A golden Spring walk

It is Spring, and fresh things are blossoming and beginning.

Fittingly, I start a new job at the end of this month, and I am beginning to think about how I will commute there. For the last fifteen months, I've had an incredibly easy journey to work – I'm based in a hospital that's just a ten minute walk from home. The new job is a little further away, but still a short commute by London standards. I could catch the tube (just four stops – and thirty minutes door-to-door), or I could cycle (I think about thirty minutes too), or I could run!

Running to work wouldn't be as hardcore as it sounds. I would start by running home, just once a week, and then slowly (over six months or more) build up to the point where I could run either in or back, two or maybe three times a week, and cycle and tube the rest of the time. My shifts are going to be shorter than the ones I do in my current job (10 hours rather than 13), and they start and finish at varied times (I will do a mixture of earlies, middles and lates) – so to some extent how I commute will be dictated by what shift I am working (I would happily run home after an early but not after a late, for example).

Google maps told me that the run would be between 8km and 9km, which is well within my capabilities, so today I set out to figure out precisely what my route would be – right down to which side of the road would be best to run on, and where to cross major junctions. I caught the tube to my new hospital, and then turned around and set out to walk back home.

Appropriately for a spring walk, I discovered when I stopped for lunch that I'd inadvertently been taking photographs of all things yellow. Flowers, street art, an ice cream van…I think maybe at this time of year, the fresh, clean yellow of the ubiquitous daffodils wakes me up and energises me, so that my eye is drawn to other objects of the same colour.

And when my food arrived, I laughed out loud, because it seemed I was still drawn to golden yellow shades. This is at the wonderful Crate Brewery in Hackney Wick, right next to the Olympic Park, where they serve the best pizzas I have EVER eaten. This was a sweet potato, Stilton and walnut pizza, which I washed down with a pint of their best cider.

As I walked out of the far side of the Olympic Park, and arrived back in Leyton I knew exactly which road I would have to take back home: the one that takes me past 'the yellow house'…

…where, amazingly there was a woman walking past in a yellow coat as I stopped to take a photo.

How do you commute to work? Would you ever consider running as part of your commute? Do you have a choice of how you can commute? I'd love to know.

 

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