As predicted, my cold (flu?) kept me pretty much wiped out for my entire week off, so I was even lazier than usual, barely left the house and didn’t run from Sunday to Friday.
Inspired by the lack of an anagram helper in the new Everyman crossword, and the fact that the Android app I wrote in 2012 is no longer supported, I wrote a very simple html/js/css app to fill the gap. With not a framework in sight, it weighs in at 152kB, works 100% offline and can be used or installed as a PWA from shuffle.kerryb.org.
I wasn’t too ill to drag myself slowly round parkrun on Saturday, and in the afternoon had a short and probably ill-advised first go on the indoor bike trainer that I’d bought last week, now all the various bits and pieces I needed to get it set up had also arrived. I connected it up to MyWhoosh (the cheapskate’s version of Zwift) and picked a random route, which ended up being 7.5km (I didn’t think to find out how to set it to miles before I started). I should probably clear some space to set it up in the garage with my old TV, because even that short session was extremely sweaty in the house!
The next “am I starting to beat this cold yet?” challenge was the Hadleigh 10 on Sunday. I started the race at what turned out to be a wildly optimistic pace, keeping up with Holly and Maria for the first mile, then the wheels progressively came off and for most of it I felt like I was just jogging along to make it to the finish. In my head it felt like the worst race I’ve ever done, but I reminded myself for perspective that ten years ago I ran it for the first time and was elated to finish nearly ten minutes slower than this year’s time. It was still pretty terrible though. The race organisers have clearly gone through all their old records, because this year they had pin badges for people who’d completed the event ten times or more. A few people got theirs beforehand, but I had to wait until afterwards because this was my tenth (eight 10s and two 5s) and they clearly weren’t going to assume I’d finish!
On Sunday evening a few of us headed to the Cricketers for a quiet drink, which somehow ended up with us being possibly the last to leave the pub, at around midnight.