It was Monday morning. I was back at the office. My weekend run in the Wicklow Mountains seemed oh so far away.
As usual, I opened up my outlook inbox to see what emails I had to deal with that day.
Nestled amongst various work tasks I found an email from a fellow mountain runner. “Were you up Prince William’s Seat at all on Saturday?” he enquired. I had indeed been running there only 48 hours ago. Now how would he have ever known that? Prince Williams’ Seat is an area that few mountain runners frequent. Not only that, but I had told no one of my route. The mist was also down that day, so no one could have possibly seen me out there.
I read on. “We found some small Inov-8 shoe prints that were close together and figured they must have been yours”.
There’s not many places in the world where you can go and be tracked down so easily. Other mountain paths would be pummelled by walkers’ foot prints, making it hard to distinguish individual tracks. This path in question is also a boggy way, and with the wet weather, a perfect imprint of my shoe had been moulded in the mud. And with my 1.60m stature and female status, my stride length and foot size matched perfectly with my description. I’d truly been tracked down.
Small feet, small stride, small world… I like it.
No way… that’s amazing that guys recognise you from your blog! Nice job!
For us here in Ireland, the mountain running community is really small (only around 1000 runners) so we can pretty much figure who would be out on which route. Its really cool when you see runners out in the hills as you’re more than likely going to know them.
Enjoy the runs and the fame, and keep blogging Reluctant Runner!
I love it when stuff like that happens! I have people coming up to me at the beginning of races asking if I’m the Reluctant Runner, makes me happy that there are people out there who read my blog and actually retain what is being said, to the extent where they might actually recognize me;)