Author: Buck

Bloody marvellous. I’ve been hale and hearty for as long as I can remember, I finally had my first ever simple flat marathon (the Chester marathon, today, Sunday)  to test myself. Not at the end of a triathlon, not a hill marathon, not an ultra, just  an honest to goodness 26.2 mile trot.

Then on Thursday I was having a bit of hassle at work and thought I was feeling down with it, when I suddenly realised it felt like a cold. *PANIC!*

Friday I felt drained, Saturday I got up at 11.00 and gave up and went back to bed for 20.00 hrs. Not that that did me any good, I got straight to sleep then the neighbour’s kids woke me having a squealing high pitched game of tag. I couldn’t get back to sleep then until gone 0130 and I had to be up for 0600 for the race.

That bloody treadmill. It was way down South, cost me £85 just in diesel. All day driving there and back (well, from 0900 to 1730). I specifically ordered a low, short wheel base transit as that was all I would need given the dimensions of the treadmill and the load dimensions of the van. Would it fit in in it’s operating position (ie at it most stable and less likely to break)? Would it buggery! The van was an inch to small. So I had to improvise, adapt and overcome. This meant I had to lay it down, leaving the handles on the floor. So then I had to fashion a strap to hold the handles off the floor so they wouldn’t snap off.

Then I got it home and had to try and manhandle 100kg of unwieldy treadmill off the van on my own. Wendy was trying to help but she is a total feeb.

I’d got it half manoeuvred through the front door when I realised I would tear up the floor before I could get it past the second door. Plan B, partially strip it, whilst wedged in the front door. Eventually we got it into the kitchen and I set about re-assembling it. All in all it must have took an hour and half just to get it into the house.

First off, better update you on the Wendy front. She went back to the hospital on Thursday as an outpatient, the whisked her straight in and scanned the crap out of her. They couldn’t find it at first but kept looking until they confirmed it was a shitload of tiny gall stones, about 1mm each. Apparently this is the dangerous time, when they are still small enough to move and crash vital organs. If they are large they can’t go anywhere. If they are large they must have started small? Whatever. The doctor said they were dangerous now, which is what the pain was; small stones moving and blocking the bile ducts. Whatever they are, or do. The point being, they have to remove the gall bladder.

Wendy hates hospitals, but she is really relieved it is something as straight forward and relatively minor as this. Not that the pain is to be dismissed. Believe it or not Wendy is quite a tough little cookie when it comes down to it. I’ve seen her with a broken arm, with metal rods drilled through her bones, dropped on her head, all sorts of really bad, painful things and she’s never made too much of a fuss. She had an attack on holiday and she was actually crying with the pain. That’s pretty damn bad.

By a strange coincidence, our next-door-but-one neighbour had her gall bladder out last week. It’s obviously catching. She reckons they can do keyhole surgery and have you out a few hours later.

We’ve had quite the eventful couple of weeks.

Before I start let me say Wendy is OK.

We didn’t know that at the time, though. It must have been Sunday night, I was playing on the internet, Wendy was watching crap on the telly, when she called me. She was suddenly in a world of pain, right in the centre of her chest around the solar plexus (the bit where your ribs meet at the bottom) . She was doubled up with it. She said she couldn’t breathe and if felt like she had a crushing weight on her chest. I thought it was a heart attack. I shit. I gave her some aspirin and looked up the new NHS advice number, then rang that 111 thing. They got talking to her and immediately sent out an ambulance.

I’ve had a bit of fun in the Lakes the last two weeks. Friday last week, when I was looking forward to an early dart so I could do some hard training on Saturday, I got to my furthest point from base and broke down.

I’d gone under the trailer I was to take and started the ‘tug test’ (where you try to drive forward, twice, to make sure you are properly connected.) There was an electrical type smell and a red light flashed up on the dash saying the clutch was knackered.

Ace.