It's raining again, run for the hills

Then add in a sauna to soothe those winter blues

I’m getting used to looking out the window and seeing the glass covered in raindrops, the sky a sheet of slate grey, the trees swaying like they’re in the mosh-pit at an ACDC concert. Driving my son to school the other day, the person on the radio said that the last dry day we had seen in the south-west of England was on 31 December 2025.

Of course, running is not weather dependent - luckily. You can do it in the rain. But after a while it does start to get tiring, especially when all the trails are like splashing through streams and you can’t get your footing. It’s fun the first few times in November, trundling child-like through the mud, but I’ve had enough now, and this week I’ve been mostly sticking to the pathways and running in my road shoes.

On Sunday, because we had a busy day, I was up at dawn - which, admittedly, is only about 7am. It was a dark, gloomy morning, with not a chink of a sunrise anywhere to be seen, and the moment I stepped out the door, cold spiky rain started blathering in my face. We’re really being tested here, I thought. Still, I got home glad that I’d been out.

In an effort to beat the weather, and in a spirit of refusing to be cowed, on Friday I joined a group of friends for a three-hour run on Dartmoor. The moor can be wet and muddy and cold even in August, but we had a cunning plan: after the run we would spend an hour reviving in a sauna by the river. Take that, wind and rain!