Dover

Running alongside the cliffs

We found a new running series, the coastal trail series. It's whole idea is to run along the coast somewhere. The UK has a lot of coast, and a lot of it is pretty nice, so long as you don't want to swim in the sea. Even though we've been here for a while now, we still hadn't visited the cliffs of Dover. And this race series allowed us to actually run along the cliffs. How could we say no? It was only when we turned up that we discovered that any pictures you may see of the white cliffs of Dover are usually filmed in Sussex. Still the ones we saw were pretty white, and there was even a castle there.

This has got to be one of the toughest races we have done, we signed up to do a 10km race, then it turned out to be 12.3km, that's not an insubstantial increase in the race. The worst thing was it was incredibly muddy, I have been in some muddy races, but this was crazy. The real problem wasn't the mud so much, it was more that the ground underneath the thin mud layer was completely frozen. You just couldn't get much purchase, I managed to fall over within 200m of the start line. That was a bit painful.

Dover castle - didn't even know this existed

Otherwise it was a great run, good views and blue skies. I've done a lot of muddy, long 10km races this winter, I'm kind of wishing I had signed up for a flat, road race somewhere amongst all that.

The lighthouse - the trail dried up for the second half

The finish line was the muddiest point of the whole race, you were finally finished with this slog, had climbed the last hill, and you want to do a nice run across the line, what with everyone watching. Yet it was so muddy you had to just tip toe your way across hoping not to slip. It was a bit of a let down. The poor ultra-marathoners had it the worst, they had to slog through 56km of mud and hills only to get to the end, when all your stabiliser muscles are gone, and try to inch their way across the finish. Some didn't make it, and it took them a long time to stand up again.

The massive Dover harbour, with herd of horses