Trip to Norway and beyond ...  pre-Covid-19 days


Report by Brian Admanson


This was going to be a late Where in the World entry last month, but Sarah asked me to extend it a bit, so as we’re not getting very far these days, I thought I’d remind us of a world beyond the rolling green horizons we see while out on our latest EGRC challenge.  (I nearly used the word “confined”, but I think we’re lucky to be surrounded by some beautiful countryside, and are kept engaged and entertained by our little community, so the word didn’t seem appropriate.)


It seems a long time ago now after some hot spring days, but as recently as 3 months ago, I went to Tromsø in Norway with Paula (also EGRC) and my younger 17-year-old son Lewis (Bristol & West) to – hopefully – see the Northern Lights as part of my 50th birthday celebrations.  Of course, I rarely travel anywhere these days without my running gear, and before heading back to the airport at lunchtime on our last day, I did manage to squeeze in my first run north of the Arctic Circle.  It’s surprising how quickly you can warm up on a winter run in the Arctic, but the hat and 2 pairs of gloves most definitely stayed on – except of course to quickly snap these pictures!  And I’m glad I remembered to take trails!
     
And we were lucky enough to see the aurora borealis…
  
I’m lucky enough to have travelled a fair bit, and luckier still to have visited some places through work.  More recently, I have always taken my gear, and so have run in some diverse places: cold Boston, sweltering Puerto Rico, the barren Cape Verde Islands, rainy Tel Aviv, oppressively humid Hong Kong, as well as Lisbon, Menorca, Nice, Italy, and Lake Geneva.
        
Incidentally, your pace looks really good when you run on a moving ship…
    
Sometimes the work visits can get in the way of a training plan, but not always: last year, I did my first half-marathon since 1996, the crazy Cheddar Gorge, so when the hotel and office in Belgium just happened to be 13.1 miles apart in the week that I was ready to give the distance a go, there was only one way I was going to travel back after work!
But sometimes your luck runs out.  I’ve never actually run a race abroad, and we were booked in to do the Melbourne 10k in July on our last day visiting Paula’s brother and his new baby son.  As we’re all too aware, events have taken over, so I’ll have to wait.  Disappointing of course, but with all that’s going on, I’m keeping it in perspective.
And finally, while you’re changing flights on another continent, you never know who you might bump into heading the other way back towards Pomphrey…