I like rain

I like rain. It feels good running (or walking) in rain. It washes the sweat off your face and the dust out of your eyes. It stops you from overheating and there’s no chance of sunburn on the back of the calves. The air tastes sweeter and so do you. You don’t stink so much when you stop and your clothes have already done their first rinse in the wash.

I even like mud. Slippy, slidey, sloshy mud. You can splash through the brown puddles like your mum never let you when you were little. Better than that hard-baked, sun-caked ground that blisters your feet and batters your ankles.

But. There has to be a but. Or rather there has to be a limit. For the past 48 hours the BBC weather chart, helpfully broken down into hourly intervals, has shown nothing but heavy rain for the Lakeland fells. And for much of those 48 hours I’ve been out on them. When even the Great North Swim on Lake Windermere has had to be abandoned because it’s too wet, you know it’s been raining.

It would be nice, then, if it eases up just a little tomorrow, when I’m doing the final 15 miles of more than a hundred this week trying to acclimatise my legs to the hills I’ll be running in earnest in five weeks time.