The Second Farm Gate

A few months after moving house, yesterday I had my first case of “not this trail again.”

I’d already found two loops that had quietly become the go-tos. Nothing wrong with either of them, but that morning the familiar turn felt like opening the fridge for the fourth time expecting the contents to have changed (I do this all the time).

So I decided to look for another trail head, saw something I hoped would loop around and dipped down the left instead of my usual for a bit.

An hour later I was still going. Two hours in, I was still going. Turns out the trail did loop back but the question of when took a little longer to answer. The watch jumped between 5 and 9min/km.

Old me would have probably deleted the file. For him, any run that averaged slower than 4:00/km was soft. That included warm-ups, cool-downs, recovery days and sometimes the walk from the car park. I still need reminders to stop obsessing over the metrics. I’ve become very good at getting a session done and arriving. Less good, it turns out, at just being out there.

Exploration was fine in theory. In practice, getting lost meant not getting the most out of a session. Going off-script meant the numbers wouldn’t add up. The watch was the referee and it didn’t care about scenery.

Yesterday, the terrain sorted it. Rocky, uneven, constantly trying to read which rock would hold, which would roll and which had grip. Any misstep and I’d have been looking at six weeks of tendon rehab at best.

I lost track of time entirely. Which, for me, takes some doing. Comparison is the thief of joy they say and still these days on a normal run, I can’t help but judge a run by the numbers on my watch.

There was a time when this was just how training worked. You’d ask a local for a route and they’d say turn left at the second farm gate, follow the ridge until you hit the stream. Getting lost was basically guaranteed. You’d come back late, slightly muddy, having covered some approximate distance at some approximate pace, and that was fine.

The apps fixed all of that. Every trail pre-mapped, every route previewed, elevation profile loaded before the first step. Strava even built a feature specifically for people who run the same routes repeatedly - it tracks your times across every attempt, charts your progression, tells you whether you’re faster or slower than last Tuesday. The fact that this feature exists tells me I’m not alone in the constant measurement contest.

Which means we’ve also optimised away the small decisions. Do I go left or right here. What’s down there. Where does this come out. The navigating by feel, by light, by which direction the water’s running. The mild low-grade problem-solving that used to be a standard part of an easy hour. We’ve become so good at removing the friction of discovering that it’s probably worth adding some back in.

The run a few days ago was 2h-ish. 20km-ish. I’m not entirely sure of either number and I find I don’t particularly want to check.

I won’t pretend the whole thing felt good in the moment. There’s a stretch somewhere in the second hour where I was tired, vaguely unsure where I was, and the responsible adult part of my brain was making some reasonable points about dinner plans.

The tired part fades. You remember the trail dropping away around a corner you hadn’t expected. The decision you made at the fork that turned out to be right, or wrong, and it didn’t much matter either way.

There’s probably a second farm gate on your road too. A track you’ve not been taking because the loop you know works fine and the numbers come out clean.

It’ll probably add an hour. You might hate it until you don’t.

Jan.