Run up Meikle Bin and a Garscube bail out

In my frustration at not having managed to run up a munro during my time here in Scotland as a result of a bloomin cold, I decided to take advantage of the recent spot of sunny weather and head to the nearest hills to Cumbernauld - the er fabled Campsies. It's only 30 minutes drive from my folks house to the car park at the west end of Loch Carron, and the start point for a nice 3.5ish mile run up and 3.5ish mile run back down Meikle Bin.

Meikle Bin is the prominent hill that peeks up from over the campsies and the most obvious thing to go up. Actually it's a surprisingly nice wee jaunt starting next to Loch Carron (which was a glorious deep blue surrounded by dark green of forest and bright blue of a sunny 18C evening sky), winding up for about 3 miles through plantation then breaking out onto the summit 'ridge' for half a mile with great views on all sides. The summit is quite pointy by Campsie standards and affords great views all over Glasgow area and the beauty that is Cumbernauld and Kilsyth.


Looking north down the summit ridge of Meikle Bin
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/199291

The summit is at 570m and I think you start at about 215m so the route covers 255m of climb in 3.5 miles then 255m of descent over 3.5 miles - a nice way of getting the quads to work again after the Fling. I felt good during the run and completed it in an easy feeling 59 minutes, varying between 8 min/mile and 8:30 min/miles.

Getting out into the evening sun, alone on a hill was just what I needed but jeez-oh, did I cough. The after effects of that cold. I had a nice cool Loch Fyne Avalanche Pale Ale when I returned, for constitutional purposes.

I had arranged to go out running with the Garscube Harriers (Marco and Debs) last night (Thursday) but Microsoft Word put paid to that. I'd been editing a document all day, working from a memory stick but regularly saving, when there was an error and Word had to close. It couldn't recover the document and in fact decided to delete it from my memory stick just for convenience. Great - 8 hours work down the pan. The report I was editing couldn't wait so I spent until 9pm last night and mouch of this morning re-doing what I did yesterday. Thank you Mr. Gates. And sorry Marco for having to bail out.