Two ultra-runners and a triathlete were running a very hot race...

and suffering in the sun, when they came across the wreck of an old car. To ease the burden of the heat, they each decided to take one piece of the car with them as they continued.
The first ultra-runner took the washer bottle, saying 'when I get really hot, I can pour the water over me to cool off.'
The second ultra-runner took the back seat, saying 'when I get really hot, I can crawl under the seat and get some shade.'
'I'm taking the driver's door,' said the triathlete. ' When I get really hot, I can wind the window down.'

Today, I am, of course, wibbling about the weather; this is the curse of everyone who does outdoor activities. I'd love about 16 degrees, dry and cloudy, but Rule 4 applies: it is what it is.

To this end, I've got complete body waterproofs, sunglasses, a peaked cap and my wetsuit on standby, so I can cope whatever the conditions. I will nevertheless spend all day obsessively refreshing the web pages of several different weather forecast sites, before choosing to believe the one I like best.

I may take some time out to find my boomerang; I can't remember where I left it, but I'm sure it'll come back to me.

I shall take myself out for three miles of light jogging, do one last session with Kia-ora and her yogalates; never before have my facial muscles been so relaxed or my jaw so soft.

All that then remains is some more faffing and wibbling, followed by a very early start tomorrow.

NEY Dave (and maybe one or two other people!) may appreciate the irony of a present given to me my my dear wife recently. For the rest of you, it's an in-joke, fully explained in this blog if you're eaten up with curiosity:

Remember, kiddies, wearing a hat doesn't make you interesting!

I'm glad to report that the charidee donations have started to trickle in; thank you to Dis and Mr Frog! I'm hoping that, like the Severn, there will be a big gush and a flood in five days time. Blimey, is that a link to my Justgiving page, over there, on the right?

My plan is to blog every day; you can keep up with my astonishingly slow progress here, courtesy of my Executive 'Ead 'Itter, sherpa extraordinaire and lovely wife, Squish.

If you're particularly unlucky, I may tweet stuff from @Crash_Hamster (subject to being able to get a signal/find my phone/being arsed); it'll probably be fairly dull, but that's Twitter for you.

Rumour has it that this is actually a race, so if you want to see how comprehensively I'm being thrashed, there are apparently going to be reports here, daily.

If you've been with me on my journey to this start line, thanks for your help and support; if you were redirected here after looking up 'incomprehensible' in an online dictionary, I hope you're not too scarred.

Thanks as ever to my sponsors: Riverside Fish Bar, Pom Bears and Worcester Royal Infirmary for making me the finely-chiseled athlete that I am today.

I'm going into radio silence with two quotes from famous Daves:

'It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.'

 (Theodore 'Dave' Roosevelt; I may have cheated a little with this one)

and:

'Let's get out there and twat it.'

(Dave Lister)

Let's hope it turns out nice again.



What's the first sign of madness?

Suggs walking up your garden path.

That is all.

I put coffee in my hamster's bottle last night.

I don't want him falling asleep at the wheel.

I spent yesterday going through essential kit for the big day on Thursday (and bigger days on Friday to Sunday inclusive; if I make Monday, it's only a marathon...)

So what will I be taking? I'm always intrigued by what the good ultra-runners carry (generally 250ml of water, 3 fig rolls and a stone once trodden on by Joss Naylor) but as a slow, fat former triathlete, I have a love of a good gadget. Hence:

my IPlod, so I may listen to rock in a hard place;
a brand-spanking new Garmin 310XT, which has a reputed 20 hours battery life; the desire to know how far I've come is completely overwhelming;
some nice, isotonic gels, which don't make me throw up; at the risk of re-using an old gag, the hills will not be alive with the sound of Drew sick;
some water; lions drink it, but they're rubbish at ultra-running;
a good, honest cheese butty; apparently, real ultra-runners eat proper food, but I hate fig rolls;
lots of toilet paper; sometimes, I get to make like a bear;
Ute the lucky cow; everyone needs a little help from the random forces of good fortune;
all the compulsory stuff, such as a machete for the long grass, a folding bike for if it gets 'a bit difficult', a small box of live woodlice (purpose delightfully obscure), the usual nonsense;
and a small blue box, stuffed with salt pills and caffeine tablets;

I don't want to fall asleep at the wheel, after all.

I put on my kit and said to my wife...

'Do I look fat in this?'
'Maybe a little,' she replied, .but to be fair, it's a vey small bathroom.'

Weighty matters for today's feeble punnage. I am putting together a rough schedule of calories in and out for my Severn Challenge attempt.

Let's assume that I cover 45 miles a day at 150kCal a mile; that's 6750 kCals burned; throw in another 1500 for basal metabolic functions and that's a total of 8250 used.

Let's assume I can absorb about 200kCal/hour every hour; this may be a bit simplistic, but this is a blog not a scientific paper so ner! That's 4800kcal in.

Subtract one from t'other and that's 3450kCal a day of deficit, which give or take a lettuce leaf, is a pound of fat lost. Throw in the loss of a few lb of glycogen (which hopefully I'll have plenty of, what with the pies I've been eating'n'all) and I reckon I'll be aboout 10lb down by the end of the event.

If you too would like to be ten pounds down by the time I finish, there's a handy Justgiving linky in several places on this page! Thanks in advance!

I hear that at the Severn Challenge, they're making you camp.

Well I've got some 80s cheese on my IPlod and I'll be wearing tight lycra, but I don't think I'll be camp.

Ooh a double entendre on temporarily living in a tent/being theatrically effeminate; not since the 'sex with a chihuahua' joke have I stooped so low.

I'm not spending four nights in a tent, even though they look very nice'n'all. Many moons ago, I hurt my neck playing rugby; over the years it's given me progressively fewer and fewer problems, but it can still play up if I'm tired and it gets cold and in a draught. This takes the form of enough pain to stop me putting my feet on the floor the next day, which would obviously put me out of the Severn Challenge, so I'm not risking it.

It may be theatrically effeminate of me, but it's also very sensible. Camp? Me? Only in the one sense...

I saw a man at the Olympics...

...carrying a long, thin piece of carbon fibre.
'Are you a pole vaulter?' I asked.
'No, I am a German,' he replied, 'but how did you know my name is Walter?'

It has occurred to me that I am spending the Queen's Diamond Jubilee weekend in *cough* athletic endeavour, so just to be perverse, during the Olympics I shall be holding a street party.

Two runners training for an ultra...

...when one of them falls down a deep hole.
'Have you broken anything?' asks the first.
'No,' replies the second, 'there's nothing down here to break.'

I could've gone with 'can you call me an ambulance?', 'Dave, you're an ambulance' but the former links better into the fact that  AE Dave's stress fracture of the shin is as confirmed as stress fractures generally are; it will be me and 21 other hardy souls tackling the trip down the Severn.

The taper provides too much time for thinking. On Sunday, my daughter had spaghetti hoops for lunch (yes, just spaghetti hoops; the NSPCC phone number is 0808 800 5000.)  She has long since graduated from Alphabetti Spaghetti, but it got me thinking:

assuming that all 26 letters are included in AS (as aficionados call it) and are included equally, there's a 1 in 26 chance that any given letter is an 'O';
assuming that all letters are made in different moulds, then mixed together before being put in tins, there's a high probability that an individual tin will contain more of one letter than another;
assuming that there are (say) 200 letters in a tin, there's a 1/26 ^200 chance that a particular tin of AS may, when opened, turn out to be indistinguishable from a tin of spaghetti hoops.

Now briefly consider the good 'ole British National Lottery; if you buy one ticket, your chances of hitting the jackpot are just a little better than one in 14 million, or about 0.000007%. This means that to 4 decimal places, the odds of you winning whether you buy a ticket or not are exactly the same at 0.0000%.

My odds of winning the Severn Challenge, with 22 competitors are probably marginally better than those of hitting the jackpot in the National Lottery or opening a tin of Alphabetti Spaghetti and finding it's actually Spaghetti Hoops, but I'll settle for my highest ever race placing; I was once 25th in a Santa Dash, so I'm in with a decent chance.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Because it was there. There was something within the chicken that made it think 'I wonder what's on the other side?' and it ate away at the chicken until one day, the chicken thought 'I'm just going to take a look.'

That chicken, by crossing the road, won the admiration of many other chickens and became a hero to chickenkind. Or got run over. It really doesn't matter, except possibly to the chicken, but that chicken will always be my hero, for trying when others found it too daunting.

I have many heroes; if you've ever done something amazing, if you've ever pushed on when something has been difficult or seemed impossible, if you've ever become an overnight success after years of hard work (and I know your story) you're probably already on my list.

Some are perhaps obvious; people who are famous for their deeds:
Bob and Sir Ian, who are forgiven every subsequent hint of fallability after Headingley 1981; total belief that nothing is impossible.
Charles, for having the courage of his convictions when both Church and state said he was wrong
'Titus' for 'I am just going outside and may be some time'; nobility, courage and sang froid in the face of certain death

Some will never be widely known:
John, for an Ironman finish that was a total triumph of will over talent; I'd never seen someone outside of elite sport wring so much performance from their body; one of the very few for whom the phrase 'he gave 110%' is appropriate
Kath, for doing what she does, giving what she gives and doing it one one kidney (and that's her mother's); utter courage and self belief
Simon, for even thinking that running in snowy wastes immediately after desert heat was a sensible idea

And some I've added this year:
Claire, for a full life well lived and tragically curtailed. She can have my last mile.
Kaz, for her ten in ten marathons. What tremendous guts and self-belief
Darren, for his 6:29ish at the London Marathon...on a broken leg. I'm hoping for your pain management skills...

I'm lucky enough to count as friends some pretty amazing people; each and every one of you will be giving me inspiration during my little jogette. Please just take a moment to consider, without false modesty, the remarkable things that you've done. It's ok if you're a stranger on the internet, you can join in too; some of my best friends were once strangers on the internet.

I hope you're smiling now; if not,think again and TRY HARDER! It's not about crossing the road, it's about daring to try.

Einstein came up with a theory about space...

...and about time too!

Yes, the blog has returned from the dead, or at least the archived.

I've been having a tough time of it over the past few weeks; my Achilles has been niggling and I've had to nurse it along, which has curtailed my running; my mojo was last seen going on holiday to Portugal with its parents, though thankfully it has been returned largely unharmed after it terrified its captors with off-key versions of The Ace of Spades; weight loss has been akin to a faster-than-light neutrino (I was hopeful for a while but it turns out to be an optical illusion)

My 'B' races didn't quite go according to plan; I woke up feeling dreadful on the morning of the Worcester Marathon so didn't run; for the Stratford Marathon, even the ducks were moaning that it was 'a bit wet', so the organisers shortened the race to a half marathon only. I ambled round with Squish in 'just too fast to die from hypothermia' and came home for an afternoon of blankets and hot drinks. As we passed two by two up the gangplank at the finish, they promised to post me a medal, but it's not arrived yet.

I lost a week of training (and of my life in general) because I  felt grotty; this handily coincided with my GP having cut my thyroxine dosage three weeks earlier. After a small discussion, I'm now back on the original dose and feeling good again.

It seems that Hasn't Entered Yet Dave is definitely not going to enter, thus disproving the power of the collective subconscious; meanwhile Already Entered Dave is crocked and, like the Vatican delegate to the World Birth Control Conference, may have to pull out at the last minute. It may be just me and my IPlod; the conversation will be less stimulating, but at least the songs will be in tune...

AE Dave and I had been logging some pretty good training miles til that point, including a trip round the Mid Worcestershire Ring and a couple of outings that saw us recce the route from Bewdley to Tewkesbury. I think it's only fair to throw in the following photo at this point, so that those of you who haven't seen it before may be as confused as we were...

We were working on Dave's 'random but radical' run-walk method which involves 23 run/7 walk; it really does work very well for me and I expect to be employing it during the race.

We had got some pretty good 'very entertaining when you've run a long way' material too, to include tractors as the One True God (and featuring diggers as false prophets), membership of the Fukawi tribe and a whole series of obvious double entendres about having been up Madge Hill; as an aside, who said that this race was flat?

Since the potential demise of AE Dave, I've been out on a few decent long runs in the ever-deepening bundu which passes for the British countryside; it's hard work running through long grass, so I have devised a cunning tactic; apparently there are around 25 entrants for the Severn Challenge; my plan is to let at least 20 of them break the trail for me, so that I may have an easier run. Please note therefore that if I am seen pootling along at or near the back, this is NOT because I'm fat and lazy, but a deliberate strategy.

On our earlier runs, we were congratulating ourselves on how dry the trails were, and commenting that if ever it rained lots, it would all get very muddy and claggy and generally hard work; good job it's not rained so much that the river has flooded since then...

I can't do much more in terms of training, I've now just got to hold it together until race day. As Einstein never said, I should do relatively OK; well, in theory anyway.