When Bucky, the owner of the incredible Running Adventures company asked me if I would like to travel to Madeira, recce some routes and then take a group of enthusiastic London City Runners across the trails, mountains and levadas, well how could I possibly say no?

We arrrived on a Tuesday morning in Funchal, picked up a hire car and drove straight to some big lumps to recce.  Bucky had already done the hard work of planning the route from his office back home, or at least we thought that the hard work had been done.

As it turned out, the start of this run planned from the beach was incredibly difficult, suffice to say that it took over an hour to travel no more than 3/4 mile, the terrain was tough, the trails were unclear and the way up at times seemed quite treacherous. 

After scrambling, persisting and eventually realising that the route was too difficult for us, let alone the group we were going to be leading, we decided to find an alternate way up.   We used the 'road'.  

Fortunately, when we took the road, we came out exactly where the impossible hill was taking us to, at this point there were fantastic views, and some super onward trails towards a town.  Importantly, (thinking ahead at this point) there was a good place for the groups minibus to be able to drop us all off.  

Bucky and I continued our recce and the run that day was hard, we guessed this was due to getting off an aeroplane, getting in a car and then just going running in a location with some serious elevation.  But, I think that first hill was an energy sapping experience.  We pushed on and we were treated to lots more elevation but with the reward of some fantastic cliff edge views, the weather was fantastic and the mix of running, hiking and just laughing was exhilerating.  

We ran about 12 miles or so, under normal circumstances this would not phase either of us, but the elevation, the mix of rock, earth and vegetation that we were running over made this pretty hard.

At the end of this run, I suddenly realised that we had two more routes to recce, a mountain to run up before the group even arrived.  Then of course, we had to repeat the process.  Anyway, how did we finish the run, with a nice cool beer next to the beach, well an alcohol free beer anyway!

Am I moaning, not a chance.  It was a fantastic 6 days of running, getting to know new people, eating, playing table football, playing pool and having a few beverages.

Thanks Bucky

Perry

If you have a group you would like to go on a running break with, give Bucky a shout over at Running Adventures and he'll happily design your something bespoke to fit your needs.

Click below to go to the Running Adventures website

Running Adventures Website