I've been aiming to run The Shipwrights Way for a while now. It follows a possible 50 mile route the giant green oaks of Alice Holt could have taken to get to the dockyards of Portsmouth for Tudor ship building.
It runs very close to home and I use sections of it very often to walk the dog and on some of my runs. But I also like the idea of being able to run from my house to my parents house down on Hayling Island, this route would be perfect.
In my mind I always planned to run it in mid May, when things were green and it wouldn't be too wet underfoot. But in the end I ran the first part of it on 1 April after 24 hours of rain. Things were indeed starting to go green, but it wasn't dry in any shape or form.
In several places I had to wade through quite deep puddles, but it wasn't quite as muddy as last weeks run, of which I was very pleased.
I was dropped off at Bentley Station, then followed the trail for 20 miles to just outside Petersfield. The markers were a little hit and miss, but I know some parts of this trail quite well, so didn't need to refer to my map too much, which was lucky as it was raining for most of the run.
The hardest part was running past the end of my road and knowing I still had 7 miles to run. It was very tempting to just stop at that point, but I kept going and was very pleased to find I'd completed the 20 miles in under 4 hours.
This week I tried out some Kendel Mint Cake as fuel. I love this stuff and used to eat bars of it in one go as a kid. Although I think it worked well as fuel, by mile 13 I was kinda over it and relying on my Tailwind mix instead. Back to jelly babies and harrybo next week I think.
You can read what happened on part 2 here.
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