Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

A year or so ago I finally reregistered with a dentist, returning to the practice handily located at the end of my road. Last time I had a hygienist appointment they moved it to their other branch, in town, and now to make things even more inconvenient they’ve merged with another practice three miles away.

Anyway, I had a checkup in my calendar on Tuesday, so I dutifully cycled out there, only to find that the appointment was actually on Monday. So I’ve now been slapped with a £15 non-attendance fee, and have a new appointment in a month’s time.

After over two years of having to turn the kitchen hot tap on via the isolation valve under the sink every time I wanted to use it, because otherwise it leaked prodigiously, I finally managed to get the tap housings undone yesterday to replace the cartridges (spurred on by the fact that the cold was starting to drip too). It was, as YouTube had originally told me, “just” a case of unscrewing the bits below the taps, but as they were ludicrously tight and helpfully have no flats on them, it took a lot of force with slip joint pliers protected by some cut off bits of inner tube, and a strong conviction that despite appearances they were actually a separate part from the base. Then after only a short time figuring out where I’d put the new inserts when I finally got fed up with them sitting on the side in the kitchen, it all went back together nice and easily and now I finally have normal working taps again! I was beginning to think I’d have to call a plumber.

On Wednesday I noticed a strange-looking straggly thing on the patio behind the house, then was slightly shocked to realise that it was actually an animal skeleton. I can’t say for sure that it was a cat, but it seems likely that it was, which means it was probably Shadow, who’s been missing for a couple of months. I can only assume she had some kind of fatal injury from a fight or a car, crawled into the undergrowth out of sight, and some animal or other pulled the remains out last night.

Anyway, she’s now been buried, and at least it’s some kind of closure, if not as pleasant as the “found another home” story I’d been half-heartedly telling myself.

Tuesday was the final Summer Series 5k, and fortunately no-one old and quick turned up so I completed my clean sweep of MV50 trophies. I managed to scrape under 21 minutes too, which is my fastest time on that course (which has a nasty steep hill which you have to go up twice, although obviously that implies a lot of downhill too). Then on Thursday there was a brief reappearance of the Thursday Tempo Ten, a training run that a bunch of friends usually do in the autumn and winter months. It’s basically five miles out and five back, at what’s supposed to be tempo pace, but for me is pretty much flat out (the target’s generally 70 minutes). This time they only aimed for 75, which meant I felt obliged to keep up with them, and it was as horrible as it always is.

I took my blood pressure again a couple of times, and it was much more normal. Although it turns out the ZOE thing was a one-off reading, so I guess they’ll have me down as hypertensive now.

Firstly, and technically belonging to last week, a couple of photos from the SVP that show (a) how parched the landscape is at the moment, and (b) how pleased I apparently was to finish.

After that extended hot dry spell, I suppose it was inevitable that when we had our planned work get-together in the park on Tuesday afternoon, it clouded over and actually rained a little. Not enough to really do any good though. We sat around for a bit, got visited by various friendly dogs, had an ice cream, and played Faye’s Viking stick-throwing game again.

Somewhat surprisingly, my legs survived both Tuesday evening’s club training and Wednesday’s “Two Rivers” race – a social club handicap race with runners setting off at various times from Landguard Fort, choosing our own routes and converging on the Ferryboat Inn for a few beers, around five miles later. Admittedly I was a couple of minutes slower than last time it happened (pre-pandemic), but there was a tailwind that day, and it was very much against us this time. Excuses excuses …

More boring running stuff: Run for Coffee first thing Friday, what turned out to be my course best at Chantry Park parkrun (where my boss turned up to take part for the first time), and a long slow one out to Martlesham today to grab this month’s hollow tree photo (I need to find four more trees now, to finish the year). It’s also nice to be able to describe 14 miles as “long” again!

I bought a cheap blood pressure monitor so I could take part in the ZOE blood pressure study. My three readings came in at 131/86, 134/87 and 121/85, which I just assumed was normal, but now I’ve looked it up might be slightly on the high side. Probably not to the point of worrying about it though.

At the pub on Friday lunchtime someone complimented my bike, which apparently they remember seeing “outside Crown Pools” (which is technically true, although I was in the pub next door rather than swimming). Seemed odd, as it’s not really anything special other than being fairly purple.

A pretty uneventful week, for the most part. Although there was the small matter of the SVP50 on Saturday, which I’d entered a couple of weeks ago for reasons best known to myself, despite the distance being well out of my comfort zone, and before it turned out it would be taking place in a 32°C heatwave.

The race is the relatively new little brother of the SVP100, and covers 50km of the Stour Valley Path, from Sudbury to Brantham. Definitely not an event to treat as a race, especially in this weather, and I ran it with Emma, who’s done a few ultras before. I left her in charge of setting the pace (including walking the uphill bits, and deciding to switch to 25 min run/5 min walk by about halfway), which meant all I had to worry about was keeping up. Both of us have something of a reputation for poor navigational skills, but somehow we managed to cancel each other out, never both missing a turn at the same time. I managed to trip over 2½ times, but without doing any damage to either my body or my Garmin.

The heat was definitely the main feature of the day, and the excellent volunteers on the three aid stations with food, drink and hosepipes were very welcome, as were the occasional churchyard taps which gave extra opportunities to soak caps and flexible sports head pipes¹ in cold water. We finished in about 6 hours 37 (oddly the tracker shows a two minute difference between our times, despite crossing the start and finish lines together. Not sure whether the actual results will be more accurate when they come out, but anyway it definitely wasn’t a day to worry about times).

Overall it was much less unpleasant than I thought it might have been, and there wasn’t really any point where I’d have said I definitely wasn’t enjoying it (or maybe I’ve already blocked the memories out). To be honest I don’t really think I felt much worse than the last time I was at Brantham Leisure Centre, after finishing the Friday 5 there a couple of weeks ago. Maybe there’s something in this long distance malarkey after all, but I’m definitely not going to start calling myself an ultra runner yet!

¹Robin’s name for the generic version of a Buff™

Another half day of greyhound-sitting this week. Apart from occasional bursts of manic activity, she seems admirably lazy (I see why people compare them to cats). Here she is relaxing (?) after having refused to go for a walk:

The trail camera I ordered finally arrived, and the first night I put it out it picked up a pair of badgers passing through the garden. And some impressive weeds.

On Thursday evening I got a phone call from someone up the road who’d found a friendly hungry cat wandering round and thought it might be Shadow, but when I went to check it wasn’t her. They seemed pretty convinced it was a stray, but couldn’t take her in as they had several cats and a dog and nowhere to shut her away, so I said I’d take her for the night and find out whether she had a microchip. I went home and got a cat carrier, at which point she suddenly became a whole lot less friendly, and shut her in the utility room (which she also wasn’t too happy about) with some food and water and a litter tray.

I took her to the vet on Friday morning and it turned out she did have a chip, so they contacted the owner to go and collect her. Apparently she only lives just round the corner from where she was “found”, so clearly not a stray at all. Hopefully she’s not too emotionally scarred from an unexpected night of incarceration!

A bit of a bike-run-bike type weekend. Ipswich parkrun was cancelled yesterday because of travellers on Chantry Park, so a few of us rode out to Alton Water to give that event a try. It made a nice change, although I didn’t do a great job of saving my legs for today’s race, finishing in 21:36. Then today we got back on our bikes to head out to Woodbridge for the post-covid return of the Ekiden Relay. This is a great event in which teams of six run a marathon as a relay on a 2.5km loop (the legs are 7.2km, 5km, 10km, 5km, 10km and 5km). About 150 teams take part, from pretty much all the running clubs in the area (our club had ten teams across the various categories).

This year was the first time I got to run the 7.2km leg, which meant (a) it wasn’t quite as hot as later in the day (but still boiling, as is traditional), (b) I didn’t have to stress about being ready at the right time to take the baton from the previous runner, and most importantly (c) half an hour after the event started I was free to indulge in ice cream, beer (an extra incentive to cycle there instead of driving!) and the mountain of cakes etc that people had brought along.