Kate Condon’s Journey Route 66 – Newsletter

Dear everybody,
thanks so much for your emails wishing mum well. She really appreciates them.
Mum has been doing extremely well and has done 8 days so far, keeping up with her daily mileage plan so we’re very proud of her.

The following is part of an email from mum:

At last a few mins with Wi-fi and some time whilst Kev serves up another Cordon Bleu meal! I am really well looked after. Dom is as ever head down with the GPS machine working out miles ,directions and alerts as to where I might get lost!
Chicago was crazy and desperate and hilarious and totally knackering with Dom driving and negotiating the streets while Kev rode his bike alongside me.We eventually looked back to a great sunrise and before we knew it we were way out of city and into suburbs. They saw but I missed the prison at Joliet AKA The Blues Brothers one! We slept (p.s. omitted to tell you getting lost 3 times in Chicago, par for the course!) at Mr. ‘B’sbar and grill car park or rather I didn’t much , same old sleeping problem at beginning of runs, never mind. Oh dear it’s a big mush between then and recently as I haven’t kept notes.
Suffice it to say that I love The Union Pacific Railroad as it has travelled alongside me for the past few days as a constant companion with deer bounding across it soon after dawn, large deer with long tails which fold upwards and a white underside. Then the train drivers honk their ‘doppler effect’ American film horns and wave to me !! We stopped at lovely Lake Springfield with great sunset and a racoon. Not a Simpson in sight just ole Abe Lincoln and the boyz were very privileged to be taken round the State Capitol building by the security guards as it had closed when they arrived . They even saw a secret room. 3 x chats with the police and all v. friendly.
The 3rd was interesting as I was almost arrested! It happened that my early run came to a short bit of Interstate (motorway) and no way round it and the boys asleep so I climbed over a fence and made my way across a bog the edge carefully avoiding the brother of the 4 foot snake, dead, that I had seen earlier ( you see loads of little 30cm dead ones along the way, NO live ones yet! ).I then ran as fast as I could which was about 3 1/2 miles per hour! I was sayin ‘ good no cops yet’ and then just about 200 m from the exit one pulled up with his lights flashing etc . He asked what I was doing and said I’m not allowed to go on interstates as a pedestrian and then drove me off and round the corner to the R66 proper and told his ‘control’ about the L.A. on foot who said ”she’s doing what!!”

Got lost last night AGAIN and it was tough at the end of 6 hard days with quite a lot of miles and today was going to be easier with only 31 but a major storm and winds and rain made it all rather hard work with very slow progress. Any way only about 10 miles to go but lunch and little rest calls.

So there you have it, mum is progressing very well with tough days and great days. She also was on the Chain of Rocks bridge over Mississippi which she said was incredible.
The American mothers day was on Sunday, and she said she felt very privileged to be running on “the mother road” on that day.

I will write again soon
Thank you for all your support
Love jess xx

---

Multidays.com The home of multiday running news and events.