If ever there’s a truth in life, it’s that you get just the same out as you put in.
Easily remembered, but easily forgotten, too. And at eight miles in the Bath Half Marathon, it was time to remember.
Anyone can make a mistake. It’s easy to do. But after five marathons and eight half marathons, perhaps you don’t expect to make mistakes in races. But you can make them just the same. And with five miles still to run, I was learning just how true that was.
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Brace ! Brace ! Brace ! Standby for ditching…..!
These are the words you never, ever want to hear, especially when you’re flying at low altitude above the North Sea. But they were real enough, and strapped firmly into my seat, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
It’d been a hell of a bad day already, to be frank. One problem after another. The whole morning spent dousing out a series of kerosene fires, and then that frightening traverse in breathing apparatus through a blackened and smoke-filled furnace to escape. Without even mentioning the exploding chip pan in the galley.
And now, after all of that, our helicopter was going down. Again.
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Posted in 2005, A1 - the best of roads of stone, geology, life and times
I’m sitting on old Guildford station
Got a ticket for my destination
How I wish I was
Homeward bound
I’m on a tour by rail you see
‘Cos tonight I’m out in the great City
And the day at work’s begun for me
This rock hound with a BlackBerry
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Posted in 2005, life and times, music, poetry
One of the great benefits of taking up running is that I rarely get ill. Touch wood.
In years of yore, winters were always long, drawn-out, snuffly affairs. I seemed to go from cold to cold. Handkerchiefs were in almost continual use, and it seemed like I was permanently tired. From October to April.
After taking up running, I still was permanently tired, of course, but at least there was good reason, and it was a different kind of tired. And most of the zillions of germs that knock around our offices and schools during the winter months decided I wasn’t worth meddling with. Not only was I fitter, and at times even perhaps slightly thinner, but I was also more resistant to the coughs and sneezes that serve as unwelcome bedfellows to many of us for throughout the darker half of the year.
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Posted in 2005, life and times, winter
And girl it looks so pretty to me
Like it always did –
Like the Spanish city to me
When we were kids
Dire Straits – October 1980
La Rambla de Almería. An elegant Spanish boulevard, rising gently but inexorably towards the sunlit mountains of the Sierra de Alhamilla. Just 2.4 km of climb, and yet this one stretch defines an entire race. Twice.
An article on the radio this week said that 24th January was officially the most miserable day of the year. Apparently the combination of bad weather, dark nights, post-Christmas debt and broken New Year’s resolutions serves to make this the depressive lowpoint in our calendar.
The fact that it was a Monday can’t have helped much either.
Posted in 2005, life and times, winter
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