Shortcuts

I'm all for taking shortcuts.

As you know, In Life There Are No Shortcuts.

Fortunately, we're not talking about life. I mean shortcuts that make runs interesting. A bit like Alice slipping through a wormhole and ending up in a parallel universe.

One shortcut we took a couple of years back occasionally has me waking up sweating. I can still hear Nick's reassuring voice while, at that precise moment we were unable to see the outside world - bear in mind that the Blue Route and high-speed traffic lay possibly 50 metres away to our left - and were badly in need of machetes to hack our way through head-high vegetation. I imagined I could hear the whup-whup-whup of Hueys and an occasional whoosh and whump from the rocket launchers, the crackle of automatic rifle fire, and I could have sworn I felt the heat of napalm-fuelled brush fires. Perhaps I shouldn't have stayed up to watch those re-runs of Platoon, or perhaps it was that extra slice of pizza that did it. After all, it was just a 16-k run that turned out to be 22.

Shortcuts. The thought struck me on this morning's run (which largely reversed our regular "Up Bowwood" route) as we prepared to cross the Liesbeeck River near the Vineyard Hotel. There's a neat little bridge in the shade that takes you to the road that itself leads to our watering stop at Paradise Motors, the Shell garage at the bottom of Wynberg Hill.

So, I'll dig out some good shortcuts. They're the kind of thing you don't see unless you're out running. You rarely see them while riding, and almost never while driving. Some of them take you to interesting places, and some are interesting in and of themselves. I'll be listing a few in due course, and I welcome additions from those with suitable inside knowledge.

Oh, and water points. That's another one. So stand by for a listing of water points, commercial and non-profit. To runners, they're like gold.