November 2019 Run Review and Excess Photo Dump

On the 9th, the first freeze of the season arrived with sleet during the last 1/4 of a 20 mile trot. The sun graffito mocks me.

All change this month with a house purchase (and move), Thanksgiving (and return of the Holiday Run Streak), Impeachment yonder and a snap General Election here.  First, monthly stats:

Miles: 141
Runs: 19
Avg:  7.4 miles/run
Long: 20.4 miles
Pubs on runs: 8, and total: 14
Best pub: King Edward VII

 

The 2019 Holiday Run Streak is the first in a couple of years (these always seem to fall on odd-number years) but at the end of the 2017 effort my inflamed soft tissue injuries dating back to the Ridgeway Challenge were only a few months away from curtailing ALL running for the entire summer of 2018.  In fact, return to form has never completely occurred albeit this year represents a noble effort for an old man.

The rules are dynamic, and this year include a minimum of 3 miles per day but use the ultramarathon training schedule I recently started as a guide for the days with longer runs.  More at the first weekly update, here.

One nice discovery this month was the Harborne Walkway, an old railbed converted to paved foot/bike path running from Harborne into (at least) Smethwick.  Exits onto busy roads but also tunnels under or uses old rail bridges to fly over them.

“Stand for something,” reads the sign one of the background women is carrying at the Mary Macarthur monument in Cradley Heath honouring the trade unionist suffragette who, among a long list of achievements, led a strike of women chain makers here in 1910.  Spotted on a long run on my way to the Wetherspoons a couple miles away:

Another rainy run turned up this monument to the 2nd Boer War with another towering woman (I reckon this is Brittania) flanked by two artillery men:

 

This was the day after Remembrance Day and the sad, solitary tribute of poppies at the base seems fitting to a war about gold, diamonds, and the Boer’s resentment of their British overlords prohibiting slavery nearly a century earlier.  These ladies’ diaphanous gowns were worth the stop:

The running plummeted after the house purchase led us into a pre-move refurbishment rabbit hole.  This is beginning to recover with aforementioned Holiday Streak…its weekly updates will supercede the monthly ones from today.