Hawkesbury 5K - Debbie Young's Writing Life

As I was running along the “Yellow Brick Road” in the first ever Hawkesbury 5K last month, the lady next to me gasped with surprise.

“But it’s lovely up here!” she said, as wistful as Alice peering through the tiny door into Wonderland’s gardens.

“You should see it on a sunny day,” I told her proudly, though not expecting one any time soon. “Then you would see both Severn Bridges.”

When she looked as pleased as if I’d given her the password to a secret society, I realised that many people living nearby never discover our fabulous views, unless they are (dog)walkers or runners. They might recognise the village name from a roadsign, but if they’ve never taken that road, they have no idea what it’s like.

If I hadn’t got lost 21 years ago, this could have applied to me. While househunting between Bristol and Chipping Sodbury, we took the wrong turning for the M4. As we headed north on the A46, we spotted a signpost to the left indicating “Hawkesbury Upton”. We’d never heard of it.

“That’s a pretty name,” I remarked. “That would look good on a change of address card.”

We turned left. We had no estate agents’ fliers for the village (there was no online searching in those days), but we thought we might spot some “For Sale” signs. And we did: outside a small stone cottage on France Lane.

“That would do us,” said my husband. “Let’s go and take a look.”

We did, and we bought it, and the rest is history. And that is the story of how – neither a runner nor a walker in those days – I discovered the secret world of Hawkesbury Upton. The road sign is right – “Hawkesbury Upton: You’ll never leave.” But that’s fine by me.

This article was originally written for the Hawkesbury Parish News, July 2012.

If you enjoyed this post – or if indeed you like road signs – you might like this: Rage Against the Road Signs

In the last 10 years, there’s been a new and recurrent theme in my life: running. Mostly I’ve not run more than 5K at a time – a nice round number, long enough to impress but not far enough to exhaust. I’ve done Race for Lifes, the Chippenham River Run (no, it doesn’t involve walking on water), and a couple of 10Ks too.

My first 10K was meant to be in Cheltenham. But then the organisers had a difference of opinion with the Town Council and relocated the race to the Moreton-in-Marsh Firefighters’ Training College. Instead of pottering gently round the elegant streets of a sedate Georgian town, we were faced with a route like Armageddon. We were surrounded by fake disasters that trainee firemen use to hone their skills: derailments, plane crashes, overturned cars and burnt-out buildings. There’s nothing like fleeing disaster to make you run a little faster.

And now there’s the first ever Hawkesbury 5K to look forward to. If the sun’s shining, that section of the Cotswold Way fondly referred to by some as The Yellow Brick Road will be glinting and golden. It will be hard not to slow down to enjoy the view.

I have not always been a runner. In school, I ran round at the back on cross-country, chatting away to my best friend Elizabeth, who was equally unenthralled with running. We kept our tights on under our shorts. She was my partner in crime in Geography too. The teacher scrawled in my exercise book “Why are you and Eliz. being so slow?” The reason: we’d got carried away with our drawings of an Oil Derrick, going on to design an Oil Graham, an Oil George, and an Oil Stanley. Our hearts were simply not in it.

Yet now one of my chief pleasures on holiday is to run in new territory. Round castle walls, along seafronts, down cobbled streets – it’s a great way to unite my adult interests of running and geography. The teenage Debbie would have been astonished at what she grew into: this leopard really did change her spots.

So if you’re not a runner yet, don’t write off the prospect. The new Hawkesbury 5K on 16th June 2012 might be just the thing to convert you. One of the great things about running is that your age doesn’t matter – you can still be running marathons when you’re 90. I’ll report back on that one. See you at the 2050 Hawkesbury 5K, if not before.