Snowy Saturday

March 1st tomorrow? Oh, go on . . .

Weekend in Littondale - the Falcon II

Weekend in Littondale - the Falcon I

We spent the weekend at the Falcon at Arncliffe, Littondale . Hospitality and food were outstanding.  Littondale is a great favourite of mine. It might possibly be even better than Wharfdale! 

Bowland

Stef and I went over to Bowland again on Sunday and had a great run out (11 miles / 2, 200 feet-ish) with friends from Chipping. The ground was frozen solid (mostly) and there was a fair bit of snow around. Conditions on the higher ground were quite tough and the outing had more of a mountaineering feel to it than normal running. It was none the worse for that!

We all retired to Tillotsons after the run where hot food and several mugs of tea were taken. Stef and I have really enjoyed the last two weekends running with friends and in particular our two trips 'out West' 

A streaky snowy Hebden

It was the Hebden LDWA yesterday and after some good work by organisers Alan Greenwood and Carole Engels the event went ahead in spite of some snow and ice on the course. It was a cracking day out as ever but I found some of the slippery descents a bit hard work in Mudclaws. Huge tracts of the route being frozen solid helped and I finished with dry feet, almost certainly for the first time in five starts. The traditional pie and peas went down well afterwards,as did home-made apple crumble and custard! There were many people there we know and we had a good hour or so after finishing catching-up with the latest gossip

We were going for a Hebden-Splash double this weekend but the Stanbury Splash course has had to be shortened due to ice so we're going over to Bowland again later instead. My next job is either getting Stef out of bed or tackling a sink full of washing up from having pals round for dinner last night. I also need to resist having some of the left-over tiramisu for breakfast, which is not proving easy

I almost forgot, but yesterday was day 50 of our 'streak'. I'm amazed I've kept going (it was Stef's idea and she was much more determined from the start than me) but we've chugged on again this week with a few three and a half milers round the village and the usual Wednesday club-run from the Lion 

Fun in the snow

Last night Stef and I ran up the Beacon with headtorchs. Snow was falling heavily and there was a couple of inches or so already on the ground when we set off. It was fairly wild on top and we didn't hang around by the trig point too long. As we hit the top road on th way down a guy passed by in a 4 x 4 and as we ran past he wound down his window and said, 'you must be bloody bonkers!'. We were still laughing about this this morning

This afternoon we ran over to Bolton Abbey along the Dales Way. The weather was improving all the way there and we stopped a few times to take photographs. We did very well with the birds along the river with dipper, grey wagtail, little grebe, heron, goosander and cormorant all seen. A pair of woodcock were flushed too in the woodland close to Bolton Bridge and we had good views as they flew away