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.