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

I succumbed to temptation and bought another fixed-gear bike off eBay. It’s a conversion of an Italian road bike from, at a guess, the early 90s, and seemed like a bargain at around £100 plus delivery. It looked great when it arrived, and seems to work well based on a couple of rides. In an ideal world the frame would probably be a fraction bigger, and I might put a smaller sprocket on to up the gear ratio a bit, but it should make a decent summer commuter while I (in theory) do some maintenance on my usual purple machine.

It looks like I might have finally got to the bottom of my water leak, after a couple of months (95% of which time was admittedly me procrastinating).

Anglian Water contacted me in February after fitting a smart meter, to tell me that it was showing a constant flow of about 15 litres/hour (it’s dropped a bit since), indicating a leak which I needed to get fixed. After doing some investigations myself, which also involved clearing out the impromptu jungle which had colonised the passage round the side of my house, I admitted defeat and contacted a company through Checkatrade. They claimed to do leak detection, but just sent round a normal plumber who looked around, confirmed what I already knew, and said they’d need to send their leak specialist instead. They clearly didn’t fancy the job, because that’s the last I heard from them and they stopped replying to messages.

I was going to contact the company that came and looked at my kitchen hot water pipe leak, but when their website said that most people’s home insurance includes trace and access cover, I thought I’d better check. Turns out they were right – I knew I wasn’t covered for repair to external pipework, but finding the leak was covered.

The insurers arranged for a different company to send someone round, and they spent all of Friday morning running tests and pumping gas through the pipes, before eventually pinpointing the leak to … the smart meter. Which means that after all that faffing it’s not my problem, it’s Anglian Water’s. Now I’ve told them that, I assume they’ll send someone round with a spanner and a bit of PFTE tape and fix it in five minutes.

The annoying thing is that there was clearly water in the hole where the meter lives, but I (and both lots of plumbers) had assumed that wasn’t the leak because there was no sign of movement and the level seemed constant.

Kesgrave parkrun for a change this week, which is a lot flatter than Christchurch Park where I normally go. I didn’t really have any excuse to take it easy, so actually put a bit of effort in for once. I thought my time was OK-ish when I finished, but when the results came out it turned out to have been my quickest on that course, and my highest ever age grade, which is encouraging (especially with the Twilight 5k coming up next weekend). I knew I wouldn’t be running on Sunday, so went back out after lunch for some easy trail miles down to the river.

On Sunday I got up at 4am to get the coach down to London for the marathon, although fortunately this year I was only supporting rather than running! After dropping off the runners, we popped into a Wetherspoons for those who hadn’t brought breakfast with them to buy some (and to wait until 9am when they started serving beer!), then found a spot just past the Cutty Sark to watch from. We saw the leaders come past on their way to the historic double sub-2, then waited for our friends Haydn, Dave, Maria and the two Sams to come past. At that point some stayed on to wait for other club runners further down the field, but we didn’t have a great view there and the rest of us traipsed under the Greenwich foot tunnel to a quieter section in Millwall. From there we saw the same FRR people again, almost missing Maria entirely but actually managing to get a decent photo of Dave. Unfortunately we were standing by a subtle speed bump, and we saw a woman fall down but get up mostly unharmed, then a Belgian chap went down much harder and smacked his head on the ground. We had Nic (a retired midwife) and Ali (a nurse) with of us, so they helped until the St John Ambulance people arrived. They cleaned him up a bit and whisked him off to the medical station – we all hoped he’d be able to carry on, but I checked his number in the results later and it looks like he was forced to retire, which must have been an awful disappointment. We then braved the crowds and public transport to get to Trafalgar square to meet Dave and hand over his post-race beers.

Typically, after the ridiculous winds on Sunday we woke up to a lovely still day on Monday, which would have been perfect marathon weather. After breakfast and tidying up we left the Airbnb and headed home. The roads were pretty quiet apart from being held up by a couple of tractors for a few miles, although as usual getting back across Ipswich seemed to take almost as long as the rest of the journey (I think we had to stop at all but one of the seemingly endless pedestrian crossings).

I managed to drag myself out for a very slow jog round the block to loosen my legs up (and to avoid leaving my year-to-date mileage sitting on 598.9), then cycled into town with Rob, Jo, Dave, Sally, Neil and Gill for dinner at the Marinero Lounge and a fairly inevitable few extra pints at the clubhouse. Fortunately the Real Ale Monday to Wednesday deal softened the blow of returning from the land of £2.20 pints to the Cricketers’ £2.99!

Back to work on Tuesday, then cycled out to Felixstowe with Rob, Jo, Dave, Neil and Ryan to show off our marathon T-shirts and/or medals before ignoring the actual training session in favour of food, beer and watching Ipswich Town lose to Portsmouth at the Grosvenor. The vague plan had been to put our bikes on the train for the journey home, but once Ryan realised there were no trains between 9.28 and 11.01 everyone was convinced to ride home too. Somehow this all got a bit competitive, with Strava telling me I had three segment PRs (the tailwind might have helped).

No respite from the beer on Wednesday, as it was time for the regular [ex-]BT meet-up at the Fat Cat, this time featuring Anders, Rupert, Tony and Dave F. Then on Thursday I finally had a free evening to relax (and to go to the supermarket to stock up my dwindling supplies of food).

I’d just finished my lunch on Friday when my phone buzzed with a reminder that my MOT test was in one hour, a fact I’d completely forgotten. The car sailed through for another year – probably not surprising as it had only travelled 1,650 miles since last year, which is slightly less than I’d run in the same time period.

I ran down to parkrun on Saturday, early enough to tag along with the course inspection again, then stopped off at the Cricketers (again) with the gang for a second breakfast. Then on Sunday I went out for a few miles in the sunshine round the Fynn Valley. No sign of my friendly sheep, but its friends seem to have taken over the bench in the field.

Marathon week! A fair-sized gang of us from FRR travelled up to Boston (Lincolnshire, not Massachusetts) for the festival of running, with most of us running the marathon and Steve the half. A bunch of us had booked an Airbnb close to the town centre together, and went up on Friday afternoon. We were conveniently close to the Moon Under Water, so headed there to meet up with some others who were staying elsewhere for dinner and slightly more pints than intended. Then on Saturday we did a leisurely parkrun before some of us heading back to the pub for second breakfast/lunch (but no beer this time). Then we all piled into the Stump and Candle, so everyone (even Glen and I, with our lack of interest in football) could watch the Ipswich/Norwich derby. Some beer was drunk, but only Guinness 0.0 this time. Most of us couldn’t be bothered with cooking, so returned later to the Spoons a third time for dinner.

The race started at 8am, so there were lots of early nights had on Saturday, all hoping the weather forecast would miraculously change from force 5 winds with force 7 gusts (it didn’t). Then an early start for everyone to get breakfast and make all those nervous extra trips to the toilet, but at least we only had a five minute jog across the river to the start line.

I started with Holly, and we ran the first 23 or so miles together, which made for a much more enjoyable experience. The initial 11 or so were with the wind behind us, but then once we’d started heading back in there were some pretty brutal headwinds in places. Fortunately the route was fairly winding, so it wasn’t just a solid half marathon into the wind, and I think most of us managed to keep the pace up much better than we’d expected. I certainly did a better job in the later stages than I did last year in London, when the problem was heat rather than wind. Holly’s knee started hurting with about three miles to go, then she got a stitch, and insisted I shouldn’t wait. At that point based on my average pace I was still more-or-less on target for my original optimistic 3:30 target, but that was clearly never going to be possible with the majority of that average made up of the early miles on fresh legs with a tailwind. I knew I was pretty much guaranteed a PB by that point though, which was motivation to try not to slow too much, and I even found myself thinking “well this proves I should be able to go under 3:30 next time if the conditions are better” in the last mile, which is a bit early to have already gone back on the traditional “never again”! I wasn’t far off, crossing the line in 3:31:07 (Holly wasn’t that far behind in the end). A surprising number of us came away with PBs, and Neil and Ryan both had great marathon debuts. Then, once everyone was in, those of us who weren’t travelling home on the day hobbled back for showers and yet another visit to the pub – this time with no reason to limit the number of beers!

A quarter of the way through the year already, which seems almost as unlikely as being more than a quarter of the way through the century. It’s beginning to almost feel like Spring too, and the lighter evenings are nice despite my general antipathy towards daylight saving time.

I watched the last of the Columbos. I hadn’t realised that the ”season 10” specials lasted sporadically until 2003, meaning that despite starting in 1971 the show almost outlived Buffy.

Another short work week, with Monday and Tuesday off as well as the bank holiday on Friday. Not that I got many useful tasks achieved in my time off, naturally! I did manage to accidentally contribute to reducing energy use by (a) making a flask of coffee for work on Thursday with cold water after forgetting to boil the kettle, and (b) having marmalade on bread instead of toast on Saturday after absent-mindedly buttering it after slicing instead of putting it in the toaster.

First week of marathon taper, so less running this week, but that did include the Sudbury Fun Run on Good Friday. I managed to be only one second slower than last year (Or a 0.58 percentage point improvement in age grade, as us old folks like to say).

I made hot “cross” buns again, for the nth year in a row. I didn’t think they came out as well as last year’s – I used the Dairy Book of Home Cookery recipe, forgetting that last time I followed one I’d found online – but they went down well with everyone after Friday’s race and parkrun on Saturday.