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

Only a day late this week, so there’s progress! It’s definitely feeling very spring-like now, with decent temperatures, things starting to grow, and lighter evenings even before the state-mandated mass denial of the correct time of day began on Sunday.

I finally got fed up of being splashed while cooking – technical running tops in particular never seem to recover from spots of fat, and I have quite a few that bear the signs of quickly making some dinner before changing out of them – and ordered a cheap apron from a catering supply company (along with a few other bits and bobs). For some reason they also included one of those chef tops with the button-over front in the delivery, so if I ever feel particularly fancy I can make my dinner wearing that (I should have ordered a hat too!)

This month’s track session on Wednesday evening was another mile challenge. Once again I failed to get under 6 minutes, but at least I wasn’t any slower than the one we did in the Summer. As usual, a few of us headed to the clubhouse (aka The Cricketers) afterwards, for slightly more refreshment than originally planned.

On Thursday I got the train to Colchester to see Beans on Toast at the Arts Centre, with Matt Millership on piano and supported by Evy Frearson and William Crighton. The gig was good, but somewhat spoiled by an inincredibly annoying group of people right behind me talking at maximum volume for most of Beans’s set. As I was leaving I spotted some (possibly all four) of Pet Needs standing at the back.

After parkrun on Saturday I did a little bit of digging for the greenhouse base. I was planning to use my old laser pointer spirit level to find level points at each corner, but it turned out the batteries had leaked inside, and either the leakage or the amount of violence necessary to evict the batteries from their little tube has killed the laser, so now it’s just a normal short spirit level. I also filled both brown bins, having attached the stickers to prove that I’ve paid the new fee to have them empties, and made basically zero dent in the pile of garden waste. I just need to remember to put them out on Tuesday night now!

Slightly against my better judgement, I entered the Colchester (actually Langham) 15 again on Sunday. It’s a nice low-key little tinpot race, but surprisingly hilly! I ran round with Jason, who wasn’t going flat out because he has a marathon in a fortnight, which made for a more enjoyable time than last year when I was on my own with hardly another runner in sight for most of the second lap. Once we got home, those of us from Ipswich showered, transferred to bikes and headed back into town again for another afternoon in the clubhouse. I started with a curry and a pint for £7.45, which you really can’t complain about when the average non-Wetherspoons beer apparently now costs over two thirds of that!

Rather nicely, and completely without planning it, that brought my running mileage for the first quarter of this year (tomorrow will be a rest day) to exactly 500.0 miles. Cue the Proclaimers!

Oh dear, nearly a week late. As long as I hit publish before Sunday, so it’s not a whole week!

I had the week off, and did manage to accomplish some things, albeit not as many as I should have. A year after taking down the chicken run to make room for the greenhouse (which I’ve had in pieces in the carport since 2022) I finally took a chainsaw to the giant laurel hedge (and to a section of trellis that had almost completely fallen over) to actually clear a space. Now all I have to do is prepare a base for the slabs, then hope I can remember how the greenhouse goes back together.

While doing that, I came across a mystery egg. I initially thought it must have somehow survived since I had chickens, then realised it had a face on it. I assume it’s hard-boiled (I certainly wasn’t going to crack it to check) – maybe it got stolen from someone’s Easter egg hunt by a fox?

Of course I’ve now got an even bigger collection of garden waste to get rid of. Ipswich council have just introduced charges for brown bin collection, and I splashed out for two permits (I’ve still got a spare bin from when I used to pay for a second one, but since stopping that I could only put one out at a time). I figure even with two bins a fortnight it’s going to take a while to clear everything (there’s still lots of other overgrown stuff to sort out too).

I also did a bit of fettling on my bike. The rear wheel was a bit wobbly, so I cleaned, regreased and adjusted the bearings. Now it doesn’t wobble, but also doesn’t turn quite as smoothly as it should. Not sure whether that’s the bearings, the brake pads binding, or the chain. I guess a little extra resistance is good exercise anyway!

After getting some free financial planning advice through work last year (which was also a thinly-veiled selling attempt, but I resisted that side of it) I finally acted like some kind of grown-up and put some money into a stocks and shares Isa instead of keeping everything in a variety of Nationwide savings accounts and cash Isas. So if the stock market crashes, you’ll know who to blame. although I think we all know who to actually blame.

In an attempt at healthy snacking, I bought some carrots and apples, then accidentally baked some ginger nuts and ended up snacking on them instead (or at least as well). Oops.

Drinks in the Fat Cat with Rupert and Mel again on Wednesday (seems much less than a month since last time). For some reason it seemed less busy than the past couple of times. It had rained before I went out, providing a nice double rainbow, but fortunately stopped in time for the walk to the pub.

I managed to trip over towards the end of Thursday’s TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten). There’s a little service road with a sharp-edged speed bump, and there are tree roots pushing the pavement up at around the same spot. I decided to run in the road because the pavement was quite dark, even though I thought “this is probably a bad idea, and I won’t see the speed bump”. I nearly tripped when the road was unexpectedly a couple of inches lower than my foot was expecting, and thought that was the bump, but it wasn’t, as I learned a few seconds later when I stubbed my toe and started an inevitable topple forwards. When you’re running slowly it’s usually easy enough to take a few quick steps and get your feet back under you, but at full speed that didn’t really work, and after a few flailing paces I bowed to the inevitable. Fortunately the damage was limited to a ripped glove and grazed hands and elbows, and a couple of lost seconds, but I still managed my fastest ten miles for nearly a year.

I did my long run on Saturday this week (incorporating parkrun, of course), thus theoretically freeing up Sunday to do whatever I wanted. Naturally I ended up doing pretty much nothing. I’ve got next week off work – will I end up doing any of the mountain of gardening and housework that I keep putting off? I’m writing this belatedly on Tuesday morning, so I already know over 20% of the answer, but you’ll have to wait. Yes, all three of you.

On Tuesday I went to the dentist for a checkup. The basic upshot was that everything they could see was fine, but they peeked under my two crowns with X rays, and found some decay. Apparently fixing it (rather than just extracting the teeth) would involve removing the crowns, drilling out the decay, possibly doing a root canal thing, then re-crowning them, which would cost upwards of £3k. I think I might just ignore it and hope it goes away, especially as when the second crown was done they only gave it a 50/50 chance of working, so the odds after removing even more tooth seem pretty slim. Of course in theory I could (haha) find an NHS dentist, and presumably pay less.

I drove to Felixstowe on Tuesday night with my fuel gauge reporting around 12 miles’ worth of petrol remaining (it’s a 20 mile round trip). I didn’t have time to stop on the way, and was going to call its bluff and stop at Sainsbury’s about three quarters of the way home, but when I set off to return it was claiming one mile, and all the fuel level lights had gone out, so I bottled it and filled up at the Co-op in Felixstowe. I’m still interested to know how much reserve there is, but maybe I’ll aim to have a jerry can in the car when I find out.

Also on Tuesday, pancake day! I didn’t do any shriving, but I did make pancakes (which to be fair I do far more often than once a year). I was going to make my old joke about giving up pancakes for lent, then remembered that I’d only used half the batter, and made savoury ones on Wednesday too. I suppose I could have used it for yorkshire puddings or toad in the hole.

I got another puncture on my back wheel on the way back from work on Thursday. At least it was still light, dry and reasonably warm, so stopping to change the tube wasn’t too horrible.

Stowmarket half on Sunday, which didn’t start too badly (although I had a suspicion my pace was a bit optimistic), but got progressively slower as the miles passed by. A lot of people had similar stories though – maybe we’re just not used to the sudden increase in temperature, which I think just about hit 20° today. Back to more seasonably appropriate numbers next week though, I think.

It’s March! And the days are noticeably drawing out, which is nice.

I did get round to fixing my puncture on Monday, ready to ride into the office on Tuesday. It was definitely not difficult to find the offending pointy object in the tyre! Mind you, it was slightly soft again on Tuesday evening, so maybe there was another foreign object that I missed, or the previously-patched tube that I swapped in hadn’t quite been repaired properly. It seemed to stay up again after that though, so who knows?

I was going to leave all the running stuff to the end, on the basis that it’s probably very boring to most of the tiny number of people who might actually read this. Which I am going to do, but it turns out not much else happened this week, so the end starts here.

I did a very slow short recovery run on Monday, which felt terrible after the Tarpley 20 on Sunday, then the usual club session on Tuesday night. That featured hills and a reasonable mileage (6.4, and thanks to traffic jams I barely made it in time, so that doesn’t even include jogging round the netball courts beforehand), and my legs held up better than expected. Then we also had our monthly track session the next day, which was a fairly brutal constant repetition of 400m efforts and 200m recoveries. Apparently the theory is that if you take the average of the time you take for all the efforts, in minutes and seconds, then that roughly corresponds to your expected half marathon time in hours and minutes. Mine came out a few minutes slower, but that’s not surprising on tired legs.

After what I felt was a well-deserved rest day on Thursday, and a gentle run on Friday, I had no excuse not to put in some effort at parkrun for once. I finished with a time that I initially felt was OK but not great, but later realised that it was my best ever age grade, so I’ll take that! Then on Sunday I did a long slow run with Holly, covering 22 miles in glorious sunshine.