Running in Sheffield

One of the views from my running route

Sheffield, as any fule kno, is built on seven hills, like Rome.  This has implications for the jogger.  It's brute physics, I'm afraid.  I was never much good at physics at school.  We were badly taught.  Actually, to be fair, we were badly behaved as well.  As badly behaved as grammar school girls get, that is.  We had a young newly qualified physics teacher who drove a yellow TR7.  It had hidden headlights that reared up out of the bonnet like startled eyes.  The 6th form once attached crepe paper eyelashes to them.  Well I remember the day when he darkened the lab in order to demonstrate a cathode ray oscilloscope.
       'What colour would you say that is, girls?'
       Well, duh. (An anachronism. Duh hadn't been invented back in the 70s, but it covers the semantic range of what we all thought.)
       'Come along 4B.  What colour is it?'
       'The colour of your eyes, sir,' replied Katy Staples, meltingly.
       Peppering fire of sniggers from 4B.
       'My eyes are BROWN!' he snapped.

You see?  I remember that incident vividly, but I cannot remember any actual physics beyond ripple tanks and F=MA.  I suspect this formula is relevant to shifting your carcass up a steep hill.  If you know another more relevant formula, then I daresay you weren't a member of 4B at Aylesbury High School for Girls in 1977.

When we lived in Liverpool, the (then) dean and I used to jog a three mile loop round Princes Park.  Occasionally we got caught up in the Park Run, and got overtaken by sprightly octogenarians, seven year olds, and other assorted nutters.  But mostly it was uneventful.  And flat.  The dean, in a tedious meeting before we moved, plotted a new route in Sheffield.  I studied it on the map.  It looked flat enough to me.  Besides, it was mostly round the perimeter of the Hallamshire golf course.  I mean, how hilly could that be?

I will now insert another picture, to allow Sheffield people time to cackle gleefully that their city is built on seven hills.

Another view from my running route

Having always believed I loathed running up hills, I have to report that it is strangely addictive.  My new route is proper cross country stuff, up banks, down rocky paths, skipping across streams and tree roots, and so on.  It's new to me.  We never did cross country at school.  800m was about our limit, and we moaned about that. We moaned about the showers, too; that toe-curling hell of adolescent embarrassment.  We squirmed out of showering whenever possible.  Once the PE teacher shouted across the changing room, 'I know it's only four weeks till the end of term, girls; but could you PLEASE take your aertexes home and wash them?'  Nonsense.  Nothing that a couple of squirts of Stowaway couldn't put right.

I've rather surprised myself.  It's bloody hard work, but compared with street running, it's exhilarating.  Sometimes, as I fling my arms out for balance, I feel like I'm flying, the way I did as a child.  Look at meee, look at meee!  If anyone was looking, they would only see a middle aged woman mincing cautiously down a rocky bank towards a stream.  But what do they know?  Today I remembered a childhood song. If you're part of the 'Singing Together' generation, you may recall it too: 'Streamlets are rushing by, down from the mountain high...'  Here it is.  You're very welcome.