This is a weird one, but I seem to have found a miracle cure for the knee pain (IT band, I assume) that’s been plaguing me since One Lap to Ultra back in October. The pain had been coming and going, but it definitely still wasn’t right, despite getting some amount of rest while I was ill. I could hardly walk after the Turkey Trot the other week, and after last Sunday’s run it was pretty sore. Anyway, on Monday I spent about 40 minutes riding relatively hard on my new indoor bike trainer, and since then I haven’t felt even a tiny twinge of discomfort, despite running 9, 8 and 18 miles respectively on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The fan I was using to try to keep myself cool with did self-destruct while I was riding though, which made me briefly panic and hit the brakes, which obviously wouldn’t have done anything even if the big bang and bits of flying plastic had been anything to do with the bike.
Thursday was the annual Christmas pub run with the TTT crowd. This year we ran into town, then used a wheel of fortune type app to randomly select five pubs to run to (out of a choice of seven, although one of them turned out to have closed down) and which order to run to them.
I finished work for two weeks on Friday, which will be nice, assuming I manage not to get ill this time.
On Sunday I actually remembered to chop up another load of the cut-down laurel from months ago and put it in the brown bins ready for them to be collected on Wednesday. Certainly more pleasant than doing it in the dark on Tuesday night or having to get up early to do it on Wednesday morning (although of course this week I’ve got all day Monday and Tuesday to do it). The laurel’s pretty much gone now, but there’s still a big pile of branches from the apple tree, and quite a jungle of brambles to clear. And I still haven’t started putting the greenhouse up in the space I cleared (the bit I dug out to lay the slabs in is now full of weeds).
I braved the supermarket on Sunday for Christmas food (but mainly because I needed normal food too). Despite leaving it until just before they closed it was still pretty rammed, but at least it was Waitrose so everyone was polite. That gives me a few days to figure out what I’ve forgotten. I’ve marzippanned the cakes too, and realised that one advantage of making marzipan instead of buying it is that it uses egg yolks, which handily leaves whites for the icing.
Some poor quality control from the Britannia app’s Revealed puzzle on Saturday. I guessed correctly with no hints, but the letter count didn’t fit so I assumed I must have got it wrong ?
