The most stressful job I ever had...

...was working as a forensic archaeologist for the United Nations. Once we thought we'd found the mass grave of a thousand snowmen, but it turned out to be a field of carrots.

'Now how on Earth is he going to make that relevant?' you ask yourself. Well, it's just that sometimes I make things more complicated than they need to be. My mass grave of snowmen is my attempts to run certain mileages at certain heartrates; my field of carrots is that all I need to be doing is running more than I was doing at an easy pace. This has enabled me to spend some of my holiday running time being outdoors with Squish (aka "The Wife", a name acquired in the world's most convoluted in-joke) and not stressing about the numbers.

Of course, it's also left me 16 miles short of my thousand for the year, but I'm not worried, honest! Next year, if I don't break myself,  I should pass 1000 miles before the end of June...

All that remains is for me to wish you all a happy 2012...and success in whatever challenges you undertake.

Cheers!

"It's all going really well!"...

...as they said on the Titanic about halfway.

I have succumbed to a cold; obviously I'm being frightfully brave and stiff-upper-lipped about it; it was really MANFLU and was positively ghastly.

I've missed over a week of training; I managed to get out for six miles today, but it wasn't pretty; the only good news is that I wasn't as bad as when I first started training.

Back to the drawing board, as this signwriter obviously never said:

I am determined that you all should be outraged by this picture.

In other news, I see that Eldrick Woods (interestingly an anagram of 'do 'er slow, dick') is growing a goatee; the razor becons for Mr. Hamster...