Not Running Over a Deer

Monday 2nd March

Run #59

2.5k Richmond Park in the Dark

I had almost arrived home in the light this evening (Yay! for Spring and an end to dark evenings) but by the time I got sorted into my run kit and headed out it was properly dark. And cold. A beautifully clear cloudless and crisp cold day had given way to an equally crisp and colder night and the air felt like it had ice in it. So I had on my thermal leggings and a vest top under my baselayer as well as a woolly bobble hat. That's the thing with super short slow runs: no chance to warm up. So, although it feels daft getting so many clothes on for what will be a less than 20 minute run it has to be done to enjoy the experience at all. I started out across the top of Richmond Hill - one of my favourite place for the awesome view out across to the West.

What I love about nights like this is that London has a crazy orange glow of light pollution that, where it hits the petrol blue of the darkening night sky, turns an almost coppery green. It is almost impossible to do justice to the luminosity of colour with an iPhone, or probably any camera in fact. But it sure is magical.

As I ran along the top a woman ran past me and into Richmond Park. The Park gates are locked at dusk to cars, but the pedestrian gates stay open all night and commuting cyclists use the direct route of the Park's roads well past dark. The fantastically inspiring Marathon Man Rob Young - running 367+ marathons in a year for kids' charities - was running his daily marathon around the Park at 3am with just a head torch. (read more about Rob here and, I urge you, donate whatever you can: he is the most humble amazing selfless runner I have ever met and is achieving something I would not even think was possible to raise money for vulnerable, disadvantaged and abused kids). But I have never ventured inti the Park in the dark. The idea of barrelling right over a deer and onto my face seemed too likely.

However, seeing this woman run past me and off down the (reverse) Tamsin Trail without even a head-torch spurred me on and I slipped through the pedestrian gate. The Park in the dark is surreal. In honesty, the Park without cars is odd enough. But the moon was a good 3/4 and, after a string of very clear days and nights, shone like a beacon making the path that I know so well easy enough to see even if I didn't, my unexpected shadow stretching out to my side.

Not planning on going more than a k in, and back I set off towards Pembroke Lodge. I was immediately struck by the silence. And then by every noise. Not rustles of animals in the undergrowth as I'd feared, but the scrunch of gravel under my trainers, and my breath loud in my ears. It all sounded amplified for the extra still crispness of everything around me.

I knew Richmond Park was high ground - there is a part called King Henry's mound where, on a clear day, you have a direct sightline through a special avenue in the trees all the way to St Paul's Cathedral - but in the dark I was aware of it in a very different way. Off to my left the sparkly orange haze of central London spread out on the horizon; the red lights of the cranes winking against the just discernible shapes of the Shard. Over to my right the spread of Greater London to the South West. Brighter for being closer. And me, running along alone in my bubble of darkness lit only by the moon.

Far from the fear I thought I'd feel I felt a cheery happiness bubbling up in me and it took all my focus not to rise up on my toes and sprint off down the path. But the congested tightness in my calves and tenderness down my Achilles kept me anchored to the ground and the reality of why I shouldn't, as I slipped back out of the gate and back towards civilization far sooner than I would have liked.