Meeting Nessie

It tends to be a bit dangerous being me when I'm bored and looking at future plans because I get very open to suggestions. I was looking for a short trip during the fall to spend some of my many saved up overtime hours from work so I could start using my vacation time. So when I saw a friend posting about her training for her first marathon I felt... inspired. I had a short chat with her and it didn't take long before I had booked my next extended weekend.

29th - 30th of September

Flying to Inverness, located at the northern end of Loch Ness, turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. I ended up getting tickets with a layover in Amsterdam, but not before I had checked tickets to Aberdeen (still needed a layover, and then a train ride after arriving) or London combining with a train ride north to my destination (flights were fine, but the train ride was long and more importantly expensive). I'll be arriving in the afternoon/evening in Inverness so I have a day and a bit to have a look around before the race. 

1st of October

The Loch Ness marathon is a point-to-point marathon, so in the morning we board busses that will take us south along the coast of the Loch, where we start app. 42km outside Inverness and then run in an almost straight line back to the city (town?) before doing a u-turn just before crossing the finish line. The run is considered as one of the most beautiful runs in the world, so I am looking forward to the views. The course is interesting; the first 16km is pretty much downhill from 350m to app. 50m, but around 28-30km we ascend app. 100m over 2-3km followed by downhill again to get us down to 10-20m. It'll be interesting in more sense than one - it'll be a long slog at the 28-30km mark and definitely give flashbacks to Heartbreak Hill in the Boston marathon.

2nd of October

Expecting to be sore I'll probably not get much sightseeing done before flying back out past noon.

I ended up only travelling Friday-Monday instead of the usual Thursday-Monday, mostly because it was hard to find a place to stay at that was close to the center, available and where the showers weren't shared. But here's crossing my fingers that day will be enough to unfold from the plane seat and be ready to run for 4 hours on the Sunday. I guess we'll have to wait and see.