Logistically this wasn’t simple, but worth it! Waking to a 2:15am alarm after just a few hours sleep, I set off alone on the 2hr drive to Lowestoft where I left my car and set off from the pier at 4:55am. I was questioning my sanity the whole drive there!
I decided to go North to South so I could be home a bit earlier (Sunday trains 🙄) and to avoid running into a headwind all day. This created a deadline of 5pm for the Bawdsey ferry, or I’d be completely stuck! Nothing like a deadline for motivation.
I carried everything I ate for this run - eating around 3000 of the 4000kcal I took. Mainly bananas, apples, Tribe bars, potatoes, nuts, sweets and some snack bars. I started with 2.5l electrolyte and 2x500ml Huels. I topped up 1l at St Edmund’s church in Southwold (tap on east side of south porch) and 1l again at the St John church near Butley (tap by gate).
The route was great, and waymarked pretty well, though the amount of time spent actually on the seafront/shore wasn’t as much as I’d expected. There’s a lot of darting inland and back over the route, but it’s all nice - heathland, quaint villages and hamlets, farm tracks, country lanes, WW2 defences as well as sea walls, and shingle and sandy beaches.
I set myself a 12 hour target. I was comfortably sitting right on the pace but suffered a 15 minute loss after finding impassable stinging nettles on the OS-marked path just before getting to Hollesley (I got stung badly on both legs trying to get through). So if you do this route, continue along the sea wall for 200m instead, as is obvious on the ground, and the OS-marked route rejoins. I made most of that lost time up by Bawdsey but then lost it again waiting for the ferry. I had to dig deep to lose the extra 15 minutes with only 8km to go, but I’m glad I somehow found the motivation and held back nausea long enough to actually make up 18 minutes and get in a few minutes under target ☺️
At the finish at Landguard Fort, I called 4 taxi companies trying to get a lift the station but none picked up, so I had a cold 3 mile walk back to the station followed by a 4.5 hour journey home! 😫 Worth it though 😅
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If interested, a more detailed write-up is available from my blog.
A corrected GPX route (avoiding the nettles!) is available from OS maps or from my run report.