Step Outside

It's July, and it's already rained all June, and is set to carry on, so it would seem for all July.  And I can't wait for the autumn, and for next year when I can put a key in the ignition and simply drive away or indeed to the weather I want.  Or at least try to.  And this gives me blind optimism, and the ability to cruise through the current wet spell, safe in the knowledge that soon I'll be out of here.  Two months now and counting down until I have the time and the means to just go out there and be me.  And I'm happily planning.  Well, with a spot of apprehension.  Going through the thought process of "have I done enough?" when I think about consecutive days of walking involving Bothies or tents.  Have I given my walking legs enough attention.  And I still want to get out on my bike and I want to get out and climb, and I know that all this is because I have had four days without much movement.  Suddenly a sense of urgency is hitting me.  I have to get out.  It's an irrational response but it feels with no warning as though all the exercise I've done in previous weeks is worthless, has gone, vanished, imploded leaving a widening middle aged spread and a strange sense of lethargy and stillness.  And I know deep down it'll all be fine, because I'm me, and I'm planning.  Planning my way out of things as ever.  So Wednesday will see me doing <something> which might be climbing (indoors, seriously, have you seen the weather?) or bike riding.

Anyway, the reason for doing the nothing thing over the weekend was a glorious weekend of mud,  mud, glorious mud (bother, I am going to be singing in my  head songs involving a bold hippopotamus now).  Which was a rather lovely experience, a little mellow and a little land of the strange but all in all, pretty damn satisfying.

In my normal embracing the random style, I went to Plymouth to the twentyfour12 event.  It's an enduro mountain bike event.  Riders race in pairs or teams or solo units for 12 or 24 hour period doing repeated laps of the Newnham circuit.  Bottles was my job.  As opposed to the bike (thankfully).  And Friday night in the campsite we welcomed the joy of the weather which the media was touting as "one month's rainfall in a day" and "heaviest deluge in 100 years" in the Plymouth area.  And our experience of this would confirm a gut feeling of correctness in the media for once.  3am and the flood waters were in the tent.  Paddling in rolled up PJs, moving already sodden clothing helplessly into a place of safety (that would be on top of the cool box then).  And going back to bed.  Because there was nothing else to be done.

This in fact, probably sums it up best:

TwentyFour12 from the pits.

And the tune inside my head courtesy of the four non blondes:

"And so I wake in the morning and I step outside
And I take deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs,
WHAT'S GOIN' ON!!"