🦖Running Back Through Time

Because life is more fun in fancy dress.

👋🏻 Hello, I’m Anna. An adventurer, author of six books and Restless Mumma to three small humans. Each week I write about adventure, travel, daily chaos and the inner workings of my noggin’ 🧠⚡️ 🗺️

✌🏻You can check out past posts at the Restless Mumma homepage here.

Hello Restless Ones,

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Whether you support for a month or a year, it’s massively appreciated and it all helps to justify getting my wayward butt in the writing chair each week.

Today features a tale of adventure from a previous decade (and from a life before kids, imagine!)

It’s one of those journeys where I think ‘Of course I did that’ and then realise, in conversation with sensible humans that doing a four-day running adventure dressed as a dinosaur is not the norm.

Here’s to exploring the wonders of this world in any way we see fit.

Big love and catch you next week,

Anna xx

Running Back Through Time

It’s 6am on a frosty December morning in Brixton, South West London, and I’m dressed as a dinosaur.

Next to me is my friend and housemate Danny who is also, wait for it… dressed as a dinosaur.

I can see my breath in the air. The faux fur of our green dinosaur onesies shimmers under streetlights as we weave through the still-dark streets, away from our flat, and towards the underground station.

In a few hours, we’ll arrive at Sandbanks near Bournemouth. From there we’ll begin a 95-mile, four-day run along a stretch of the UK known as the Jurassic Coast — a place where 185 million years’ worth of history lays hidden in the earth, buried as fossils and prehistoric remains.

I was drawn to an adventure along the Jurassic Coast not only because of how beautiful it was rumoured to be but also because it holds the status of being Britain’s only natural UNESCO World Heritage Site.

An accolade that puts it alongside other natural UNESCO sites like the Great Barrier Reef, The Grand Canyon and The Galápagos Islands. Happy high status indeed.

As is always the case with something that intrigues me, or can hold my attention for longer than the usual minute, I wanted to get up close to that stretch of coast. To learn about the place by being in it and seeing how it feels — covering those 95 miles on foot, the rise and fall of the land beneath my feet, and maybe unearthing a fossil or two along the way.

As a city dweller, I usually only ran when commuting to and from my part-time job in town. I ran over grey slabs, flanked by grey buildings, surrounded by hard surfaces, hardened faces — everyone and everything closed off to a point where I felt like the city was closing in on me.

And so the freedom a coastal run seemed exciting. The wide open spaces and, most of all, the beaches. I was very much looking forward to those.

So much so that I’d gone to great lengths to conjure up an image in my mind of dancing, carefree, along the golden Dorset shoreline, waves lapping at my feet, deeply connected to the swell of the sea.

‘Sod this!’ said Danny after 10 minutes of struggling over Studland Beach. We’d only made it a few hundred metres, but we were already sweating buckets into our thick, fleecy dino-suits. Running on the beach was harder than I’d expected.

From that point on, we opted to seek trails in the nearby dunes instead; deep sand should be avoided at all costs.

After four miles, we’d made to the official start of the Jurassic Coast, Old Harry Rocks, so we stopped to take in the view. The chalk stacks cut a stark outline against a steely sky — the sea below them shifting, a gunmetal blue, frothing into white where the waves met the base of each stack.

To the West was the gentle curve of Studland Bay and to the east the white cliffs marched on toward Swanage. At the horizon, mist blurred the line between the sea and sky, making the rocks appear ghost-like, as if they’d wandered out from it, especially to say hello.

I let out a breath and watched some seagulls wheel around the stacks for a few minutes, enjoying the feeling of cool, wintery air on my now reddened cheeks. I figured that any stop, even one so early on in the journey, was an opportunity for a snack. With numb fingers, I reached for a date bar from my pack and unwrapped it.

’Beautiful eh?’ I said to Danny as I took a bite.

‘Yeah. It is.’ He sighed. There was a long pause. ‘Anna’ Danny leant over and whispered, softly.

‘Yes?’ I was still looking out on the sea, not able to pull my view from it. I wondered if Danny had a profound point to add to the ethereal magic of the seascape in front of us.

‘I’m freezing my balls off here — can we get going?’ He said.

By the end of day one, we’d made it 28 miles to Lulworth Cove. We were running behind schedule (because the South West coastal path is quite hilly — who knew?) and so it was long after dark when my good friend Lydia met us at a pre-agreed point on the coastal trail.

Lydia was working as a teacher at a school nearby and had a floor we could sleep on for the night. I was tired, cold and hungry and so was relieved to see her silhouette appear on the trail.

But my relief faded as we spent the following thirty minutes wandering around in fields, lost, looking for Lydia’s car — which she had parked ‘somewhere’, at the edge of a field nearby, by a hedge she said, although now that it was dark, she couldn’t quite remember where…

Just as I wondered whether mine and Lydia’s friendship was about to go extinct, the car appeared out of the darkness.

We rattled home along dark country lanes, to her place, tumbled through the door, peeled off our dinosaur suits, threw some dinner in the general direction of our faces and I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

On the morning of day two, my legs were sore and my feet ached, but we were eager to get an early start from Lulworth.

Lydia, not wanting to let the side down, had sourced her very own dinosaur suit and so the three of us gathered like giggling school children in view of the infamous Durdle Door, just in time to watch the sun sneak through the limestone arch, casting honey-coloured rays across the unusually calm waters of the English Channel.

By late-morning, Lydia-saurus had left us to run back along the trail — she needed to return to her duties at school and so Danny and I trucked onwards, a dino-duo once again.

Forty miles through our Jurassic journey, we made it to Weymouth — a place I’d visited many times in summer holidays as a kid. As soon as I saw the beach, childhood memories flooded my mind.

I remembered it was here, on this very beach, that a bee stung me when I was three years old. I was naked and in the squat position, playing in the sand, when the bee (inexplicably drawn to my little peach) took a flight path which passed between my bum cheeks.

At that exact moment, I stood up, crushing the bee with my mighty toddler-buttocks. And so it stung me. In the bum.

While I wailed in agony, Mum used the only cooling agent she had to hand, a flask of orange squash, to pour onto the sting to ease the pain. (Every time mum tells me this story I have an image of a raging orange river of squash, running out from my bum crack — a large, now dead, bee floating out and onto my legs. I’m not sure that’s entirely how it happened, but the image is there.)

The other memories of the beach that came galloping into my mind that day were only snippets but no less vivid…

I could see the triangular black and terracotta tiles on a doorstep to the flat we’d stayed in one summer when my grandpa had joined us on holiday. I could see him on the beach too, bald on the top of his head, medium length black hair around his the back and sides. He was topless, wearing a pair of pale blue shorts and throwing a ball for his brown and white fluffy dog. I can hear his laugh — high pitched, wheezy, joyful.

I could see my dad playing with me in the shallows. Holding my hands and spinning me round and round until my legs left the ground. I could still feel the cool, hard line of the water as my feet touched it when the ride was over, and I came back down to earth.

Afterwards, I remember the large striped windbreak we put up — blue, yellow, white. And how, while my Dad was sitting cross-legged, I crawled into his lap, folding myself into the gap between his legs and torso until I felt quite protected — seeking respite not only from the wind but also from my two brothers, who were digging a large hole nearby.

Danny and I ran in silence along the promenade next to the beach. He was lost to exhaustion, and me to the past. I looked out over the Weymouth sands and wondered where exactly did these things happen? Where were the memories made?

We’d planned to stop in Weymouth for the night and Danny was feeling tired, so we checked into a hotel in the town centre and he took the chance for an afternoon nap.

For some reason, I felt recharged. I had energy to burn, so I found a second wind and headed out for an early evening run to the Isle of Portland.

I only intended to go a mile or two, but once I got going, I couldn’t stop. I wanted to run until the sun went down.

As darkness fell, I sent an image of the twinkling lights of Weymouth from where I was, five miles off the mainland: ‘Turning back now, sleepy head. Get your glad rags on – let’s go out for fish and chips.’

On Day three, it rained — a light drizzle at first but then big heavy globules — splashing onto our suits, whipping the already muddy trail up into a sticky, sloppy mess.

Up and down, in and out, we went, along clifftops and ducking into every nook and crannie of the coast. Slogging up steep inclines (which felt more like climbing endless sets of stairs) and plunging back down to sea to explore secluded bays, rich with the potential of fossil-finds.

Our dino suits grew heavy as they collected all of the mud that the South West coastal path offered up, and by day four the novelty of the whole idea had worn thin.

At Seaton, fifteen miles shy of the official end of the Jurassic Coast, we called it quits. We were exhausted, smelly and happy. We had had our adventure. And, as housemates and friends who already spent a lot of time in one another’s company, we had run out of things to talk about.

Too tired to take our suits off, we fell asleep in them on board the return train to London, mud-caked dinosaurs among suited commuters rattling back along the tracks towards the city.

As I crawled into the warmth and familiarity of my bed that night, I was content. Even though we’d not made it the full 95 miles, I’d travelled further in many other ways. Tired, mud spattered legs had carried me through landscape and memory and I’d left fresh stories behind in my footprints too.

The Jurassic Coast had shown me that time, just like the trail we’d followed, isn’t always linear – sometimes it loops back on itself. And often, the things we dig up from the past can be just as precious as the treasures that lie ahead.

👆🏻❤️ 🦖 P.s Tapping the heart button at the top of bottom means that more people will see this post. It also automatically tops up my adventure and writing juju for the following week.