Dublin leaves more (much more) to explore

I’m in Dublin for work and have been itching to get away for a good run all week. Unfortunately I was let down. It might have been because I still had a crick in my neck from sleeping on the plane, and a headache from too much coffee and too little sleep, but it was not a satisfying run and I felt somewhat let down. I had expected Dublin to be a prime running-exploring location.

It started off well; I spied lots of other runners out on the streets, always reassuring in unknown territory, and many of them seemed to be heading in the direction I’d chosen towards the coast. However I quickly found that the route I’d planned back at the hotel (on walkjogrun.com) was actually a traintrack- which had shown up on the map as a road. So I ran along the main road that hugged the train track, but where I had been expecting to run along the sea, from the road the view was blocked by a high fence.

Somehow, as much as I tried, I couldn’t work out how to still roughly follow the route I’d designed to loop back to the hotel. Again, rather than being Dublin’s fault, this could have been because my brain was addled from swimming against science and polite conversation for the past few days, but the roads that had name signs (which were few) seemed to have different names to what they were on the map, and the road signs were very few and far between so I couldn’t aim for landmarks. I was a bit lost.

I ended up tracking bus stops for the aircoach which I knew stopped outside the hotel, hoping I was going in the right direction to take me back, rather than to the airport.

What I found most dispiriting was that the area I was lost in was totally uninspiring - a mix of flats, office blocks and functional-looking hotels, with wide, busy roads that were tricky to cross. Hopefully it was just the area I strayed into today and tomorrow I’ll find my way to the lovely Dublin I’ve heard so much about.