Ras Moel Wnion

Last year I had noticed a bit later there was a race on Moel Wnion. That's my back garden! I regretted that I hadn't run it, even though the weather had been pretty bleak. But now that I am an Eryri Harrier, I find out about these things. But it is a fell run; I am rubbish at those. So I decided to do the decent thing and offer my services as a marshal to Ross, who organises it. Ross is not only a Thursday runner, but also my former classmate in Cymraeg +. 

To my surprise, he didn't need my services. And then I thought I might as well run the thing. I like running in that area! And I would be able to bike to the start in about 10 minutes. That is a luxury. I felt a little bit guilty about it, given that the day after I would run the last Borders League. And you're supposed to take it easy (or "taper") in the days before a serious race. I'm not sure if a race with 476 m ascent counts as taking it easy. But I couldn't resist!

In the blazing sun I biked to the school where registration was. That was a quick process! I also saw that there was a route map. There had been none on social media. But I knew what the route map had been a few years ago. I thought I recognised the route as starting like one of my weekend runs. And I thought I saw where the start was. I clearly should have looked a bit longer! 

I biked to where I thought the start was, and saw only one other person. He said that the start was further back on a small asphalt road. That would be close to where the start had been these years ago. I went there. And indeed! There was a sign saying "Start”. But there were only some three other runners there. I clearly wasn't the only one who was a bit confused. I locked my bike and got ready.

More people then turned up. It was going to be okay! And then we started. Initially, it was quite busy, but the field spread out quite quickly.

Start of the ascent

After a while everyone suddenly headed right. What was that? Weren't we going to go straight ahead? There was no marshal. Normally I just run after everybody else, but this time I decided against it. It's a fell run, after all! If you just hit the checkpoints it doesn't really matter what you're doing in between. I went straight ahead. And that changed everything.

I had the hill to myself. Which is nice, but not what I had expected. I just pootled on. The route was even marked! But maybe that had been for the juniors? And this time, I headed straight up the hill to the summit of Moel Wnion. If I just run that as a leisure run, I run over the big path to the pass and then take another big path to the summit. But this was a fell race. So I just picked some sort of line over the slope. And eventually reunited with all the other runners. I had clearly not been very efficient! But that's okay. I wasn't here to do well. 

Looking at y Gyrn from the flank of Moel Wnion 

From the summit of Moel Wnion we headed to the summit of y Gyrn. That is something I never do! There is a block field there and I avoid it. But not today. Then from there we went over y Llefn, down Bwlch ym Mhwll Lle, and then up Moel Faban. And obviously The uncomfortable way down. The finish was right at the bottom of the incline. That thing is too steep for me to run down at any speed whatsoever. I don't normally get to finish with so much breath to spare! Even last Tuesday they had been so polite as to make the finish uphill. Not here.

Approaching the finish 

The finish

Looking back at the incline

I cheered on some more runners and then went to go and get my bike. Then I went to registration; there I handed my number back in, and got me some soup with bread. And then it was time to go home again. And that was all downhill!

The day after, the logistics would not be anywhere near that convenient! But the race would be on the road. So then I would be sure to reach the finish satisfyingly out of breath…

Spring

The clocks have changed! The sun is out! The trees are getting leaves! It is clearly spring. 

I personally really like bare trees, so I suppose I like spring a bit less than most people. But I really enjoy the longer evenings. I can already see Jenny, my Welsh tutor, on Friday after work, and then still bike home without needing bicycle lights. You can do evening runs again without needing a head torch.

I already have meals in the garden. And I suppose the first barbecue of the season can't be very far off now. And the cat and me are often found in the conservatory. I like winter; I love sitting snugly by the fire with a pot of tea. But this might actually be even better!

Thursday Night Hen

The clocks had changed, and we would finally do our ThursdayNight Hill sessions on the trails again! Not that we necessarily were kept away from these in the dark, but now we could finally do a trail session in comfort. But as lovely as it was, that was not the emphasis of the night. One of our regular runners, Lucy, was about to get married, so this was a bit of a hen night run. 

On the parking lot where we gather she was given a veil, an ‘L’ plate (this is a British tradition), a ‘bride to be’ tiara and a sequinned clutch. And then we set off. We went north of the lake. And the second time we stopped to regroup, Lucy was told to open the clutch and get a piece of paper out. They all had tasks on them. This task was column run backwards for one minute. So she did! Which turned out to be surprisingly tiring.

Hen having to run backwards 

I think we improvised the route a bit. We had to see how much time would be taken up by the tasks, and we had to be back by eight as we would go for a pizza afterwards, and had a reservation. So we just ran around in the vicinity of the quarry. It's beautiful there!

Steep bit

Lucy got a lot more tasks. Such as high-fiving everyone, do squats or push-ups, dance for one minute to "Dancing Queen", et cetera. It was good fun!

Low sun

Even lower sun

Then we got back to the parking lot. Some people went home, but we had to tables’ worth of pizza eaters. I don't really like eating this late, but I had been strong-armed into joining by some of the runners who had been there on Tuesday. And it is nice to spend time with lovely people.

I hope Lucy will have a lovely wedding. At least she seemed quite chuffed with her hen night run!

First race of the Tuesday Night Series

I hadn't really been thinking about the Tuesday night series when I signed up to Welsh class. On Tuesday night. To be honest, I also hadn't quite been thinking about cave rescue, which also does its activities mainly on Tuesday night. I clearly wasn't thinking very much at all!

When the Tuesday Night Series came up I got a little bit too tempted. The first race is around y Fron, and that area is very beautiful. It also didn't look like one of those over the top fell races where are you are almost always on a slope that is so steep you can neither run up nor down. And if you show up for one of the first races, you can pay for the whole series and be done with it. Then you can just show up and run. 

I also knew what the course material for that evening's Welsh class would be, and I figured it was a part that I could catch up on myself. Also, it was stunning weather. So I decided to go!

I drove up to  y Fron I barely recognised the place. It was absolutely clogged with cars. It is normally rather sleepy village, but not now! I found a little corner to squeeze my car into and headed for registration. I was starting to already see familiar faces around me. I am getting to know an increasing number of people in the local running scene. 

Y Fron, but different 

Registration was quick. And I found Geoff and Josh, who had already seen the start. It was close to where we had parked. So we headed that way, and I dropped off my bag and jacket in the car. I was ready to run!

At the start I saw many more people I knew: Thursday runners, Eryri Harriers, Eryri Orienteers, and even an evolutionary biologist. It was nice! And I made sure I wasn't too close to the front when we were lined up for the start. This was a fell race, after all. I am rubbish at those!

We set off, and in the beginning it was very crowded, but that sorted itself out. It was a beautiful run! The area is so gorgeous, and it was all bathed in beautiful evening light. We ran among quarrying remains. And at some particularly steep bit of a spoil heap there was a bit of a queue, but I didn't mind. Later my shoelace came undone. That was a bit annoying, but also not a big deal.

Pic by Thomas Owen

Pic by Thomas Owen

The race ended in a descent on a tiny little path, where I took it easy, and then the last bit on a gravel road. I am more at home there! I managed to overtake some people in the last few hundred metres. I didn't run a particularly good time, but I had immensely enjoyed it. And I was cheered over the finish by a clump of Thursday runners. That was lovely!

The finish

There was a bit of catching up at the finish, which included some Thursday runners trying to persuade me to go for pizza after the next Thursday run. I think they were successful. Stay tuned! But then I figured I should go back to my car. It was a bit exposed at the finish, and I was in my sweaty running shirt. So I jogged back, and drove back while the sun was beautifully setting in the sea. Next week I will be a good girl and be in Welsh class. But I hope I can do a few of these races! They are fun!

Last geology field trip of the academic year

We have six trips in the geological module, and we now have got to number five. I have a timetable clash for the sixth one, so this was my last. But it was a good one to end with.

This was the trip to Rhosneigr, with a little bonus of blueschists with the Marquess of Anglesey (or more accurately, a statue of him) on top. The blueschists are a clear indicator of subduction. And it’s pretty as well!

The Marquess

The blueschists, looking green because of algae growing on top of them. Am I pointing at two pillows from pillow lava? 

We had some slight trouble with the vehicle we were using; more often than not it was claiming that there was a door open, and still claiming that if we had slammed all of them shut with really more force than needed to get them properly closed. We are not quite sure what that was about.  

In the Rhosneigr area we first look at some contact metamorphism; there is a (Precambrian) granitic intrusion in that area, and there are also some rocks exposed to that have been baked by this. So we look at both. And then we make a bit of a jump. From there we go straight to Ordovician sandstones and conglomerate. That is something where Jaco go out with sediment dynamics. 

Llyn Maelog 

Talking about rocks with a lot of disruption 

We finish it off on the beach, where there are more sedimentary rocks, but with these we focus on the deformation. It's mudstone with interbedded turbidites, and these are beautifully deformed. 

Beautifully deformed rock

It was stunning weather for this trip! That did have the unwanted effect, though, that it was fine weather for flying around, and the location is really close to a military airport. Propeller airplanes flying overhead makes it impossible to make yourself heard, but a fighter jet flying overhead actually hurts your ears.

I think it was a good trip. And then next week the two gentlemen round things off without me. And then we'll do it all again next year! 

Back to Llyn Alwen with Kate and Bryn

The best thing you can have when your heart is a bit bruised is friends. And if they have pets that’s a nice bonus! So after my last romantic dead end I checked if Kate was around over the weekend. And she was! I suggested we might just walk the dog together, and Kate suggested a rerun of our Llyn Alwen walk from some 15 months ago. That sounded good. 

It was a gorgeous day! Maybe a little bit more wind than would have been ideal, but sunny. It was good to catch up. And Bryn was his usual funny but obnoxious self. It was a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon! 

The dam

The lake

First selfie attempt: dog not in view

Dog in view now: he’s sneaking in a kiss while Kate is distracted by taking the picture 

First longish leisure run in a while

Since recovering from my ankle injury, I had not done any long runs that weren’t races. But I had an empty weekend ahead, so I figured it was time! And I decided to do an old favourite: around Moel Wnion. And I went after breakfast, as it would be raining in the afternoon.

It was dry, but it was windier than I had anticipated. But initially I had the wind in the back. I went anticlockwise this time.

Between Moel Wnion and y Drosgl

It was nice to run into the hills again! I hadn't done much of that recently. And I don't get beyond y Gyrn much. 

When I got to Ffridd Ddu the sun came out. But it still was very windy! I started to get tired of the endless noise in my ears. And there pretty much was no shelter at all along the way. I just plodded on.

Sea views from the other side of Ffridd Ddu 

Over the stepping stones through the boggy terrain

Where the path curves into Bwlch ym Mhwll Lle there was shelter. It was lovely! So quiet. But also very brief.

Close to the village I bumped into walking ladies, one of which was Sara, the first person I followed on Bluesky. And then I was home.

It has been a veritable plod! But it seems to be good for you to sometimes do that. Not everything has to be high intensity. And the views had been great! And with it being spring now, I might do this more often. In winter I often end up on the roads because the hills are just too soggy. But this is a lot nicer!

Stem cell donor

I routinely donate blood. I am also a registered organ donor. I am too old to be an egg donor. And my hair is too grey and too dreadlocked to be eligible for donation for wigs. So I thought that was it. But then I got a message from Miles in which he mentioned stem cell donation. I didn't know that was a thing! But it clearly is. And it sounds like such a good thing to do. The very next day I googled it, and signed up. It's not like blood donation; they don't just take your stem cells and assume they will find someone who can use them. You just end up in a database, and they might never find a match, so you might never actively donate. But if they do, you can really make a difference in someone's life. It will probably be a bit of a hassle as you probably have to get to England have your stem cells harvested, but I will cross that bridge when I get there.

I got my test kit! It's a swab test like a Covid test. Very easy to do. It's now on its way to be analysed. I will get a confirmation when they get it. And then time will tell if they ever identify me as a match…

Sport Science research seminar

I was just running the Thursday Hills when one of my fellow runners, Geoff from Sports Science, mentioned that the following week, the Sports Science talk would actually involve marine science. Maybe I was interested? It involved diving seals. It sounded interesting so I said I'd mail him to remind him to give me the details. And I turned out to be available that day.

On the day I biked to Normal Site, an obscure part of the university between Ocean Sciences and main campus. Apparently, that is where sports science is. I got to the correct building, and to my surprise, my key card gave access to it. I quickly found Geoff, the seminar organiser, and Josh, one of the speakers, who had also been in the previous night’s race.

Geoff introducing the first speaker

The first speaker, the one who was talking about seals, spoke online from St Andrews. He talked of the relationship between heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, and suchlike, in diving creatures. His facility had a license for capturing seals, involving them in their research for a while, and then releasing them back into the wild. So they sometimes had seals do some swimming underwater with a sensor on their heads that would measure the parameters they were interested in. And he did say something about that they can just turn their heart rate down to as low as 3 bpm if they anticipate that they will be underwater for a while.

He also mentioned that it is a lot of faff to have to catch a wild seal, anaesthetise it so you can fit it with instrumentation, and then have it dive around in your pool for a while. It was a lot easier to work with humans. You can just politely ask if they are willing to have instrumentation on their heads, and then do a dive. And humans are pretty rubbish divers in comparison to seals, but they could work with that.

He had also done research on people with a freediving habit, such as some Korean women who dive for mollusks and suchlike. Their physiology seem to be amazing.

I was wondering a bit how talented seals are in guessing how long their next dive is going to be. If you misjudged it, you can get into trouble. But then he also showed the graph of the diving behaviour of an elephant seal over a few days, and there was a very clear pattern in that. It really looked like these marine mammals know, and plan, what they're doing. I still wondered, though, if you could take advantage of it. If you see a seal do shallow dives, and you are a clever predator, you might be able to disrupt its surfacing, and know that they would be in distress pretty quickly because their heart rate is too high.

The next speaker was Josh, talking about chimpanzees. He was interested in cardiovascular disease, and chimpanzees just don't get that. It doesn't matter how old they get. And he said that if you have a captive chimpanzee and you give it junk food, they still don't get the diseases we get. I'm not sure how anyone would get ethical clearance for this, but it might have been an experiment done decades ago.

Josh with his research questions 

He showed us the heartbeat pattern of a healthy chimp, and that of a healthy human. It was indeed quite different! He said that the chimps’ pattern looks like that of a human in heat stress, or just after exercising. And he said it doesn't respond much to changes in temperature or activity levels and things like that. And it seems that our circulation seems to be tailored to excellent heat regulation. We seem to do that a lot better than chimpanzees! But that comes with the problem that we don't seem to have the robustness that they have. But I suppose that means the chimp has to stay in the forest. They might need the shadow!

He also said that chimpanzees still live in the habitat they evolved for. We don't. We evolved for being on the move. Where chimpanzees and humans started to separately descend from our common ancestor, savannahs had just come into fashion, and the chimps weren't interested, but the humans went there, and started to chase after prey. And that's tiring! So we learned to conserve energy. But now we get our food from the supermarket, which we may very well drive too, and we still want to conserve energy. And that goes wrong. And because we know spent most of our time indoors, we don't really need that thermal regulation so much anymore. But we have it, with all its drawbacks.

He had not only studied chimpanzee; like the previous speaker, he had also studied humans. And he was interested in subsistence farmers, because although they are not hunter-gatherers anymore, they are still quite close to but we are humans are supposed to be. And he was measuring things such as their activity levels and blood pressure overtime. And he compared that to people from a subsistence farming background who had fairly recently (In the last decades) moved into cities, and to people of European descent (the research had been known in Mexico) who had been living in cities for generations. No prizes for guessing who had the best cardiovascular health.

I found it quite funny that this guy is clearly quite an enthusiastic runner. He stays close to his roots! He might not frequent the African savannah, but he stays on the move. He knows what's good for him!

At the end of the talk we chatted a bit more. Some of it about running! He and Geoff were going to do a fell race the next day, and do the first Tuesday Night Fell Race the week after. But then it was time to leave. I took home some of the leftover brownies; there hadn’t been much of a turnout, so there were many of them. In spite of both Ocean Sciences and Natural Sciences having been invited! And then I got onto my bike. I had plenty to think about. I love sometimes going to seminars that have nothing to do with my own field of expertise. You always learn something new!