THE GOOD BUCK

To cheer myself up I’ve been down my allotment today. It is something positive to be thinking about.

It’s gone from this:

I had a run worked out on ‘Gmaps pedometer’ (a site that lets you plot your exact route, allowing you to zoom in and click it turn by turn if you are following a path or otherwise not on a road.) The same route I was running before I buggered my knee. It worked out as 20 miles, when I did it more exactly it was 20.1 miles.

Since those heady days I have done one ten miler, rested for three weeks then ran two more ten milers.

Yesterday being the last day off of my long weekend I was supposed to do a half IM distance tri. I did the 1.2  mile swim in the morning then couldn’t really motivate myself for the 56 mile ride and 13 mile run. Then it started raining. I was doing a sterling job of prevarication in fact, then my Triathletes World magazine arrived and inspired/ guilt-tripped me.

Woo-hoo! Finally a development!

Obviously not with my works, who are the biggest bunch of knobs in the history of ever.

Our Robyn (my niece) said to apply to Jack Richards (hauliers) for some weekend work last year. At the time she was dating the son of one of the transport managers, so believed he would look upon my application favourably.

I seized the moment today and set out to try to do a full length ride.

To set the scene; my previous longest ride was 56 miles, which I did twice. Both times nearly killed me. They say when you are comfortable with a distance increase it by no more than ten per cent. I laugh in the face of such scientifically proven training methods!

As it’s my weekend off (yay!), it was quite warm, sunny and not too windy I went for it. I looked for somewhere ‘there-and-back’ so I would have a definite goal (and no option but to persevere when I was knackered). Morecambe fit the bill. 56 miles, the requisite 112 round trip.

I’m back to plotting my gardening again, this time on an industrial scale. Jo has pointed out an allotment website. A good job too. The first thing I was planning on doing was rotorvating the whole plot. Apparently this is very bad. You chop up all the roots of the nasty bugger weeds and make a dozen of each. Less than great.

What one chap on the site advised was to spray the whole area with ‘Roundup’ (a weedkiller that kills the roots so it can’t grow back) wait up to 28 days for the plants to fully wither and die, then rotorvate.

Blank slate to start with then.