The most difficult part of training around here is the quality of the pavements. It’s a rural area and they are cracked and overgrown. Often, they have sick on them. Worst of all, they tend to have a wicked camber. If you’re a manual wheelchair user, camber is your enemy. In fact, wheelchair users have many natural enemies, including 50% of dogs, people who park on the pavement or block dropped kerbs and people who try to help us across roads without warning.

But bad cambers are especially awful, particularly if you’re trying to cover some distance at speed. Hills, I don’t mind so much in either direction. But when the pavement is sloped, I have to put in much more effort with one arm. It’s hard to get into a rhythm, it saps a lot of energy and it doesn’t represent race conditions very well, so it isn’t good training. Accessible half marathons are usually on city centre roads, which don’t have the problem of camber and (generally) don’t have too many potholes or yawning chasms opening up at random. Or sick. All of which the pavements around here have in abundance.

I can’t train on the roads, of course, especially around here. Many of them are narrow and twisting with healthy hedges and unhealthy visibility. Since it’s apparently unrealistic to to expect people to not constantly walk into me when I’m in the supermarket, I wouldn’t last five minutes on the roads.

Fortunately, I found a new training path a couple of months ago. It’s a bridle/cycle path running along an old railway line. The surface is part tarmac, part highly compacted tiny gravel, both well drained and pretty much perfect. The camber is mostly great. There are a few hills including one quite long relentless one and a couple of steep but mercifully short ones. It’s a nice route: quiet, lots of trees, people riding horses and walking dogs, not too many bikes.

Best of all, it’s highly flexible. There’s an entrance to the path from our village so I can reach it without driving. But there are also several places along the path I can park and this means I can vary the length and intensity of the route in lots of different ways. In one direction, the path leads into the local town, which is handy, and it does so via a supermarket. This means I can go to the supermarket and back in the chair without crossing two lethal roads as I used to. The other direction connects to a local nature reserve for when I want a less intense workout.

In other words, it’s suspiciously perfect. Presumably I’ll find out today that there are plans to build a housing estate on it, or something. It’s a shame I didn’t find the path a couple of years ago, I only knew about the part through the nature reserve, which is only accessible when it’s dry or I have my off-road wheels on. The upside is that hardly anyone else seems to know about it, either. The local dog walking services know about it and the carparks, but hardly anyone else does.

I slept fairly well last night (for once!) so if the rain keeps off I’ll probably take the path into town and back. It’s about a 12 mile round trip but I’ll be taking it relatively easy. If the sun comes out, I’ll take some pictures.

As always, take a look at my fundraising page. I’m doing wheelchair half marathons (three this year, plus sundry 10k events) to raise money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.