I was helping lay the concrete base for a barn this morning so I didn’t go running, but I thought you might like to get a sense of what it’s like to be in my shoes from the following short video, taken on Monday. And for all of you that have been putting off going out running… get on out there, the weather is lovely!
Windblown eyes
After running on Friday morning and the torrential rain of Saturday night, I didn’t feel a burning desire to go out running yesterday morning. Which has made me feel slightly guilty, as part of the reason for running is so that I have something to write about. No run: no blog.
But I had a cunning plan. This morning I called up Cliff to see if he wanted to run… maybe do a re-run of the route we ran a week or so back. Now, if you know Cliff you’ll probably be somewhat amazed at the fact that he wasn’t really keen to run today, no thank-you.
Over the last ten or twelve years I have employed thousands of freelance staff and one of the things that you quickly get used to is the excuses as to why they cannot turn up on time. Or at all. Or even why it is that you can’t see them with your own eyes at the place where they say they are. People often call me cynical, but I’m rarely surprised by excuses.
Which makes Cliff’s excuse of, and I quote, ‘windswept eyes’ all the more amazing: I’ve just not heard it before: it’s an original.
Sadly, Cliff is not prone to exaggeration, so if he has windswept eyes, there are probably salt stains extending past his ears and onto to the expanse of his shoulders. Saxo is probably considering sponsorship, or negotiating extraction rights. As the reason for the windblown eyes begins to unfold in front of you, I should like you to ponder what Cliff, the man who has climbed the tallest mountains (yes, including Everest) on each of the seven continents, means when he says the weather was ‘so bad’.
The Jurassic Coast Challengeis held on the Dorset coast path and consists of a marathon on Friday, a marathon on Saturday and a marathon on Sunday. I still remember how I felt after my one flat Berlin marathon, so you’ll excuse me if the prospect of running one the following day and one the day after that does not fill me with desire. Let alone on a path that is as steep at the path across Beachy Head but twice the height and never-ending.
But for people like Cliff and Pete, numbers one and two on Daren’s fit list, there is no challenge in that. Oh no! Fortunately Votwo, the organisers, also cater for crazy people like this by holding a race called the Oner… essentially the opportunity to run all three marathons back to back, through Saturday night and into Sunday morning.
Cliff, Pete and their friend Kevin duly started the Oner at 7pm on Saturday night. But they had only managed to reach the first checkpoint, some 8 or 9 miles, before the organisers pulled the race. Cliff said that they were out in the worst part of the storm and that the weather was ‘so bad’ that they were just slipping everywhere in the mud while being inundated with sheets of water. In the pitch dark.
Not that that had daunted them. This is a training run for a serious race (it has it’s own Wikipedia entry!) later in the year and I have no doubt whatsoever that they would have continued, given the chance. But after a night in the backroom (beer cellar?) of a pub (beer seller?) the race was restarted at 5.30am. In all, 20 of the original 35 starters decided to continue and whilst the race was shortened to make account for the missing hours, the day was still some 50 miles.
The race last year had 20 entrants in total and the word used by the organisers to denote people who retired is ‘broke’. Starting a race at half past six in the evening, one can only imagine what ‘breaking’ at 1am or 3am the following morning feels like. You’ve put six or nine hours into a race and you have to give up. Gutted! Only five runners finished.
But this weekend, with Kevin’s wife Lydia in support, our three intrepids (should that be extra-peds?) made surprisingly short work of the serious hills, glorious sunshine and stiff wind, coming in joint 8th or 9th (results not yet available) in 11 hours.
So if Cliff is not keen to run because of windblown eyes, I understand.
Dessert
After all the serious fun… there was a day of ice-karting!
Last year I won the ice-karting and could have written loads of stuff about it.
This year I came third so I’ve not much to say for myself.
Except that I didn’t start using the brakes until we were messing around after the final. That’s when I started to remember how to go quickly! DUH!
Tracks in the UK would be unfamiliar with the concept of letting the punters carry on driving, round and round, until they actually get tired of driving. Or it gets dark. Which in our case happened around the same time! In fact, at one point Benny even re-started us in the other direction so that it would be more challenging!
The casualty of the day was my boot, which now has a radically remodelled sole… on account of me trying to warm my feet up by putting them too close to the fire! It actually took an hour in the jacuzzi and ten minutes in the sauna for me to feel my toes again at the end of the day. And a large G&T, a terrific bottle of wine and another evening of hilarious conversation to stop smarting about losing!
I must work on that!
Was Dai lost?
I’m really sorry Dai… if I’d realised it was you I would have offered you a lift mate! You must have been perishin’!
And knackered by the time you got home!
Sheet!
Okay okay OKAY! I go away occasionally… and occasionally I go away again! But I’m back now, so I’ll be running again very soon!
In the meantime, I thought you may be interested in my latest annual Swedish pilgrimage to worship at the alter named VCDA: The Volvo Cars Driving Academy. (I hope you can read Swedish!)
I’ll write more about it later, but I just saw this photo from the route home and thought I’d whet your appetite.
It was an interesting morning, conditions-wise with roads so slippery that at one point when I tested the brakes in a safe place, the wheels locked and we shot along like a bobsleigh. It was so slippery that the anti-lock brakes were fooled into thinking we were stationery and didn’t kick in until we had almost slowed to a halt under our own weight. Although we were in our Saab hire car, to be fair!
You might notice that in the photo above, Mark seems to be standing gingerly and holding on to the car… yes, it really was that slippery! You can actually see his reflection in the road!
So I particularly wanted to thank Jerry who, on an earlier course, insisted on teaching us how to power-turn a front-wheel drive car. At the time he described the situation we had found ourselves in perfectly: having finally run out of traction on a narrow hill. Steering on full lock, engage reverse, let out the clutch and blip the throttle; then straighten the wheels as the car finishes a graceful pivot around its rear wheels.
Watching the highlights of that day’s Swedish Rally, it was reassuring to know that we weren’t the only ones finding the conditions challenging!
A sign of the times
I just read the following in a paper given to me by a cherished client:
‘The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.’
My mother has a favourite quote (mine too!) that comments similarly on our experience at work:
‘We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be re-organised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organising. A wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.’
Both quotes are true of our times but the latter is courtesy of Caius Petronius, a Roman general, in A.D. sixty-six, whilst the former is a comment not on the rise of the virtual child, but on the fall of Athens over two thousand years ago, being penned by Plato in B.C.392.
Above anything else I think it speaks volumes about standards and priorities in education at the time and here Dai might agree with me, that the Ancient Greeks and Romans showed such foresight to teach their loyal subjects such perfect written English.
Ski legs
WAKE UP DAVID! Time to SKI!!
We’ve stayed with Ray & Yvonne quite a few times in different chalets and what keeps us going back is them… they are truly excellent hosts! And I guess great friends now too!
Their current chalet is in Chandon, just below Meribel, which makes it a quieter, more comfortable choice and less tempting on the shopping wallet, which is useful at the moment!
The weather was crisp and sunny, the snow in great condition and Yvonne wasted little time in dragging me off piste in search of my old ski legs. To no avail, alas, as four or five connections to earth attested. Ray tried again the next morning and over lunch pointed out where I might find them and the afternoon saw my skis working more in line with the instruction manual, but not totally. Day three heralded the arrival of the unpaid debt collector in search of candle-wax that had been overdue for a couple of weeks: I lay comatose on the sofa for most of the day with only Kim’s twisted knee and our skiing buddies one-year-old grandson for company.
Our skiing buddies are Tim & Anna, whose family company Nursey is the real deal when it comes to leather & sheepskin products, having been manufacturing since 1790! That’s not to say that they are quite that old, of course… tee hee! The rest of the party comprised their son Adam, his wife Sandra and aforementioned grandson Thomas; Property developer Martin and his super-cool, ace-boarder son James (a budding Richard Branson if ever I met one!); Sue, Keith, Phil and romper-suited Nick.
After my day of rest, it was the forth day before I finally discovered the ability I think I must have left behind when I was taken out head-on (spun round length-ways in the air and left to hobble home with a broken collarbone) four years ago.
The first couple of runs felt like I was turning a credit card on a glass table but then it suddenly came back… you know, that roll of the knees into the turn as the shoulders push downhill. The edges were biting hard again and though I’m sure I’ve been more graceful, I no longer felt like a cookie. I spent the rest of the day gently pushing the boundaries and rediscovering the joys of carving.
Day five was more of the same but that night Ray went out with James’ can of spray cream and pasted all the slopes with about a foot of extra white stuff. So day six was a tricky day, with even Ray confessing it was heavy going.
I went out and pushed myself to do lots of difficult things. There are only so many jump turns that you can do with rubbish ski fitness but I had a jolly good go. In fact the steep pistes and off piste sections were easier on the core muscles than trying to ski across the lumpy bumpy flat bits. Once it gets too flat for a rhythm of regular turns, you have to pretend you’re sprinting whilst dribbling a ball through the England defenders, knees wobbling from side to side like jelly… or your back gets jarred on every lump!
And since I reckon to learn something every time I do it wrong, I had a really great day!
So now we’re home and the ski gear is all packed away for another trip. I hope I get a chance to use those ski legs before I forget where I’ve put them again!
The smell of candles burning at both ends
I thought that I’d better check in lest you’d all think I’d been abducted by aliens, which would of course be most unfair on them: They made me very welcome and I was free to leave at any time.
Apart from a modicum of proper thinking work, most of the hours from my last post until 10pm on Saturday 26th were spent finishing Kim’s flat. With a lot of help from some friends… thank you Cliff and Nick! As of yesterday I understand that it had it’s first tenants and having met them a couple of times in the lead-up to finishing, I hope that our effort translates directly into their comfort.
Slightly after 10pm then, two totally wired people arrived home with a car-load of tools & stuff, hungry from not having eaten since breakfast and with one or two things to do before bed. The tools got dumped unceremoniously in the garage and the door closed firmly behind them. The leftovers from the previous night’s takeaway were microwaved and scoffed to the soundtrack of Kim saying ‘slow down!’ The sweat and tears from the day were showered off with the paint & dust and only then did we started packing.
My head hit the pillow at 2am, with Kim’s head about half an hour behind that and the alarm another two hours behind that. Nasty alarm! The driver of the car that collected us at 5am did his best to chat his way past my glazed expression and more or less the next time I woke up we were in Meribel. Which can only mean one thing…
Walk to work
I’m sitting here basking in the rays of sunshine beating (weakly) on my desk and thinking about my Australian friends (hey y’all) sitting on their various East coast beaches eating turkey salad, washed down with Pimms, for Christmas.
We’ve already had our now traditional early Christmas lunch and food-fest weekend, pictured serenely above before the action got started, and we get to celebrate Christmas all over again tomorrow!
I’m actually sitting here trying to get my head around a new concept from America that my brother has alerted me to in the I.D. magazine. I often encourage my clients to stand up to have meetings (it helps people to keep to the point), walk around the block (to clear their minds before a brainstorm session, or to have a confidential one-on-one meeting with someone, which helps promote consensus and beats sitting across a desk) but this takes the idea in a different direction: walk while you work!
The idea is that your desk is a high-tech piece of gym equipment, designed to allow you to walk (at a sedate 2mph) while you work. The desk curves at the front to hug your stomach, while the desk whirs into place to allow your hands easy access to your keyboard with your wrists resting on a thick pad. It took the writer around 15 minutes to come to terms with the new arrangement and zone in on his work, which I think is pretty good, all things considered. He even felt productive when staring off into space!
Priced at between $3,500 and $4,500 (from Steelcase’s Details subsidiary if you’re interested) I think the Walkstation is going to be next years hot corporate toy, although I suspect that, though they may be used to intimidate visitors (the possible permutations for calculating CEO’s are wonderful!!), they will otherwise sit forlorn and idle like so much other gym equipment after the month of January.
Hmmm… wonders… how much of your power cost you could save if all your employees were walking their working week? Not only would they feel warmer (lower heating costs) but you might be able to power their laptops. And think of it, no need to shut down your machine at the end of the day either, just get off and go home.
Heck, why stop there? Why not make these things mobile so that you can work as you walk home?
Walk as you eat in restaurants. Walk as you watch TV in the evenings. Walk as you sleep… you may think that’s daft, but some people do this already.
Next thing you know, there’ll be some whizz-kid working out how to speed the process up so that you can run while you work and then they really will have reinvented the wheel.
The hamster wheel, that is.
Battery chickens
One of the reasons for writing this blog in the first place was to encourage me to run. And visa versa.
So the test is whether I can continue writing even though I’ve not had a run, or been to see a play or a film, or finished one of the books I’m reading.
I went to an interesting dinner the other evening, set in a Dickensian London in the vaults beneath London Bridge Station. The layout was rather good and although most of the brickwork was already there (it holds the station off the ground!) the mock shops, bars and snugs fitted right in. The actors were what made the evening for me, each dressed in period costume and playing quite deep roles with tremendous verve, whilst dry ice added to the atmosphere. We’ll skip mentioning the food other than to say that I think most people on our table wished they had skipped the food… oh and that the tall cylindrical portions of chicken fricassee clearly looked as if they had come from battery chickens. How glad I was for having chosen the seasonal (?) salmon.
Part way through the evening the dry ice started to affect my throat and despite escaping at a reasonable hour (the last trains heading South from the capital are timed to truncate any London outing early) I was too late. Two working days of sore throat and headaches have now been followed by a weekend relaxing at home, trying to recover for a busy week ahead. So as you can imagine and despite it being a beautifully sunny day, a run didn’t seem to fit into that programme.
With the heating on gently in the background, I had not even appreciated the temperature outside until I noticed that the water that our neighbours had washed their car with had frozen solid in rivulets across our drive. Brrrrr!
I am hopeful that I’ll be sufficiently recovered for a midweek run, but in the meantime, winter drawers on!