November 2024 was more work, work, work keeping me busy, plus a number of trips into London for work and pleasure (The Script and London Grammar) and Motorcycle Live at the NEC Birmingham, all of which somewhat disrupted my training schedule.
Activities: 29 Distance: 406.37 km Time: 17:52:00 Calories: 17,145
Turning to my weight, at the end of October I weighed 86.7kg and at the end of November I weighed 85.9kg, which is down by -0.8kg. Still eating too many sweets and dried pineapple of an evening with the cats!
Just putting this lot here as a reference for some advice and meal plans.
Although I’m largely omnivorous, I’m currently tending towards being pescatarian and/or a bad vegetarian; going vegan is a step too far for me at the moment, although we’ve just bought some vegan cookbooks, so you never know.
Welcome to “Richard the Runner”. This is my blog about running.
I hate running.
I have all the gear, but no idea. I’m 52, male, called Richard (obv!) and I’ve been advised by my consultant not to run but to swim and cycle instead as one of my knees has a fair degree of necrosis.
But my bucket list has “run a marathon” on it and I’ve so far managed to enter the Berlin Marathon twice, only to pull out due to injury {sigh} in 2013 and 2014 after my then girlfriend managed a PB around 3:45 (which gave her a “good for age” entry into the London Marathon).
So I’m told I have an automatic entry into the 2015 Berlin Marathon and this is my blog to record my experiences.
I’ve been so busy and every time I sat down to update, something else would come up, so …
On the Friday afternoon after the last update I rode up to Silverstone for Kevin Ash’s memorial lap which was a fitting tribute.
I’m on the black bike with the video camera on my helmet
Saturday and I thought I should do some more cycling: I’ve injured my knee in my training for the Berlin Marathon and had to call it off for this year on the advice of my Consultant, though I’ll still be there to support GT. So off I went for another quick explore along the Thames Path, South and North: 11 and a bit miles in all. Great fun.
Iced Tea stop at Greenwich
The following Saturday saw the start of the new football season. Jack and I have now moved seats to a more central location – which meant paying full adult season ticket rates for him as well as me – from where we watched Norwich get a draw against Everton.
The View From…
The following week saw loads of hard work and travelling between offices, interspersed with blood tests and seeing my Consultant and Physiotherapist – with whom I’m so comfortable, I started undressing whilst she was still in the cubicle talking to me. And an after-work meal with colleagues at the Folly. We found out the next day that my colleague from Colchester fell asleep on the train home and ended up in Ipswich. No trains back so he had to wait until after 1.00am for an airport coach which dropped him off in Colchester at 2.00am but the other side from the station so he had to walk through Colchester at kicking out time, stopped off for a kebab en route and got in at 3.00am. He’d forgotten we were out for the evening so had only sent a text to his wife at the last minute…
The following weekend ended on the Bank Holiday with my upping my pushbike mileage to 20 miles as I continued past Greenwich – and the obligatory stop for an iced tea – and on to Woolwich where I caught the ferry across for the first time since the late 80s. Nothing’s changed. Saturday had been off to GT’s for the evening and some shopping the next day: some killer heels from Kurt Geiger.
Cutty Sark at GreenwichUrbexThames Barrier
A shorter work week – with more doctor’s visits – ending with Club Antichrist on the Friday night with Alix. Great fun! Home at a reasonable time, though, as I was off to Norfolk again the following day.
And the small matter of a 20 mile pushbike ride on the Sunday morning down to Hampton Court, following GT as she’s training hard for the Berlin Marathon. Mad woman!
Oh and talking of leather, I ordered a gas mask and a bespoke ladies’ white leather straitjacket, which will both probably find use in one or both of these locations:
PassageDeserted
One evening that week, walking home from work, I came across the London Air Ambulance landed on Potters Field by Tower Bridge as a cyclist had been squished. I happened to take a quick iPhone shot of the landing site pausing only to try to set it up as best I could and then I uploaded the image to Instagram. That night, a local news site picked up on it and asked if they could use the credited photo on their site, which they did. The next morning it was picked up by ITV News and used on their site with credit (eventually). And the London Air Ambulance themselves picked up on it and asked me if they could use it for their promotional stuff. I was happy to licence it to them and indeed made a bigger version for them as the original would be too small for print:
London Air Ambulance at Tower Bridge
That week, I also heard that I would be heading off to Canada for a week in October and another trip there in December, both for work.
And we’re almost up to date! Last week started off with a hospital appointment for some 18 burns to be applied to my face… It improved significantly with an impromptu gig – Kings of Leon at the Roundhouse courtesy of the iTunes Festival. A great gig!
Kings of Leon
Saturday was spent relaxing … and another 20.7 mile ride on the pushbike which I’d fitted with a new gel MTB seat. This appears to have made only a slight difference: at 17 miles when I have a load of cobbled streets to ride over, my arse still hurts! But at least today there were some random Morris Dancers out:
So two stories have dominated the news recently: horse meat in cheap beef products and failings in a hospital trust.
The supermarkets’ pressure on prices will always mean quality will suffer and sourcing meat from the cheapest source was bound to cause problems. If you want to guarantee quality, use a local butcher with locally sourced organic meat. You’ll taste the difference and help keep small businesses and your High Street alive.
The NHS story ignores the main problem with the NHS: fake management jobs. These layers of middle management with people doing nothing of any use to patients cost a lot of money – money that would be better spent on front line nursing.
I know of someone who skived off work for many months on a couple of occasions on full pay. Her work? Well there wasn’t any work to do in the first place so no-one missed her and nothing needed to be carried out by others working longer or harder.
It’s one of those jobs created for someone they can’t actually sack. They give it a job title with words like ”lead’ or ‘manager’ for someone who doesn’t actually lead or manage anyone. At most these people do reports about stuff that’s completely irrelevant and they sit in meetings to discuss producing these reports. Fake jobs. They report to Assistant Deputy Directors and the like. How many more tiers?
What is needed is a clear out of people who don’t actually contribute to patient care. Everyone should have to write a job description for their own position. What they do, the value that adds and how detrimental it would be to patients if they were sacked. Anyone with the term ‘lead’ or ‘manager’ should be able to show who they actually lead or manage and the benefit they bring.
And the people carrying out these reviews shouldn’t be other NHS Trust managers with vested interests like justifying their own jobs.
So we took our running gear out to Fuerteventura but in the end only managed to do one run … at midday … in the heat and humidity. What do they say about mad dogs and Englishmen?
I made the most of the last of the Indian Summer we’re enjoying at the moment to go for another run near the Premier Inn at Wigan (M6, J25). Â The first mile is uphill which means a bit of an effort to start off with.
Because my Garmin Forerunner 410 has decided it doesn’t want to work, I’ve had to switch to using iMapMyRun on my iPhone, but the benefit is Google Earth fly-through:
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