Late 2011 I got talking with Alick, a local dad who I saw swimming in the local lake and running home. He’d done some long endurance stuff – a couple of Iron Man 70.3s and a full Iron – and regularly trained in the Surrey hills around Guildford. We planned to run together the next Sunday morning. For some reason he couldn’t make it, so I went alone and found a route that had mostly roads and some son-of-a-bitch hills. I ended up doing that same run, in Newlands Corner on the North Downs, every Sunday for several weeks, waking up at the crack of dawn or earlier and getting down there, running and then buying pastries on the way back for my family and bewing coffee just as they were just waking up.

That’s really important to me, the family thing. My wife and I work in London during the week so we don’t see each other or the kids except for an hour in the morning and a couple of hours most evenings, so the weekends are special. I never considered before that it would be possible to a) enjoy running, or b) to enjoy it and fit it into a schedule without missing much family time, but with crack of dawn runs both of these were becoming real. Of course that meant no lie-ins, and somewhat earlier nights at weekends which played havoc with my late-night video gaming schedule (!), but running won that little battle. I never thought I’d say that.

After a few weeks of my little route, Alick joined me – and I realised there was a whole new area of Newlands Corner I didn’t know about. Actually, that’s an understatement, I knew very little of this vast piece of rolling Surrey hills. However, tragedy struck soon afterwards: Alick got injured and had to wear an air boot, and I wanted to take a look around this new place – so again every weekend I went down to Newlands on a Sunday and had a snoop around – sometimes running tracks that I knew, but often just running an ad-hoc route, taking my time, finding my way around, sometimes running 15-16 miles and then trying to find my car again. One particularly special morning, the morning when I think it really turned from a pastime to an obsession for me, was in November. Just checked back on Facebook, and on 4th December this is what I recorded:

Started off this run trying to recreate last week’s loop. At about 5K I decided to veer off-course and explore, which meant negotiating my way across a very narrow (like, 4-inch) beam across a river, getting lost in Blair Witch-type woods, …running accidental loops-within-loops, running through a llama farm, almost being shat on by an enthusiastic horse, constant stopping to look for or ask directions, and ploughing through consistently and unendingly boggy fields. And the hills, oh the hills. Slow. But fun! Great fun, funnest running yet. Get well soon, Alick, the trail is waiting next week!

In the absence of a training partner I kept on going with Newlands, each time finding something new or a new trail to follow. On a breakout from my usual area I found St Martha’s hill, at the summit of which is not only St Martha’s church but also, in a darkly comical way, a graveyard – after climbing the long steep hill to reach it I often wondered how many of the occupants were dressed in shorts and a T-shirt.

I kept records of each run via Garmin, sharing them with running friends on Facebook. Then Sarah spotted some races scheduled for early 2012 at Newlands, the G3 Series. Each a different route, between 10K and 12K. I entered all three, in a moment of madness; in January, Feb and March. There were Garmin routes available, so I programmed one into my watch and went running it one day. It became like orienteering – following a map and (electronic) compass to find my way around. The elevation gain on this 10K run was in the region of 240m (~700 feet), which was an eye-opener for a race. But how enjoyable? Very. Lots of fit people, stood near the back, Sarah & kids there to support me and buy me coffee at the end, cold conditions. Over in 69 minutes. Lovely. The second and third runs were equally enjoyable, except that #2 was in -6 degrees, and #3 was in thick snow.

But that’s possibly the most wonderful thing about trail running. With road, the surface is pretty much always the same (except when it’s snowing, admittedly). But with trail, each season, sometimes even each week, is different – the running surface, the views, the air, the soundtrack, the challenge.