Imagine some soaring orchestral music……, then a husky, seductive voice says slowly:
Because you can never have too many rodents….
It’s the slogan of eRodent, a rat enthusiast’s website I’ve been ferreting about on recently. In fact there’s a second slogan which I also thought pretty good. It takes a different, and perhaps more threatening tack: They’re small and they’re furry, and they know where you live.
Apart from rats, these people are also keen on wildlife ponds, which is why I’ve been looking at their site. Our large, scrubby front garden has finally been cleared and levelled, and we are now busy making exotic plans for its cultivation.
I mention this by way of confessing, rather pitifully, that most of my recent exercise has come not from high-velocity fell running, but from gardening. It’s time this effeminate indolence was swept away.
I made a start this evening, when I teamed up with the Reading Joggers in Tilehurst, my first jaunt with these fine people since before Hamburg. The run was good – 4.7 hilly miles. It reminded me that there are some really quite picturesque spots in an area I usually think of being a fairly uninspiring swathe of residentia.
Talking of silly words, one that I didn’t make up is triskaidekaphobia, pronounced (apparently) tris-ky-dek-uh-FOH-bee-uh, a noun defined as “a morbid fear of the number 13 or the date Friday the 13th”.
I gleaned this from a recent “Word Of The Day” email. This admirable service is offered by www.dictionary.com. You can subscribe here. For a while now, I’ve had the idea that I should aim to include each word-of-the-day in one of these diary entries, without trying to make it sound too contrived. I’ll give it a go.
One of the nice things about embarking on a new marathon training programme is planning what races to do. The summer is a time for roasting on a 10 kilometre spit, and some of these smaller events have a charm that you miss out on at the big urban runfests. For instance, I noticed one 10K race offering a banana as a ‘memento’, though I couldn’t help thinking this was a little ill-advised.
I’ve not yet reached the traditional pre-marathon entry where I opine on the subject of Things I Will Do Differently This Time Around, but when I do, I may decide that I overdid things a bit by doing the Reading and Silverstone Halfs on successive weekends. It seemed fine at the time, and I was delighted with the two PBs, but in retrospect, I felt as though two halfs in 8 days exhausted some indefinable inner resource that I never quite managed to replenish before the marathon.
So it’s not just triskaidekaphobiacs who’ll be wary about half marathons this summer.
