Kerry Buckley

Drinks in the Fat Cat with Rupert and Mel again on Wednesday (seems much less than a month since last time). For some reason it seemed less busy than the past couple of times. It had rained before I went out, providing a nice double rainbow, but fortunately stopped in time for the walk to the pub.

I managed to trip over towards the end of Thursday’s TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten). There’s a little service road with a sharp-edged speed bump, and there are tree roots pushing the pavement up at around the same spot. I decided to run in the road because the pavement was quite dark, even though I thought “this is probably a bad idea, and I won’t see the speed bump”. I nearly tripped when the road was unexpectedly a couple of inches lower than my foot was expecting, and thought that was the bump, but it wasn’t, as I learned a few seconds later when I stubbed my toe and started an inevitable topple forwards. When you’re running slowly it’s usually easy enough to take a few quick steps and get your feet back under you, but at full speed that didn’t really work, and after a few flailing paces I bowed to the inevitable. Fortunately the damage was limited to a ripped glove and grazed hands and elbows, and a couple of lost seconds, but I still managed my fastest ten miles for nearly a year.

I did my long run on Saturday this week (incorporating parkrun, of course), thus theoretically freeing up Sunday to do whatever I wanted. Naturally I ended up doing pretty much nothing. I’ve got next week off work – will I end up doing any of the mountain of gardening and housework that I keep putting off? I’m writing this belatedly on Tuesday morning, so I already know over 20% of the answer, but you’ll have to wait. Yes, all three of you.

On Tuesday I went to the dentist for a checkup. The basic upshot was that everything they could see was fine, but they peeked under my two crowns with X rays, and found some decay. Apparently fixing it (rather than just extracting the teeth) would involve removing the crowns, drilling out the decay, possibly doing a root canal thing, then re-crowning them, which would cost upwards of £3k. I think I might just ignore it and hope it goes away, especially as when the second crown was done they only gave it a 50/50 chance of working, so the odds after removing even more tooth seem pretty slim. Of course in theory I could (haha) find an NHS dentist, and presumably pay less.

I drove to Felixstowe on Tuesday night with my fuel gauge reporting around 12 miles’ worth of petrol remaining (it’s a 20 mile round trip). I didn’t have time to stop on the way, and was going to call its bluff and stop at Sainsbury’s about three quarters of the way home, but when I set off to return it was claiming one mile, and all the fuel level lights had gone out, so I bottled it and filled up at the Co-op in Felixstowe. I’m still interested to know how much reserve there is, but maybe I’ll aim to have a jerry can in the car when I find out.

Also on Tuesday, pancake day! I didn’t do any shriving, but I did make pancakes (which to be fair I do far more often than once a year). I was going to make my old joke about giving up pancakes for lent, then remembered that I’d only used half the batter, and made savoury ones on Wednesday too. I suppose I could have used it for yorkshire puddings or toad in the hole.

I got another puncture on my back wheel on the way back from work on Thursday. At least it was still light, dry and reasonably warm, so stopping to change the tube wasn’t too horrible.

Stowmarket half on Sunday, which didn’t start too badly (although I had a suspicion my pace was a bit optimistic), but got progressively slower as the miles passed by. A lot of people had similar stories though – maybe we’re just not used to the sudden increase in temperature, which I think just about hit 20° today. Back to more seasonably appropriate numbers next week though, I think.

It’s March! And the days are noticeably drawing out, which is nice.

I did get round to fixing my puncture on Monday, ready to ride into the office on Tuesday. It was definitely not difficult to find the offending pointy object in the tyre! Mind you, it was slightly soft again on Tuesday evening, so maybe there was another foreign object that I missed, or the previously-patched tube that I swapped in hadn’t quite been repaired properly. It seemed to stay up again after that though, so who knows?

I was going to leave all the running stuff to the end, on the basis that it’s probably very boring to most of the tiny number of people who might actually read this. Which I am going to do, but it turns out not much else happened this week, so the end starts here.

I did a very slow short recovery run on Monday, which felt terrible after the Tarpley 20 on Sunday, then the usual club session on Tuesday night. That featured hills and a reasonable mileage (6.4, and thanks to traffic jams I barely made it in time, so that doesn’t even include jogging round the netball courts beforehand), and my legs held up better than expected. Then we also had our monthly track session the next day, which was a fairly brutal constant repetition of 400m efforts and 200m recoveries. Apparently the theory is that if you take the average of the time you take for all the efforts, in minutes and seconds, then that roughly corresponds to your expected half marathon time in hours and minutes. Mine came out a few minutes slower, but that’s not surprising on tired legs.

After what I felt was a well-deserved rest day on Thursday, and a gentle run on Friday, I had no excuse not to put in some effort at parkrun for once. I finished with a time that I initially felt was OK but not great, but later realised that it was my best ever age grade, so I’ll take that! Then on Sunday I did a long slow run with Holly, covering 22 miles in glorious sunshine.

I thought the back tyre on my bike felt a bit soft going to work on Wednesday, then when I went to come home it was very flat. I pumped it up and it got me home, so I lazily thought it was a slow enough puncture that I could leave fixing it until the weekend. On Thursday morning it was very clear that that was not the case, and I turned back after a few yards to drag my rarely-used mountain bike out, top up the air in its tyres and swap some lights over. I worked at home on Friday as usual, but still haven’t got round to fixing the puncture, had to use the backup bike a couple more times, and now the weekend’s over. Let’s see whether I can remember to do it tomorrow before I have to head into the office again on Tuesday!

On Saturday I travelled down to That London for Frank Turner’s Show 3000 at Alexandra Palace. Because the last train back to Ipswich is too early this entailed driving to Colchester, then getting the train into Liverpool Street and another train out to Ally Pally. I was mildly paranoid that something would go wrong (especially as both the train and gig tickets were only on my phone), but it all worked out OK. I’d bought a ticket that was limited to a specific train, and when I got to the station the boards were showing it as cancelled, but it turned out that I’d allowed so much extra time to get there that rather than waiting half an hour I was able to just jump on the earlier service.

I hadn’t really appreciated quite how big the venue is, but the size of the crowd descending (ascending) on it soon made it clear just how many people were going to be there (pretty sure it was sold out, at 10,000 capacity). I got in the queue half an hour before the doors opened, which allowed me to get pretty close to the front, and because I was driving I didn’t bother getting a drink, which negated any need to fight my way to the toilets and back.

It feels like I normally rely on Frank Turner shows to discover new bands, as he always does a good job of picking support acts, but this time I’d seen both of them before. I’d somehow failed to find out who was supporting until the day, and was pleased to discover it was The Meffs and The Lottery Winners. I’d seen the former in The Smokehouse, a venue that would fit in its entirety several times over on the Alexandra Palace stage, and the latter supporting Frank in Ipswich a few years ago, and at a couple of Pet Needs-related events in Colchester.

Having been on my feet for around six hours (at times in a pretty lively crowd), at least the journey back passed without incident, although it was well after 2am by the time I finally got home. Then in a piece of less than optimum timing, after four hours or so of sleep it was time to get up for the Tarpley 20. I wasn’t expecting much (in fact my ankle was so sore when I got up that I almost started to wonder whether I could even finish it), but thanks to company all the way round from Neil (usually way ahead of me, but recovering from injury so taking it easy) I made it to the finish and even managed a slight negative split. Admittedly it was the slowest I’ve completed the course (around 30s slower than my first time back in 2000 just before the world ground to a halt), but my average pace was bang on my marathon target, so all I have to do is hang on for an extra 10k (presumably after a more restful day before) – how hard can it be?

Oops, late again!

Starting to get a bit fed up with the seemingly endless stretch of just-above-freezing temperatures we’ve been having. We haven’t even had any proper wintry precipitation, apart from about five minutes on Saturday which happened to coincide with me walking half a mile down the road to get a lift to Felixstowe!

I squeezed a short trail run in on Wednesday evening before heading to the Fat Cat for another pleasant evening shooting the breeze with Rupert (current boss), Joe (previous boss) and Mel (boss before last). It was a lot muddier than I expected (the run, not the pub), including a field that looked like it had been ploughed five minutes before I got to it. It got darker a bit quicker than I’d expected too, but despite both those factors I managed to stay upright. I also came across a sign in the small area of woodland that had unexpectedly disappeared last year, saying that it had been turned into cricket bats. The area now features some new willow saplings, which will apparently be ready to harvest in 15–20 years’ time.

Because it was the last round of the Suffolk Winter League cross country on Sunday, ruling out a long run at the weekend, I decided to join in with Thursday’s Run for Coffee, but to tack on some extra miles. I basically did a lap of more or less the usual route, met the people who start in town, ran another lap, stopped for coffee, then added an extra loop to my run home. I’ve been working at home all week on account of not being able to shake the cold I’ve had for nearly a fortnight, so I was still able to start work at 9am, although that did entail setting out at 5.30. My general tiredness through the day suggest that it might not have been my best ever idea!

Saturday was the FRR AGM and awards night, which was pretty sparsely attended. Nothing much happened, and obviously I didn’t win an award, although a few speedier friends did.

The aforementioned cross country was the Bungay event, which this year was on a new course at Woburn Farm in Corton, on the other side of Lowestoft (counting this side as south rather than west, otherwise it would have been a bit wet). It was two laps on mostly fairly dull field-edge tracks, but with one short section that was normally used by BMXers, with a rollercoaster of short sharp up-and-down mounds.

I woke up in the night on Monday (or possibly Tuesday, but you know what I mean) with the kind of sore throat that means you’re definitely about to get a cold, and sure enough it’s been progressing through various symptoms all week. Mostly just a cough left now, but knowing me that could last for months. To be honest if lingering coughs are part of some kind of demonic pact I don’t remember making to never get ill in any other way, I’ll take it. I hope that’s not tempting fate!

As I turned right at the staggered crossroads at the end of my road on my bike on Tuesday, an inattentive SUV driver decided not to bother looking in my direction, and drove into the side of me. Fortunately fairly slowly and there was no real damage done (to me or the bike – I hope the car picked up a couple of scrapes), and I didn’t think it was worth taking it any further than an admonishment to look where they were going next time.

I organised a code retreat at work on Thursday. Somewhere around thirty people turned up, and I think it went reasonably well. These events always remind me though that outside of the little bubble of our team, and despite people like me banging on about it for a decade or two, hardly anyone seems to actually practice TDD. Oh well, their loss I guess.

Having just about made it through the first two “days” (we’re actually doing one of the book’s day sections every fortnight) of Elm in Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks, we made the executive decision to skip day three and jump into Elixir (which is a bit of a busman’s holiday for me). The current version of Elm is totally different to the one covered by the book, and it seems quite tricky to get hold of an old enough version that still includes signals, which are core to a lot of what’s described. It’s a shame someone hasn’t rewritten the chapter at some point since 2014 when the book first came out.

I whiled away some time on Saturday adding age grade scores to the spreadsheet where I keep my race results, which involved copying a sheet from the official tables, then writing a pretty gnarly function to cross reference the race date (to get my age), distance, open standard time and age correction factor to work out the percentage. All to make me feel better by being able to claim that – even though I’m getting slower – I’m arguably still improving if you take into account the fact that I’m an increasingly old man!

Bury St Edmund (Pakenham) cross country on Sunday, which was much drier than it was last year, even if the weather on the day wasn’t as nice. I got round in a not altogether terrible time, given that I’m still ill, but nothing special either.

February already, eh?

Another double club session week, with the normal one on Tuesday night supplemented by the monthly visit to the track the next evening. I treated the latter as just a social event though, with a handful of us – who were either nursing niggles or thinking of the half marathon coming up at the weekend – jogging round the outside of the track while everyone else flew past at speeds varying from a bit faster to outrageously fast. Then we followed what seems to have become a tradition and headed to the pub for a few pints afterwards.

I ate the last piece of Christmas cake on Wednesday, so it’s officially not a special occasion until Easter.

On Saturday I headed to St Stephen’s Church – a whole 1.7 mile bike ride away! – to see the final night of Pet Needs’s acoustic tour, supported by Ben Brown again. Both enjoyable as ever, and it’s a great venue too, which I’d not been to since it was promoted from its previous role as a tourist information centre. There were a couple of cool looking young lads in front of me, then when the band came on they rather sweetly held up a sign saying “We love you Mr Sharman!”. Apparently Ryan the bassist used to be their teacher.

I’d been slightly dreading the Great Bentley Half on Sunday – the first proper road race since November, and the idea of running 13 miles at pace seemed optimistic. It went OK though, and I ended up finishing in 1:35:28, which is a couple of minutes quicker than last time (but nearly three minutes slower than my 2019 PB on the same course). I think most of that was thanks to Holly and Maria, whose company I enjoyed on the way round, which relied on me managing to keep up with them!

One thing I forgot to add last week was the Big Garden Birdwatch, which I did on Saturday. My total haul was five sparrows, five blackbirds, three starlings, two (for joy) magpies, two blue tits (no sniggering at the back) and two redwings. Also a fox and a squirrel, which I’m told don’t count.

Extremely late this week – almost forgot entirely! I don’t think very much happened though.

The front brake on my bike was making a right racket on Tuesday, so when I got home I had a look and the pads had worn down to the metal. I had a rummage around and found a new set, then managed to drop the little springy thing that keeps them apart, and spent so long looking for it that I was nearly late getting back out for training. The old one wasn’t usable, but in the end I found an old one in the bin that was still serviceable. In the process of looking, I opened the old fridge that’s in the garage that I used to use as a warming cabinet to melt honey for bottling (not that I thought the spring would be inside, but it could have been under the door), and I found half a dozen jars of honey still in there, so that’s a bonus.

Ipswich parkrun has been paused to let the park recover a bit (although the ground seems in much better nick than it was last year), so I went to Kesgrave instead, which is exactly the same distance away but in the opposite direction. I met up with Holly and Maria again to incorporate it into a long run, partly because I’d felt really tired on Tuesday and Thursday, and didn’t fancy trying to keep up on Sunday with last week’s crew.

Sunday was a lazy day, having already got the long run out of the way, then in the evening it was off to the Cricketers again to celebrate Robin’s birthday with a few too many reasonably-priced pints.

I figured I’ll probably need more gels for a marathon than I can squeeze in a shorts pocket, so thought I probably ought to buy one of those belts with stretchy loops to hold them. The best-reviewed one seemed to be a Ron Hill product for about £20, but I found one that looks basically identical on AliExpress for about £1.50. I ordered a landing pad for the drone, a 256GB micro SD card and some muslin squares for marmalade making at the same time, to make the total up to £8 to get free postage, and all but the last one arrived about four days later. Capitalism is weird.

First ex-colleagues catch-up in the Fat Cat on Wednesday, although it was actually two current colleagues and one former.

Struggling to think of much else that’s happened this week. Lots of running as usual, culminating in an 18-mile long run on Sunday to take me just over 46 for the week. My watch has finally upgraded my status from “maintaining” to “productive”, so I guess it must be working.

Brr.

First week back at work. A not insignificant part of Monday was spent trying to work out why a handful of tests were failing on my machine that weren’t before Christmas. It didn’t help that the first time I ran the full test suite was after upgrading to Elixir 1.18 and fixing a few new compiler warnings, but then when I went to bisect from main I realised that that branch was failing too. After clearing various caches, build products etc with no luck I slowly narrowed it down to certain integration tests not receiving expected completion messages, then to a couple of specific background tasks that didn’t seem to be succeeding. After running them manually, I eventually spotted that they had a two-minute sleep that was required in production but had been stubbed out in test. Because these are TCL expect scripts called from the main Elixir code, making them behave differently based on environment hadn’t been as simple, and I’d done it (a while ago) by checking for an environment variable that was only set in production. And guess what I’d been playing with last thing before finishing for the year? Yup, trying out some setup for a new production environment, in the process of which I’d set some environment variables in my shell profile, including the one that caused it to do a real sleep. As Dan pointed out, the mention of environment variables was a bad sign. I’m not sure the hack I’ve currently replaced it with is any better, but at least it works for now.

I also managed to soldier on to the end of the exercises in the Factor chapter of Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks ready for the study group on Tuesday, but no-one else bothered, and I can’t say I blame them. Definitely not my favourite of the random languages I’ve dipped my toe into.

In my usual style of finding things on TV that everyone else has been watching for ages, I’m currently about two thirds of the way through Man Like Mobeen, and enjoying it.

I’m also over halfway through my Christmas cake. I’m not sure it’s doing my “lose a stone before London” diet much good, but I have at least started to build my running distance up again (80 miles so far this year). Sunday was the Stowmarket cross country – my first race of the year – and it went better than expected, so that’s vaguely reassuring.