THE GOOD BUCK

That was a Black Sabbath quote, btw. Ozzy Osbourne? 70’s rock legend? *sighs at the yoof of today’s want of culture.* Anyhow, Iron Man; I finished my first half-marathon on Sunday. It was epic! It lashed down the whole time, parts of the course were flooded, others (due to the bloody hills they managed to find in Warrington) were more like streams. I seemed to be labouring up stream for thirteen miles. By the end of it I felt like a salmon on its spawning run. Parts looked like this;   Lo-res, but you get the picture, as it were.   So, cracked the half marathon, in 1:43:38. Not too shabby for a 44 year old unfit duffer’s first attempt. Two days later, convinced that I was now a top athlete, I set out for an hour’s run. I had decided to do better, so was after knocking a minute a mile off my time. Not even! My legs were done-in for the first mile, had to force them to work, got into a ‘quick’ pace, then flagged almost immediately! Ended up running 4.5 miles(in 30 odd minutes)! By the time I’d finished my legs felt like they were made of wood. I did knock 20 seconds per mile off though, so not all bad. Then I started thinking that I needed something more challenging. Thirteen miles! Ha! Then I stumbled across Iron Man. An endurance triathlon. You swim 2.4 miles, on to a pushbike for 112 miles, then finish it off with a full (26.2 miles) marathon run. Obviously that in itself is a bit too easy, so they have time limits for each section, and stage it around the hills of Bolton to give you a bit of a workout. As soon as I saw it I realized that was it; my new challenge. I have given a name to my mid-life crisis, I call it Iron Man! There are a few obstacles,  such as being a crap swimmer. I have never been competent, and don’t think in my swimming ‘prime’ I could complete two lengths. 2.4 miles equates to 154.4 lengths of a (25 metre) pool! Nor have I actually been for a swim in about 15 years. Then there’s the push-biking. OK, I can ride to work and back (which is 11 miles when worked out accurately) but 112 miles, after a swim, at race pace, around the hills of Bolton is a different kettle of fish. The half-to-full marathon step up is said to be easier than the 10k to half, but even so it’s quite challenging.   The thing is; as soon as I started considering it I got a buzz of nervous excitement. As Mal said in ‘Firefly’  (the series that preceded the epic film ‘Serenity’) “We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty”. That’s how I feel. It’s next to impossible, the challenge would be heroic, but if you succeed…., that would be mighty, indeed!   The thing I don’t […]

On the Sunday night, after my weekend of jolly T.A. training, I posted a throw-away remark on Twitter saying I was finding it hard to get my head back into civvy mode. This has attracted a few wry comments. Allow me to explain. What I wasn’t saying was that 48hrs of T.A. training had turned me into John Rambo, a steely eyed loner unable to adjust to civilian life. That would probably take a whole week. No, I was just saying that it is a totally different mindset. I am a Liberal by nature and politics. I rarely get myself in a state of apoplectic rage and self righteous indignation because I can usually see the other chaps point of view and often will argue it out of contrariness.   With the exception of religion. That is a whole other blog entry. Many other blog entries. I could dedicate my life to writing nothing but the arguments against religion and still have spleen to vent before I died.   As I was saying, my default state is one of laissez faire. There are things that wind me up, but I can’t see them as absolutes.   BNP for example. Easy to say they are a bunch of racist morons who should be sterilized, if not shot, for the common good. (Tempted to leave that train of thought right there.) But,….the thing is, I can see what made them like that. They feel disempowered, marginalised and afraid. They are probably not burdened with an excess of education, so can’t get the good jobs. They retreat into the solidarity of an exclusive white only world, and invent myths of a white only Britannia where scum-of-the-earth morons, who happen to be white, lived like kings. The answer then is better education, more integration, better understanding of diversity (and maybe sterilization and shooting, let’s not take that off the table as an option!).   So that’s my civvy state. I reason. I empathize. I wring my hands and clutch my pearls.   Then there’s the army.   I had forgotten. It is not a job. It is a life. Let us not forget that I have already done three years and one war in the regular army. It is weird. I compared it on Twitter to a dream/ awake state. Both states seem real at the time, yet are inconceivable in the opposite state. It really is like that. For me, at least. I was indoctrinated into army life at an impressionable age, and in a vulnerable period of my life. The lessons learned remain. Twenty years of being a civvy, all the freedoms you take for granted, work just being a job that you leave in your locker when you clock off. All forgotten in an instant. SLAP, and you’re awake. You live army, you think army, you are army.   The Captain who took us for one of our lectures was saying about that Daily Mirror story, where a ‘prisoner’ was shown […]

How hard can that be? You go to the shop, they say blah blah, you say OK, delivered, job’s a good ‘un. HA! We went around four sofa shops, they were all advertising ‘buy now, pay nothing for a year, then three years interest free credit’. Found one eventually as the one Wendy really liked was too big, the others she liked one part of but not the entirety. Finally found one she liked, at a surprisingly reasonable at £875, geezer said ‘the credit terms are only on sofas over one thousand pounds, but I can put payment protection on to take it to over a thousand.’ I wasn’t having any of that. He said we could put one hundred pounds down as deposit and pay the remaining £775 in a year.  Better. I went back after I’d been paid and said ‘that sofa, one hundred pounds, do me now’. (Or words to that effect.) Bint asked if I’d  seen someone about it, I said I had so she took my money, said it was OK, and told me to come back in when the geezer I’d originally seen was in work. It wasn’t till I was at home I got to thinking that this was just for the geezer’s commission, I was having to make another trip to town for his convenience. Not a terrible hardship, but a piss take on principle. I went back to the shop, (third time) and he said he needed two forms of I.D.! I’d brought them the previous three occasions, but as they had already taken my money, and not told me to bring it in with me, I didn’t think I would need it. I lost my rag a tad, swore a bit and was ready for a fight. Stormed out and got my I.D. (Note to prospective customers; although the lad was on his break when I returned the other guy in the shop served me immediately!) So that was undue stress. Then Wendy starts saying we should decorate the front room before the three piece arrives. Got the call on Thursday saying it was arriving today (Saturday) so Friday being my day off I trotted off to B&Q, under instruction to buy grey paint and white gloss. Piece of piss, I thought, how hard can it be? Then I had to strip the front room. There are two book cases in there. I had to empty them, move them, then everything else, clean up, then start. Finally got to painting at about 1.30, Wendy got stuck in with me as soon as she got in from work at 4.30, and we were just finishing  putting the room back together, still covered in paint, when the ‘phone rang for a family emergency (which I don’t want to go into on here.) Apparently there is a reason people pay painters and decorators! Anyway, the sofa arrived today! Yay! End of problems you might think. Wrongly. They didn’t take the old sofa, but […]

I was thinking about a Rush track today. The Trees. I’ve not heard the rock yodelling of Geddy Lee in a yonk, but I used to love it as a teen. Anyway, I’m not so fond of this track. Not because it fails to rock, but because of the subject to which I believe it alludes. Allow me to elucidate; “There is trouble in the forest, unrest amongst the trees, For the maples want more sunlight, and the oaks ignore their pleas" …”So the maples formed a union and demanded equal rights” …”Now there’s no more oak oppression, for they passed a noble law, And the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe and saw.”   A clear cut polemic against the unions and the scourge of socialism then. If there was such a thing as a meritocracy, or one that could survive more than one generation without nepotism and the special favour that wealth and power bestows, then maybe that would be a fair analogy, Mr Lee.   Anywho, it struck me today, perhaps there is more to it than that. The maple is a symbol of Canada, the oak a symbol of Britain.   Could this be Mr Lee’s acknowledgement of  the native superiority of we Brits, and a call to his countrymen to fight to remain part of the Empire?   I think so.   Buck. (PS The above entry was to wind-up my Canadian chum on Twitter. She didn’t over-react. *sigh*)

If you don’t want to read about one man’s struggle in the face of the insuperable; about sweat, blood, and grit (whilst humming the montage music from Rocky, preferably) look away now. *tumbleweed blows across blog* O.K., just me then. Still recording it for posterity.   Before I went for my assessment weekend for the T.A.,in April I’d knocked out a few 1.8 mile runs. This I sporadically doubled up to my last blog entry  (June 13th) when I had managed one run of 7.2 miles. That was pretty heroic. I then started loosely following a training plan to get up to half marathon standard. The plan gave distances, but not speeds. Knowing nothing about it I was basing my time on the one person I knew who ran, a Twitter chum, @Suzywong30 who said a good speed would be about 8 minutes per mile. (To be fair she said that because on my shorter runs I thought I was averaging about 7½ minutes per mile.) The other snippet I gleaned was from the half marathon website where I read that up to a cut off point of 1 hour 40 minutes, you got an exact ranking and time in the race results. After that just position. The implication being, it seemed, that that was a respectable time, anything over than that was just ‘also ran’. The maths on that seem to say that if you are running over 7 minute 40 second miles, you are not going to get a time.   So I was aiming for 8 minute miles as I built my stamina. It said on the plan to up your ‘long’ run by 1 mile a week. I was at 7 miles. I did an 8 miles, again nearly killing me. Then, fairly soon after I tried for a 9 mile run (that was the 10th July) which I was really pleased to have finished in 1 hour 13 minutes. I was nearly dead by the end of it, but just chuffed to get that far. The more I was running the more daunted I was becoming by the prospect of the full 13 miles. There’s only one way to get over that kind of apprehension, so on the 13th instead of the planned 4 mile warm up run I went the distance. 13 miles, 1 hour 46 minutes of graft. Go me!   In less than 2 months I’ve gone from a sweaty, wheezing unfit bastard who could barely manage to run 1.8 miles, to a sweaty, wheezing unfit bastard who can barely run 13 miles! Yay!   The twist in the tale came yesterday. Some other newbie runner was asking advice on a training plan. I suggested the plan I’d been loosely following, someone else came back with the BUPA training plan.They said it was better so I took a look.   It says newbies should aim for a run time of about 11-12 minutes per mile, which you can knock down to 10-11 […]