Note: This entry was created over several weeks. The great bulk was written while in the USA, but I wasn’t happy with it, so I left it to congeal on my local drive. On May 17, I padded it out, and have retained the perspective of this date for the post, even though I have tried to soften its sharper edges since then. And I will almost certainly tinker with it some more. In particular, I have a lot of photographs and pieces of video from the race, and from our subsequent travels, that I need to do something with. Seventeen days in the USA after the Boston marathon was always going to be risky. I try to avoid clichés … …
Author: andy
Crying out loud Another step forward. Four miles on a mild and bright evening, with the run element of the run:walk ratio back over 50%. The aim is to keep it creeping up, but I won’t let it reach 100% before I’m a stone lighter than I was at the start of this week. The good news, as predicted, is that the pounds are sliding off. The gains so easily made over the last few weeks and months are just as easily removed — to begin with, at least. I’ve become something of a running wuss in recent years. It was only two years ago that a jacket became standard issue on cold winter mornings. For the four years or … …
Life is good. Life is great. Seven-thirty this morning. I’m in the kitchen, dressed athletically. Eight scoops, nah, let’s make it ten, of Sainsbury’s Finest Columbian. I’ve work to do when I get back. What a morning. One of those last desperate throws of the summer dice. We know the game’s up, but how nice to go out like this. The sun is high and warm, but balanced on that crisp autumnal edge, I give you, lay-deez ‘n’ gennelm’n, the very very perfect day for the race. Yep, the human race. I know, I know, you heard that here before. Indulge me, please… On my way out, I visit the small pond. Earlier, through the kitchen window, I thought I’d … …
Any mind mappers out there? I’ve recently been reminded how much it helps to see things in pictures. Charting has long been an interest; probably since those distant lectures on systems analysis on my MSc course. The enthusiasm continued during a brief and largely miserable career as an intelligence analyst with the police, when I spent my days drawing sprawling, complex charts showing links between criminals and organised crime, and mapping out the hierarchy of their gangs. Mind mapping is similar, but rather more useful, showing ideas or other entities in a tree-like structure, emanating from a central point. I came across some interesting and sophisticated mind mapping software last week which I’ve been playing with. If you want, try … …
Spoken with a raw Belfast accent, “terrorism” and “tourism” sound like the same word. Handy, as the city seems to have swapped one for the other in recent years. And it’s possible to experience a spot of both simultaneously, as I found a couple of weekends ago. After watching (in my case, guiltily) a boisterous crowd of SportRelief runners bounding through the smartened-up city centre,we got into a taxi by City Hall, and asked to be taken to Divis Tower, on the Falls Road. The driver didn’t move at first; then he turned round and stared at us. “Where did ye say?” I checked my notebook, and repeated it. I asked: “Do you know the place?” “Do I know… …
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. It took me until halfway through the Copenhagen Marathon to adopt a hybrid of 99 Red Balloons and Mister Tambourine Man as the soundtrack to the day. By contrast, Zurich Marathon day was just a few seconds old when I found what I really didn’t know I was looking for. I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’, Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world… Alarm goes, eyes creak open. I’m lying there in the darkness for a few moments, semi-conscious, hearing a noise I didn’t want to be hearing; the unmistakable sound of water drumming against the slanted window. Just like the Almeria Half in … …
I recently bought an iPod Nano, and have been teasing myself with its possibilities. Started off with a few rather unsatisfying weeks, re-exploring the less hospitable, outer territories of my own MP3-ised CD collection. Since then I’ve been back on safer ground — the spoken word. It’s a wholly different experience. Being a lifelong BBC Radio 4 addict, this shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was. It’s the different context that’s startled me. There’s something surreal about hearing languid, disembodied voices while out running. I suppose this is what believing in god must be like. On the subject of which, I heard yet another cracking Mark Twain quotation yesterday, while listening to the podcast of Start The Week… …
Dusseldorf, by all accounts an elegant city nestling in an elbow of the Rhine, has been home for three days now, but I’ve not seen much of it. What I have seen plenty of is the interior of Mercedes taxis – invariably driven by heavy-set, grouchy Turks who abuse me when I question their choice of route. Trilinguality and tranquility are out the window when confronted by their dishonesty, and they revert instead to some threatening hybrid of German and Turkish. Perhaps I shouldn’t care – someone else is paying for it (ultimately, the customers of a certain British mobile phone company.) Not a good attitude to take, but I don’t need any additional stress. Yes, all I’ve seen so … …
Life goes on. It was around 10:30 this morning that I first heard about the bombs on the London Underground and the Russell Square bus. For a couple of hours, there was a sense of shock around the office – not helped by the lack of hard news. Rumours of further attacks and mounting body counts kept the internet humming for most of the morning, before my capacity for grotesque wonder was fully charged, and it became time to do something else. You can say “isn’t it terrible?” only so many times. So I carried on configuring my server – a job that took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon. Running? I’ve had a good week … …
Interesting experience yesterday. Last week, I was up in Leeds for a couple of days, and took the opportunity of popping over to Huddersfield to rescue a five-years-garaged bike. I bought the machine (a mid-range Trek hybrid, for anyone interested) somewhere in the nineties. [Aside: Hmm. When I was younger, people used to remark on my ability to remember dates. It was a party trick. Someone would recall a meeting, a football match, a party, a fight, from years before, and I’d say, “Ah yes, March Seventh, Nineteen Eighty Two”. But now? Now I’m reduced to saying “Er, somewhere in the nineties…”] The bike never got much use, but then Huddersfield isn’t a great place for a novice cyclist. … …