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.

Mommy, mommy, why am I running round in circles?

Shut up or I'll nail your other foot to the floor.

This is largely the story of the Raceways Half Marathon, held at the ever-enticing Long Marston Airfield. I'd picked it to be a convenient (Saturday), easy-to-pace (four laps of 5k plus a twiddle) race to test my Hadd training to this point. Although, as befits an airfield, it was flat, it is also, as befits an airfield, open and exposed to the elements...and by my calculations, the course contains 21  180 degree dead turns in 21k.

I was hoping for a PB (anything under 1:39:48 would be fine) but it was not to be. The ever-strengthening wind in the home straight put paid to that; I've also managed to hurt my Achilles, which probably cost me a bit of forward momentum in the closing stages and a couple of days of icing/heating/elevating to boot. I may also not quite be fit enough, though this race is 8 weeks earlier in the year than my PB effort, so I may yet be able to gain 3 sec/mile/week and be (slightly) better than I used to be.

Even putting a hat on this race and calling it Erwin wouldn't make it interesting, but there is plenty of good news to take away; I averaged a heart rate of 169 (84.5% of my max) for 1:43:58 and remained below my lactate threshold. Hadd training is obviously working and my lungs are back to where they were before the DVE/PE incident. I just need to fix my Achilles and get back to it!

I came last in the pancake race

...because I'm a useless tosser.

I thought I'd post some Shrovetide musings about the origin of Pancake Day traditions. Lent, obviously, has been around since shortly after Jesus said 'I need to be alone; I'll be back in about 6 weeks,' so let's call that about 2000 years (8 o'clock)

Pancakes may have taken a little inventing, so we'll allow a few years, but according to Wikipedia, pancake races were alive and well by 1445 (quarter to three).

Refined sugar became affordable to the proletariat in what, the late 18th century, so let's say quarter to six (1745); I have no idea when lemons became commonly available in Britain, but as they had to be transported from the Mediterranean, it's probably fairly recently.

So where did the tradition of sugar and lemon juice on pancakes come from? How long ago? How long does something have to have been happening to become a tradition? What did people have on their pancakes before sugar and lemon juice?

There's a joke that's really apposite for Shrove Tuesday, but it involves copious numbers of racial stereotypes which are considered inappropriate in the 21st century (after 8pm); if you substitute the PC equivalent of '...and a blonde' it becomes a proper bag of spanners and doesn't work...

...so though I'm not going to post it, please feel free to laugh uproariously or frown disapprovingly and call me a useless tosser; it is Ash Wednesday after all.