JUBILEE LINE: Canada Water to Baker Street

Today we tackled our first tube line. Now don't go reading too much into the Jubilee line being the first, I try not to have favourites (other than the Victoria, Vicky you know I love you).


Anna and I live in South London, amusingly in the context of this challenge not on the tube, so I tried to find a reasonably straightforward start point and an exciting route. We plumped for Canada Water and met at 11am on the Overground (not included).


The weather could not have been kinder to us with clear blue skies albeit very cold. But we both had our marathon 'rejection jumpers' to counter the chill as we snapped our first pic, got our bearings and set off.

Unsurprisingly, given the glorious weather the runners were out in force and the first leg of our journey saw us running alongside a group of dads and their running pushchair. We had a lot of love for the running dads.


To be honest with you, Canada Water and Bermondsey are really very close together! I'd only just put my phone away before I had to get it out again to snap this action shot of Anna passing Bermondsey.

Look at the colour of that sky. The sun was shining, the sky was cobalt blue and we were navigating ourselves by the Shard. Totally the point I made in my first post, about the everyday beauty that we shouldn't take for granted and the reason I think the work of the RNIB is so important.


London Bridge (where we got chatted up...did he think we had time to stop?!), Southwark and Waterloo were all a bit of blur next. We took a bit of a detour trying to find Southwark station, but were both feeling really motivated and chatting our way round so the extra mile or so wasn't an issue.

We did think to ourselves when we popped into some of the stations to get the requisite selfies, that someone cynical out there will probably think we just caught the tube between all of these! We can assure you, however, we did not...that is authentic sweat you can see in these lovely pics!


Things got very busy between Waterloo and Westminster, in spite of us avoiding the South Bank. We did have a good laugh at all of the tourists taking photos of the Houses of Parliament as they got in our way on Westminster Bridge, wondering why they'd want pictures of Parliament when they could have one of a tube station....

I felt like I was almost back on home turf as we ran up Birdcage Walk, into St James's Park, across my favourite bridge and up to Buckingham Palace, the highlight of my run to work. We did realise around this point though, that we should have definitely done this route the other way, as this 5th mile was particularly uphill. But we powered on up and sprinted the last bit of the hill to Green Park station.

At this point we were still both feeling great! Breaking the route up into stops and running with a friend just makes the whole thing so much easier and more enjoyable! We certainly didn't break our PBs, but our pace was still decent and it was mainly about covering the miles.


Running up Bond Street, we will admit we felt slightly underdressed. Anna wished she'd put on her diamond encrusted trainers, don't you hate it when you leave the house without any sparkle on for a run! As we turned onto Oxford Street we found the road was closed for the Christmas light switch on! *UPDATE We discovered Craig David and Sadiq Khan were there, if we'd known at the time we obviously we have hung around as apparently we looked "beautiful ladies" in our kit!* Instead, after quick stop and asking a tourist to take a snap of us by Bond Street station (she clearly thought we were mad!) we sprinted off along Europe's most famous shopping street (oops, work mode!) and weaved our way up through Manchester Square and Chiltern Street on our final stretch.

As we approached Baker Street, I wished we'd been slightly more ambitious with our inaugural run! We covered the right miles for our training plans, but were feeling good still and the experience had been great! Still, we're 9 stations down of the total 26 on the Jubilee, and I'm pretty excited about the next leg of our great tube map adventure!


From us squinting at Baker Street, goodbye!
www.virginmoneygiving.com/jessford
www.virginmoneygiving.com/annashields

If you're still not convinced of the scale of the challenge, or feel we're cop outs for only doing zone 1-3, check out this progress map (kindly provided by Anna Shields!).