unfortunately I am not quite as tough as I would like to think...and I watched them making the hill ahead look easy disappearing over the mounds of HILL infront of me! I was forcing my aching muscles to keep going and my lungs to calm down..slowly but surely I inched my way up the hill!

The general rule is that the front runners loop back to touch base with the slow coaches like me. "Super fit" Dave is great at doing this...he MUST run twice as far as the rest of us!

As the Jalus shoes started to get wet they began to expand and soften up, that along with the fact I had silly thin socks on caused my feet to start slipping around in them. I did find that their grip was beyond my best expectations. They weren't moving anywhere! My feet however had other plans and therefore I felt pretty wobbly in them on the way up. Not wanting to stop and tighten them for fear of falling further behind!

By half way up my achillies tendons were agony, I had adopted the tip toe high knee approach as I dug my toes into the soft boggy side of the hill. But the stretch on the tendons is unavoidable...I am not sure that this would be improved my a short warm up or just more out and up practice!

You know when you are mountain climbing and you reach false summits? Well when you do hills in the dark it's a bit like that too. You think that you're there only to find that there's more stretching away into the darkness. One way to gauge this is the wind levels..it nearly always gets very windy at the top. Last night there were also still patches of snow dotted about as we neared the top.

Did I mention, yet, that I fell down a rabbit hole? No injury and no blushes as the rest were too far ahead at that point to witness the expletives.

Once at the top we took the necessary photos that have now become a bit of a ritual! Given that they had already waited for me to arrive, tighten my shoes and check out the view, I didn't want to insist on a picture...but it seems camera shy they are not: "Come on get your camera out then" so here is the evidence!"Superfit" Dave, Fiona Outdoors and Steve "The Professor"


With newly tightened shoes we flew down the hill. (Except for the uphill bits!)

I loved the grip of the Jalus's. Areas that I would previously have had real trouble staying on my feet were no problem. That said I did trip over a tufty grassy mound the less said about that the better.

Once we hit the bottom we had to run the short distance along the road to the cars. We got some very strange looks from the occupants of a passing car. It ground to a halt unsure what was coming towards it. When we reached the car I looked back and saw Steve "The Professor" that is I didn't see him but I saw his light. It was instantly clear what a sight the four of us must have been to that poor couple in the car! It did look for all the world like there was a camel running down the road...the action of the lamp was just how I imagine a camel with headlights to look. Not that I've ever seen one. But there you go!

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