2005 ended with a 12½ mile bang, closely followed by the cork popping on a bottle of Sainsbury’s Vintage Champagne. It was intended to be a toast to usher in a new year of glowing good health, even if yes, there’s something mildly ironic about celebrating abstemiousness by glugging a bottle of bubbly.
And true enough, the gesture came back to bite me on the arse yesterday, when my visit to Loftus Road was enhanced, or otherwise, by visiting a few of the local inns to check that all was in order. Everything was, apart from me.
It was my first visit to Mecca for some weeks, thanks to Sky TV. It’s hard to get down there in midweek, but increasingly, matches are being pushed away from Saturdays by the insatiable appetite of live television. It seems hardly worth renewing my season ticket if the true fan is going to be abused like this. It would now be cheaper to buy tickets for individual matches rather than get a season ticket and have to miss half of them. Grizzly images of a goose having laid its last golden egg, in the gutter outside Sky TV Towers comes to mind, next to all those babies thrown out with the bath water. Ultimately though, I don’t think the Skylords care. When this seam has been mined to exhaustion, they’ll move onto the next.
One moment of note in the game. An extraordinary save by QPR goalkeeper Simon Royce from a close-range thump by Ade Akinbiyi. One of the best bits of goalkeeping I’ve ever seen. A startled Akinbiyi just stood there, clapping the goalkeeper, like Eusebio and Alex Stepney in the 1968 European Cup Final. We too were astonished by the save. Play continued, but for at least a minute or more, the crowd stayed on their feet, applauding. It was involuntary, and not something I’ll forget soon.
Sport is like that. Just when you’re tempted to collapse beneath the weight of your own disillusionment and cynicism, something flickers again, and reignites your faith. Thank you, Royce and Akinbiyi.
Running? Just 3½ miles on the board so far. Yesterday was written off. I’d felt pretty good on Sunday, despite the 12½ miles and the Champagne, but decided to be sensible and make it a day of slothful recovery, especially as I’d already made my mileage target for the week. With tonight’s cold and rainy, beer-heavy, laboured 3.5 miles, here’s how it’s looking:
| Mon | Tues | Wed | Thurs | Fri | Sat | Sun | Tot | |||||||||
| P | A | P | A | P | A | P | A | P | A | P | A | P | A | P | A | |
| Dec 19 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 8.3 | 8 | 3.5 | 3 | 9 | 22 | 23.8 | |||||
| Dec 26 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 6.4 | 4 | 3.5 | 10 | 12.5 | 3 | 25 | 26.35 | |||||
| Jan 2 | 3 | 3.5 | 5 | 3 | 13 | 3 | 27 | |||||||||
| Jan 9 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 8 | 30 | |||||||||
| Jan 16 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 15 | 3 | 32 | ||||||||||
| Jan 23 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 13 | 35 | ||||||||||
| P = Planned, A = Actual | ||||||||||||||||
The week before Christmas is never a great time to start a weight-reduction programme, but that’s what I did. And it’s been as successful as you might imagine. After 2½ weeks of intensive and determined calorie-counting, I now weigh 2 pounds more than I did at the start.
Things will get better.
