Snow, floods and tempo runs

Weather: Snowing, but not so much. Quite windy. Wet.
Activity: Tempo run then a cool down run back through the forest.
Remarks: Ate a lot, drank even more tea than yesterday. Died of hypothermia in the morning & subsequently unleashed hell on unsuspecting Stagecoach Bluebird driver. Its cold. And miserable.


I look out the living room window towards Braemar and its a white, white world. I see blizzards. I look out the back door towards Aberdeen and I'm overwhelmed with the urge to build an Ark. It is, quite honestly, bizarre. It's as though the freezing point is hovering directly in line with the house (actually, its our sodding bedroom!). The back is stripped of snow and flooding quite badly as is the rest of lower Aberdeenshire. Aberdeen has been hit quite badly. Two roads in Banchory were closed today - one because of the snow, and one because of flooding. In Stonehaven, a smallish town on the coast 15 miles directly south-east of here, part of the old town slid down the hill and 65 homes have been evacuated for fear of further landslides and/or the River Carron flooding them as it did back in November.

The higher parts of Deeside and further north and inland however are really suffering with snow. A mere 2 miles from here, people have been without power for 2 days and 6 to 8ft high drifts are reported. Schools are shut and buses are running only as far down Deeside as Banchory and on a limited timetable (so I found out this morning). Powerlines all across the affected areas are falling under the weight of the snow or being torn down by falling trees. Ballater is cut off completely.

Two pics above are taken by Fia in Upper Deeside.

The storm thats wrought this havoc is moving south and it looks like Edinburgh and the central belt are taking their turn over the next couple of days. We're due a couple more days of sleet/snow and then, I swear to god, I see sun symbols on the weather forecasts!!!

Oh, I did get to work this morning. Still too dodgy to try and cycle so tried for public transport again. I only had to wait a full 65 minutes for a bus today. In a full-on, extremity numbing, soul sapping Scottish Winter blizzard (as oppose to a Scottish Summer Blizzard). Unbeknownst to me, and the rest of the world for reasons I shall explain shortly, Stagecoach Bluebird - who run the big Deeside buses - had reduced their service from Aberdeen to Braemar down to a) 'once every hour leaving Aberdeen at 25 mins past the hour', instead of the normal once every 20 minutes and b) were only going as far as Banchory. This was of course because of the 'weather'. The second point is not a problem for me as that's as far as I want to go but the first bit? If you think they'd notified anyone, like the public for example, you'd be sadly mistaken. Nothing on website to suggest anything out of the ordinary (a bit like Scotrail not telling anyone all trains between Aberdeen and Inverness had been cancelled yesterday..) and when I tried to call the company this morning to enquire as to whether I was in for a futile wait again today, it rang out repeatedly. So, after I was informed by a schoolboy who'd been told by his driver (its a Stagecoach school bus that grown-ups aren't allowed on) of the situation I challenged the bus driver who eventually picked me up at 9.03 am (I'd been waiting since 7.55am) as to the whereabouts of the missing buses, if in fact they were running once every hour at 25 mins past....and what did I get? Nothing. He looked at me blankly. In fact he looked through me and just gave me a ticket. I know they're not supposed to acknowledge foaming-at-the-mouth irate members of the public but I was close to death (at least), tired, hungry and bloody late for work again!

Tonight, after my mate gave me a lift home from work (otherwise I might still be standing there, waiting..), I decided that I really did need to go for a run to assist in burning off the large amount of crap I've grazed on today (I like the word 'graze'..it implies a polite nibbling. 'Ramming everything in sight down my throat' is actually a slightly more accurate but less ladylike description of my eating habits today) and also to try and burn off some of the tension that had been swimming around in my system since this morning.

So decided on a tempo run. Only had thirty minutes till my pre-arranged Skype video-call-thingy date with daughter in Germany so... 2 x 2k @8:00 min/mile with 1 x 1km @ recovery in between. I'm aiming for a sub 50 min 10km in April, which would make me an extremely happy bunny. It was hard going underfoot - slush, snow, floods and for the first 2k I over compensated and went way too fast (07:39 min/mile) so subsequently I was absolutely fecked for the second 2k, even after 2 mins of jogging/heaving my lifeless corpse around at recovery pace so y'know what? I called it a day and ran home the longer way through the forest instead. Sooooo much more fun.

Tomorrow is, stating the obvious, Saturday and I'm not working so with our end of Deeside losing this icy slush faster than you can say JoDon'tEatTheEntireFridgeContents, I plan on getting out on the bike to make up for some of the lost mileage this week. I can at least mountainbike through floods!