SATURDAY AFTERNOON ROLLER COASTER RUN

  If I had a coach.........which I don't...but if I did.......... I would have pinned him against a wall...if there had been a wall at the end of the run.....which there wasn't.....but if there was ,as I said, I'd have pinned him against the wall and with my hand gently caressing his neck (!)  demanded to know what the heck  that run was all  about!
  His reply would have gone something like this......... we wanted 9 miles, you ran 9 miles.......we wanted a near traffic free road run, that's what you got......we needed  a more testing course, not dead flat like the canal,  that's what you got. You  wanted some good countryside autumnal views , that's what you got!   Fine.
  It was testing indeed.  Every single mile of the circuit,  in the Thruscross reservoir area,  involved an uphill pull; enough to give undulating a bad name.   If my Big Dipper course involved multiple short hills, this was a Roller Coast of a run.   Consequently,  only one of the mile splits was under 9, compared to 10 of 12 on the canal.
  It's years since I've even driven in this area and at one point I thought I'd gone wrong but the welcome sight off the Thruscross reservoir came into view and the route I'd planned on gmap-pedometer was falling into place.  

 On the run  I was thinking that in the past I would never have tackled an unknown route such as today without having driven around it.  Great to able to "reccy" it and measure it via the computer. 
 Then of course, the garmin validates the distance and the pace.  In  pre garmin days,  I would have just averaged out the  pace for the undulating course and probably said the run was,  at the very least, 10 miles
.....not a 9. Technology rules..OK!
  After 7 miles the route took me over the Thruscross dam,   before yet another hill to tackle.  A couple of
(borrowed) views going over and looking back ............

Of course, today's run wouldn't have been possible until comparatively recently. It's said at full capacity there are  1725 million gallons of water contained by the Thruscross Dam.  A dam built in in the early 1960s with the loss of the the WEST END village.  No sign today of the remains of the church, school and cottages which can apparently be seen at times of severe drought as in 1989 and 1990.