While I’m house & cat sitting for my sister Jo in Trinity, every other day I’ve been going for a dawn run. I’d forgotten how many valleys there are around this part of Jersey, how steep the sides are and that in order to get anywhere using the lanes, the only way to go is by crossing said valleys several times.
I was climbing up a very steep hill from le Moulin de Ponterrin this morning and rounding a sharp bend where the lane gets even steeper I was thinking that when I reached the top I was just going to to need a minute to recover. Getting into an oxygen debt rhythm after a few minutes of steep uphill is painful, legs and lungs burning, the thought of a rest at the top is just tempting enough to keep me going though.
This particular hill has a point where the climb gets less steep but still nowhere near flat and on reaching this bit I willed myself to keep going. It only takes about thirty second before things get easier, but it seems a lot longer and very unfair that the pain doesn’t go away when the worst of the climb is over. The reward of such perseverance this morning was that, once my breathing had recovered and the oxygen debt repaid, it seemed like I was flying :)
