Destination - Inverness

It’s been a funny year for us with respect to races, we have not entered as many races as we normally do in order to keep the diary clear for the Speed of Light experience.. However, the Inverness half-marathon is one of our favourites in the race calendar. Last week we had a steady training week, nothing spectacular but a decent number of miles under our belt. 

Friday night arrived, we picked up JammyBilly and headed back home for what we anticipated would be a quiet night in and a fairly relaxed start to the Inverness weekend.  How wrong could we be – started to prepare dinner and very quickly realised that we had no water. Fortunately we had enough water to prepare dinner and JammyMo even managed to prepare her infamous Rocky Road for Saturday’s parkrun – after all it is now expected by the runners when JammyMo is Race Director.

To our horror the water was still off on Saturday morning, so we headed off to parkrun to undertake our volunteer duties, JammyBilly was running the course. At parkrun our minds drifted away from the water situation. Optimistically we headed home to pack for the Inverness trip, our hopes dashed by the appearance of six 2 litre bottles of water in our driveway courtesy of Scottish Water. Although, thankfully, we didn’t need to hang about for too long and we headed north to Inverness for the rest of the weekend.

Needless to say the first thing we did when checked into our hotel was to hit the showers.  Bliss!  Saturday night was spent in the company of fellow Jammys -  JammyIain, JammyAlly, and  JammyRo discussing various aspects of parkrun and running in general much to JammyRo disgust – typical teenage boy, he doesn’t GET this running thing yet!  But he will! JammyAnt, on the other hand, was tucked away in a more romantic location

The Global Energy Invernesshalf- marathon is a great event, well organised and a brilliant atmosphere. However, while hanging about in the Sports hall we were approached by Bryan Burnett who requested an interview – so with PR in mind we agreed to his request.  Turned out to be an interview seeking our views on Marathon running and why we do it.  Why does everyone want to know why we run? It is always a hard question to answer, there are countless reasons but surely the most obvious one is the simple one – we enjoy it.

The race was once again well supported by the people of Inverness who were on the streets giving us a good cheer all along the way. Half-marathons are without doubt my favoured distance, they take enough of an effort to be worthwhile and yet you feel you can do another one the following weekend. I also like the races that finish on a running track, in your head you are competing in the Olympics – Brilliant! It’s even better when there are people there shouting out your name, thanks JammyLu and JammyIain.  Unfortunately JammyLu had to pull out but in true Jammy Tradition was there cheering on the Jammys as they finished.

All too soon the race experience was over and we headed back home. Shock – the water was still not on.  So back to using bottled water – it’s frightening just how much water you use for everyday things in the household. However, happy to report that the water was restored on Monday when we returned from work.  Water, we’ll never take it for granted again!