I have just entered the Brompton World Championship race to be held at Blenheim Palace.
Catch that, a world bloody championship!
Anyway, rules state I must wear a suit jacket, collared shirt and a tie.
I don’t have a tie - disaster!
Anybody got a spare tie that would complement my delightful bike and wouldn’t be impaired by a gallon of sweat?
Popularity: 2% [?]
The race packs seem to be dropping thick and fast through the letter box this week, after the painfully slow 5k at the weekend I came home and opened an envelope to discover I was entered in the Great Capital 10k in just 2 weeks time. Goodness knows when I signed up for that, I hadn’t bothered to note it in my diary anyway.
I’m thinking that’s its probably impossible to turn around the worst ever 5k race time within the space of 2 weeks given a backdrop of 5 months of lacklustre training, but I’ve got to do something to ensure I don’t collapse before the finish line. I’ve therefore embarked on a 2 week anti-Stella campaign to be combined with regularish running commutes.
JogBlog is not the only one completing an old new running commute, I’ve shifted jobs yet again and am right back where I started with the very first running commute of 18 months ago. Happily I’ve picked up a bit of local knowledge over the months and can now get from asylum to home with barely any need to run on the grotty streets, it also seems to save me 500 metres which is no good as it ruins my perfect 10 k route.
Running along the edge of assorted waterways provides plenty of opportunity for water related incidents and playing around with the forerunner 405 touch bezel does not reduce the likelihood. I stumbled over some barge docking related paraphenalia but managed to steady myself in a rather sturdy clump of stinging nettles. I’m still itching but I did discover a rather cool new screen on the forerunner.
It the HR graph option and shows your heart rate displayed on a backdrop of HR zones. Quite neat but probably only useful if you are doing intervals, for most of my run it appeared as a flat line between zones 4 and 5. The photo was taken after I stopped.
Distance: 9.58km
Time: 1:22:00
Popularity: 5% [?]
This time last year I came face to face with the world renowned shambles that is the British London 10k.
Fortunately, this time round I was invited to join the Surrey Housewives Set in their annual attempt to show Michael O’Reilly how mass participation events should be organised.
Under the auspices of SHS1 the humongous portaloo/baggage drop nightmare of last year was replaced by a rather well equipped room in the Royal Horseguards Hotel no less.
Here we were able to leave our bags and eye up the breakfast that we would devour as soon as we’d got the running thing out of the way. The bathrooms were worth admiring as well, in contrast to the usual race day alternative they were delightfully perfumed and had neat little piles of personal face towels.
Outside, chaos reigned supreme as the afore mentioned Michael O’Reilly forgot to organise the promised baggage buses and the hoi polloi wandered round looking for someone who knew what they were doing.
Luckily SHS1 stepped into the breach and established a start line and pronounced that the race would start in 5 mins, ready or not!
Of course Michael was not ready and so many runners had to set off with their backpacks and handbags slung over their shoulders - they should have joined the Surrey Housewives.
It amazes me that good ole Mikey can arrange for a Spitfire to be plonked in front of the Houses of Parliament each year and for the Dad’s Army band to come and play “There’ll always be an England” but he can’t sort out a functioning baggage drop.
As for the run, it was hot, sweaty, painful but also strangely uplifting - who can fail to attempt a little sprint finish when Chariots of Fire blares out at the end? If pressed on actual numbers I will just admit to having achieved a personal worst but on all other fronts this race has been pushed well into the ranks of personal bests.
At the end, we were congratulated by the Queen’s Cavalry before being ushered back to the hotel for a continental breakfast with champagne. Quality organising and my only complaint is that now every other race is going feel ever so slightly down market.
Popularity: 6% [?]
OGB may well have left London in search of science but he hasn’t stopped harassing me. The last email I got from him went along the lines of “how do you fancy doing a 10k race in Cardiff?”
Cardiff? That’s in a whole different country, why would you bother?
He obviously thinks I’ve gone soft and will sign up for any old event, I did afterall allow myself be bullied into the “Great North Swim“. Yup, I did say SWIM.
It’s apparently the first mass participation swim event ever, styled by the organisers of the Great North Run, and involves thousands of folk jumping into Lake Windermere and trying to swim over each other to reach the other side - a mere 1 mile away.
Sounds like great fun if you don’t drown.
One minor problem with this event is that it requires a wetsuit. Not surprisingly there is a huge shortage of off the peg wetsuits in my size so I’ve had to go down the made-to-measure path. How scary is that?
I’ve just gone through the measuring process and sent the figures off to Snugg for verification, I can see them now with calculators in hand, trying to determine if they possess that much rubber.
I’m not looking forward to the receipt of this item, it will require me to come face to face with my excesses. This suit will presumably be the size of a rolled flat me, where the hell am I going to store it?
What’s more, I can’t spend 200 quid on an outfit for 1 event. This is going to be the start of numerous wetsuit donning activities, OGB is just going to have to invest in a bike, I see triathlons ahead.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Here’s a quick pictorial introduction to the new bike recruit.
The Brompton is squeezing alongside the other two bikes and trying to carve out a niche for itself.
So far it’s doing very well and I’m beginning to worry about what I’ll do with the other two.
I wonder if I could have a go at a sprint tri with it? It certainly needs to have a go at some sort of challenge event just to cement it’s street cred.
A marvel of British engineering.
Here it is in transition mode - notice the sweet pea holder built into the Brompton bag - how useful is that?
Just to continue the bike porn theme, here it is in full glory.
I’ll just finish by plugging the WizzBike - the best bike shop I’ve come across so far. Superb service, it’s based in Brentford but well worth the trip if you are interested in Bromptons, folders or Pashleys.
Popularity: 7% [?]
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll be aware that my Salomon XT Wings challenge - to run the central London tube map - ended in the middle of last week, and since then I’ve been suspiciously quiet about it.
At the time of my last posting, I had two more lines left to complete and only one day left to do it. Not being of the easily defeated variety, I left work all togged up for running, took two buses and two tubes, battled across multiple time zones and arrived at 7:30pm to a drizzly evening in a grim, grey location. The only point of brightness and colour was a large golden M on the other side of the street. I’m ashamed to say I trogged across that road and gorged myself on a big mac meal before returning to the tube station to reverse the journey back home.
Hours of my evening wasted and zero miles added to my tally.
So here’s what my map should have looked like:
and here’s what I managed:
I think I may well go back and finish this off at a later date, the Victoria line picks through some great spots and I’d like to see it completed. For now though, I am just happy to return to my runs along the river, where I can roll out of bed and set off running without first having to share bugs with London’s sick in an overcrowded train carriage.
Salomon XT Wings Challenge
Cumulative:
104 Tube Stations
92.56 km
Popularity: 6% [?]
With only 2 days left to cover off 3 tube lines the pressure was on today.
All started positively as my hacking cough ensured I had a spacious seating arrangement on the tube as it transported me across to the other side of the metropolis.
I started to feel a bit more jaded as I headed up towards city boy land and already my plan to tick off two lines this evening was beginning to seem a bit optimistic.
Running alongside pubs spilling out at the seams with pinstriped blokes holding cold beers is not appealing to me very much at the moment. I’m quite looking forward to the return of my genteel river runs and an end to public transport, running in bus lanes and pretty much anything east of Westminster Bridge.
The new Garmin wasn’t performing very well either. Out in the sticks the 405 seems noticeably faster than the 305 but within the square mile it is equally useless, the Nokia N82 in contrast was able to pinpoint my location in seconds.
I’m going to have to do some considerable jiggery pokery with the route before I can publish the map, it didn’t lock on to a signal until I found myself wandering around a beautiful burial ground right at the city limits. Bunhill Fields hides the bones of many plague victims, tipped into unmarked pits as well as some fine memorials to notable authors such as Bunyan and Defoe.
I came out of the graveyard to find all the passers by had lost an eye. It was quite surreal, I must have passed about 10 people with either bulging eyeballs or whopping great bandages obscuring half their face. I was a little worried to proceed lest a similar fate should befall me.
Round the corner I found my explanation. No need to fear daylight attacks by the walking undead.
The Bank branch of the Northern Line was not too inspiring, apart from the dead people, and by the time I’d completed it I was losing the will to live. Walking takes too flipping long, so I bailed on the Victoria Line and went home to open my Big book of Symptoms on the tuberculosis page.
Popularity: 11% [?]
There are 3 lines outstanding on the Salomon challenge - Northern Line (Bank branch), Victoria Line and the Bakerloo Line. With only 4 days to go it should still be quite manageable but the trouble is I am still ill.
For the past two weeks I’ve been hacking up chunks and have had to avoid deep breathing as it tends to lead to paroxysms of coughing. I’m not particularly under the weather but the symptoms have been harsh enough to scupper my Juneathon chances and to take me to the line with the Salomon Challenge.
Yesterday I was in central Londinium for a meeting and as I arrived more than an hour early I did a bit of walking (and shallow breathing) to fill in the missing sections of the Circle Line.
Only 3.5 km but it was an interesting section and the sky was beautiful.
I was approaching this building absolutely convinced it was the Houses of Parliament but I clearly had my bearings all wrong. It’s obviously Westminster Abbey but I didn’t realise that til I turned the corner and saw Big Ben leering out at me.
Another reason for me not to opt for a full time tourist guide position.
Popularity: 20% [?]
I went to London but missed the Queen. I arrived on her doorstep to see a trail of red as the horseguards shot back into their cubby holes.
I set off from West Hampstead and had an unremarkable run down to Central London but as soon as I entered Bond Street an ominous rumbling filled the sky, I looked up and caught sight of a WWII Lancaster Bomber, with a couple of Spitfires in tow. They were rapidly followed by hoards of other military planes that I was unable to recognise.
Turns out it was her birthday and I had narrowly missed the Trooping of the Colour with the celebratory flyover. That probably explains the high density of gents in bowler hats.
It’s probably just as well that I was a bit late, my route took me straight through the Horse Guards parade and I can’t imagine they would have been too keen on me running through the middle of the trooping.
I’m quite impressed with the jubilee line, for a grey line it’s proved to be pretty colourful. Even without the Battle of Britain re-enactment there seemed to be a photo opportunity round every corner and now have a picture of a Beefeater and the London Eye on my phone, I think I can claim to be a true tourist.
Salomon XT Wings Challenge
Today:
10 Tube Stations
9.37 km
Cumulative:
91 Tube Stations
80.79 km
See the combined progress map here.
Popularity: 13% [?]
As you all know, I think the Garmin Forerunner 305 is the best thing since sliced bread but I’m so fickle it’s taken barely a thought for me to stick it on ebay and swap it for the new version - the Forerunner 405.
I’d like to say the new and IMPROVED Forerunner 405 but is it?
Reading the spec list it’s hard to see where Garmin made any attempts to improve on what had gone before, they missed out by not making it fully waterproof and therefore tri suitable, for example. Instead they appear to have simply repackaged the existing 305 as a sports watch that can be worn all day with the bonus of a nifty touch sensitive bezel control.
Out of the box, I decided I liked the look and feel of the watch very much. Garmin put a lot of effort into design and the strap closure is ingenious, a big improvement on the 305 which kept coming loose, snagging on my clothing and risked falling off. A minor point maybe, but Garmin are big on the little details.
The watch charged fully in 3 hours by the use of a strange bulldog style clip that slips snugly into a couple of recesses on the back of the watch. Another neat design but I fear it is just going to prove an inconvenience. With the 305 you uploaded data to the PC by slotting it into a USB docking station and it would charge at the same time as uploading. I’d leave my device in for a few minutes longer and thereby ensure I always hard a fully charged unit. With the 405, uploading data is automatic and will occur while the watch is still on your wrist, which now means I’ll have to remember to charge the unit separately.
In standby mode (ie time display only) the watch will supposedly last 20 days, although I’m down to 89% charged after 1 day so I doubt it will last much longer than a week. When used in active mode the battery life is expected to be in the region of 8 hours. So that’s another charging gizmo to be added to my pile of wires under my bed.
I thought the software was a bit of a faff to install, it didn’t happen automatically and I had to hunt around to see what it was that needed to be loaded up. It comes with Training Centre but after installing it I immediately removed it again because I remembered how pants it is. Instead I’m using the ANT uploader linked to Garmin Connect which is quite a neat online training log.
Setting up the watch is a doddle and it takes you through the process quickly with a mini tutorial that teaches you the basics of the bezel control. Basically:
All very easy really. I had no problems using the bezel on the run, not that you need to use it much, you can tap to nudge the screen to a different view and in virtual partner mode you can increase/decrease the pace of your partner by sliding the bezel. I’m particularly fond of that feature as it means I can ensure I win every race now.
I’ve heard a few people fearing that accidental touches of the bezel would mess up the data but they shouldn’t worry. The start, stop and lap functions are all controlled by the big side buttons. Pressing the bezel during a run just alters the view - not a big deal. I haven’t tried it with gloves but as long as they aren’t massive affairs it shouldn’t be a problem.
For my first run I decided to set up a simple interval session, run 90 secs, walk 60 secs. I know that’s lame but I’ve got a cold and needed the walk periods to retrieve my hankies and have a good blow! Easy enough to setup, you don’t even need the manual. Features and settings are much more intuitive on the 405 than with its predecessor.
The intervals were well “signposted”, I was given a 5 second warning of loud beeps followed by a clear “chirrup” that marked the start of the next interval. I didn’t miss one and I appreciated the warning. A good feature.
I personalised the display I wanted to see on the run, you can choose upto 9 features to be displayed on 3 screens. On my main screen I had pace, time and distance and I accepted the defaults for the other screens. It’s well worth playing around though as there appear to be some great features. This is available on the heart rate screen for example and shows progress within your heart rate zones.
I had set the screens to auto scroll but will turn this off for the next run, I think it is more convenient to control the screen I view by tapping the bezel, that way I don’t have to wait for it to get around to the bit I’m interested in.
Back home, I was just unlocking my door, when the watch beeped to say it was uploading data. By the time I’d staggered through the hall to the laptop, my stats were already displayed on the Garmin connect website.
As a simple everyday watch its functioning fine, but I would have preferred the power save mode to be the time and date screen, not just the time display. It’s a fiddle unlocking the bezel so I can access the date feature. Its also quite chunky so if you have a small wrist you are unlikely to find it very comfortable and it will probably overhang a little. I don’t have a small wrist though so I’m alright Jack.
I’m pretty pleased with it so far and think there are clear signs of improvement, I’ll be scrutinizing it further though and am particularly keen to see if there are any improvements with the speed in which it locks on to a GPS signal.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!
