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

A long-overdue week off work, during which – as predicted – I barely made a scratch on the enormous heap of queued-up chores. I did have some nice lie-ins (lies-in? Definitely not “lay-ins”) though.

I took the new carbon wheels out for a spin on Tuesday morning, then rode that bike to Felixstowe for Tuesday night training. Not sure they give me much advantage other than psychological, but they’re definitely lighter and more aerodynamic, and look nice! The whole bike pretty much has a matt black vibe now, which is obviously perfect for road safety.

I took the latest bike out for a little test ride (incorporating a couple of shop stops) on Wednesday. Not quite as smooth this time, as I had to stop and return home almost immediately after realising I’d forgotten to tighten the rear wheel nuts, then it turned out that the fancy electronic gear change battery wasn’t as charged as I thought, so I ended up doing the whole ride in one gear (fortunately something I’m pretty used to!). Nothing actually wrong with the bike though. I’m waiting for the unofficial charging cable I ordered to arrive (obviously Shimano wouldn’t just stick a USB-C port on it) before it can start its job as my daily (well, Tuesday to Thursday) commuter.

Lots of running this week, but no racing. Monday’s (easy 8 trail miles in the Fynn Valley) and Saturday (parkrun, plus commute and course checks) both felt horrendous, with my heart racing despite a very slow pace. I guess some combination of humidity and dehydration to blame. The other runs felt OK, and my heart rate was much more in keeping with the pace, so I don’t think I’m dying.

One of the few jobs I did actually get round to was cutting back the vegetation (wisteria and some other kind of climber) on the back of the house. As usual I’d left it longer than I should have, which entailed a trip up onto the roof to disconnect the bits that had wound themselves round the chimney and TV aerial mounting.

I spent an hour or two removing the spokes from the wheels from the purple bike, with the intention of reusing the rims with the new hubs I’d bought. Unfortunately after doing that, and while taking all the various measurements to figure out what size spokes to buy, I noticed that a spoke hole on one of the rims was ripped through. I’ve ended up ordering new rims too now, which means that these wheels are going to end up costing more than the (admittedly incredibly cheap) carbon ones I got for the road bike. Also that I wasted my time carefully disassembling the old ones into pieces that I’m no longer going to reuse. Still, they might come in handy one day …

This week was Robin’s 666th parkrun, so (given that it’ll be a while before the next proper milestone at 1000) he decided to run it in cut-off jeans and an Iron Maiden shirt. A few people joined in, but I decided that acquiring appropriate attire just for this one event would be a bit of a waste.

I lost my Stryd foot pod a few weeks ago, during the Stowmarket Friday 5. I was going to just do without like a normal person, but ended up caving in and buying a second-hand (but a newer model than the one I lost) replacement from eBay. One of the selling points of the newer (not latest) model is a more secure fit, so hopefully I’ll keep hold of this one!

I took a small step towards disconnection from the big surveillance capitalism giants by switching the browser on my laptop and phone from Chrome to Vivaldi. So far it’s been a pretty seamless experience (and free of any AI nonsense), although I’m yet to see how well it will work on my work laptop with their various random network blockages.

Catching up … hopefully I’ll remember to get next week’s written in time!

On Tuesday we a team “away day” (although only as far as another building on site). People had voted for various categories of award, and I was given the “Keep it Simple” award (“most creative problem-solver who finds surprisingly simple fixes to complex problems”), in the form of a trophy that Brad had 3D-printed (and some Haribo).

Then on Wednesday we had the software engineering community unconference, where people from various teams on site got together to discuss a wide range of developery topics (including, unsurprisingly, a lot of AI stuff, but fortunately only one per session, and all in the same room so easy to avoid).

I bought another bike on eBay, which I drove to Colchester to collect on Thursday evening. It’s a Genesis Day One Alfina Di2, with an 8-speed hub gear with electronic shifting and lots of braze-ons for mudguards, racks etc, and the plan is to make it my year-round commuter, allowing me to revert the Grinduro to more like its original spec (again).

The cheap Chinese carbon wheels I ordered for my road bike a while ago arrived this week. I haven’t had time to try them out yet (well I have, but notional past me that’s pretending I’m writing these notes on time hadn’t), but they certainly look good on the bike.

The last of the Friday races this week (and the last race of any kind for a while), with the Ipswich Twilight 10k. They’ve tweaked the route a bit this year to remove some tight U-turns, which is a definite improvement (although the new start line was a bit chaotic). It felt tough pretty much all the way round, and I was just hoping to keep under 45 minutes, so I was very surprised to approach the finish line and see a 42 on the clock! I guess it felt tough because I was going quicker than I thought. I ended up with 42:33 – I’ve gone quicker a couple of times over the distance, but it’s my fastest Twilight, and my best 10k age grade, so happy with that.

After Twilight we naturally retired to the Cricketers for food and drink, then were back there about 12 hours later to celebrate Dave and Sally both completing their 500th parkrun. Then we somehow ended up back there again on Sunday evening because Robin and Jo had got back from holiday too late to go shopping. The plan was to eat and leave early so people (not me) could get home for the world cup final, but they put it on the TV in the pub (the first time I can remember a TV in a ’Spoons having the volume turned up) so we ended up staying much longer then planned.

Oh dear. I remembered this morning (Thursday 23rd) that I hadn’t done last week’s notes yet. What I hadn’t realised was that I hadn’t done the week before’s either. So, let’s delve into the past and see what (aided by Strava, social media posts and timestamped photos) I can remember …

In a classic piece of questionable corporate motivation, I got a recognition award for building a tool in a week that an external company had quoted £100k for. The email described what the tool would enable them to do, mentioned the £100k savings, and came with a voucher for … £25. I’m nothing if not good value for money.

I also had what I can only assume was an initiative test, in the form of credentials for a service (basically a very long string of random letters) being sent to me in a “secure email”. This might seem sensible on the surface, but unfortunately what it means is that Outlook won’t allow text to be copied from the message, and prevents you from forwarding it. I certainly wasn’t keen on retyping the whole thing, and was considering taking a photo of the screen and having my phone OCR it, but it turned out the solution was to open it in webmail, then use the developer tools to inspect the element and copy the contents from there. I can’t help thinking this wasn’t the intention, but I still have no idea how I was expected to extract the text.

Tuesday was still hot, so in addition to cycling to Felixstowe for FRR training, we went for a swim in the sea before cycling home. Normally this is the kind of thing I only do on New Year’s Eve, and it turns out to be much more pleasant in summer!

The Friday 5 series may have been over, but as usual there was still one more five-mile race on Friday, in the shape of the Brantham 5 (not part of the series, although this year it was part of the Suffolk Grand Prix for the first time).

On Sunday I went for a long trail run with Holly, out to Witnesham, across to Claydon and back along the Gipping river path. As usual, it ended up being a bit longer than planned (especially for me, as I had further to go to get home), although we did stop for a quick drink at the Bramford Cock. The original intention had been to nip into the village to get ice lollies from the Co-op, but Holly mentioned that there was also a pub, and didn’t take much arm-twisting to go there instead. It was tough getting going again afterwards though.

At some point during that run I went through 1000 miles for the year, and noticed that I was also within a couple of miles of also covering 1000 on the bike(s). I mentioned this on a WhatsApp group, and got talked into joining Neil to ride a little ten mile loop including stopping at the Cricketers on the way home for food and a couple of pints. Incidentally I don’t think I’ve hit 1000 miles in the car this year yet.

Pretty sure this week consisted almost entirely of running, and cycling to places to do running (plus the normal three days of cycling to work).

I dragged all my working bikes out for a photo, and I rode all of them (apart from the mountain bike, which is very heavy and best avoided) at least once this week. The yellow one that I got back into working order last week had its first tryout on Thursday’s ride to work, and everything is working well so far. I do need to sort out some more organised storage than two or three in the garage and the others in the hall though, but that will entail some tidying.

Monday saw the first Run for Beer for a while, ending up in the Nelson to celebrate Claire’s birthday.

On Tuesday Neil and I cycled out to Felixstowe for training (to be joined by Ryan and Dave for the return trip), but mostly just jogged round the actual session on account of having raced on Friday and Sunday, with more coming up. Then the following evening we rode out there again for the club’s annual Run Bike Run event, which is basically a social fun duathlon (1.5 mile run, 6.1 mile ride, 2.2 mile run) with the twist that the “winner” is the one who sets off last and still finishes before the cutoff time. This was my first time doing the cycle leg on a bike with gears, which definitely sped me up, but I was never going to challenge for the title! Even if Ryan hadn’t been there to set what I think was a new course record then I would have been defeated by Robin’s tactics of setting off ten seconds after me and knowing that he then just had to finish before running out of time to beat me. Anyway, it was more about the chilli and beer afterwards than the actual competition.

Friday was the final Friday 5 race, at Great Bentley (I didn’t ride there!), then Saturday’s Christchurch Park parkrun was cancelled because they were setting up Music in the Park, so Robin, Ryan, Neil and I cycled to Alton Water to do that one instead. Dave (a different one) had also ridden there, and joined us for the journey back. Finally on Sunday a similar gang (minus Neil but plus Chris and Jo) rode to Woolverstone for the Ekiden Relays (basically loads of running clubs fielding multiple teams each running a marathon as a relay with 7.2k, 5k, 10k, 5k, 10k and 5k legs round a 2.5k course on the school fields). This year I had the second leg, and wasn’t also doing one for the coffee runners like last year, which meant I could relax fairly early, break out the beer and tuck into the snacks that everyone had brought. Highlight of the day was Ryan subbing in to do the final leg in our slowest team after one of their runners didn’t show up, and deciding to spice it up by downing a can of cider on each lap. He still managed to finish in about 20:30 – a minute quicker than me – despite having run a 36 minute 10k earlier in the day.