Kerry Buckley

Four day week! And not only that, but a four day weekend too.

On Friday I headed to Sudbury for the “fun run”, which despite the name is very much a proper road race. It also has the distinction of being the only race I know of that includes a road crossing on a zebra crossing, which the motorists must love! Only 15s slower than two years ago (last year’s time looks much quicker, but the course was short thanks to some unexpected emergency roadworks that caused a last-minute change of finish line location). Sudbury always seems to take ages to get to, despite not being far away, but Google Maps managed to make it take even longer on the way back, taking us a very odd route. Still, it was through pretty countryside, and it was warm enough to open the sunroof for the first time this year (28 days earlier than last year!), so I’m not complaining.

When I did eventually get home I had to figure out what I could make for lunch with the fairly meagre contents of the fridge and no bread, and settled on pancakes – just two days before we’re supposed to start eating them again! I assume that’s how Lent works, anyway.

After 12 weeks at Kesgrave parkrun, I tagged along with Holly, Maria and Gary who felt like a change of scenery and headed to Framlingham (actually Thomas Mills) instead. Still no word on a return for the Ipswich event – a man walking his dog even stopped while I was waiting to be picked up (and wearing my parkrun shirt) to ask me if there was any news. I’d not done the Framlingham event before, and it’s not massively exciting – basically two laps of a mixture of school playing fields and farmer’s field edges – but pleasant enough. Afterwards we headed into the town for some breakfast at the Two Magpies bakery. The name of the place made for a couple of odd-sounding items on the menu, like “Two Magpies sourdough toast & butter”, only saved by capital letters and the absence of a comma. We all ended up opting for the full English, which was particularly greedy on my part, being the only one who’d already had one breakfast before setting out.

In the afternoon I made my traditional hot, cross buns (with a comma this time). I realise that traditionally they’re for Good Friday, but never mind. I didn’t even leave them overnight after their first proving so they could rise again on Easter Sunday (I’m here all week).

On Sunday Robin organised another “freedom parkrun” at Chantry Park. I thought I had plenty of time to get there, but decided my bike tyres were a bit soft and needed some air, and when I took the dust cap off the rear wheel the valve (and all the air) came with it. I screwed it back in and pumped the tyre up again, but could hear a hiss and didn’t fancy its chances of staying up for 15 minutes. I grabbed my old mountain bike (which only comes into play in this kind of scenario), found that had a completely flat back tyre, pumped it up and hoped for the best. It did indeed stay inflated and got me there, but only barely in time for the start. Not sure whether it was the lack of a breather after riding up the hill, or delayed tiredness from Friday, but despite plodding round really slowly I felt awful, struggling not to give up and walk. Still, a week of very little running now, before the big one next Sunday.

Weirdly, given that the tyre had only gone slightly soft since I last rode it on Thursday, the hiss turned out to be a puncture. All fixed now, and will hopefully stay that way.

Another month must have elapsed, because Wednesday was time for another meet-up with Rupert, Mel and Joe in the Fat Cat. Always good to catch up.

I’ve now received my number (50267) for the London Marathon, which makes it start to feel alarmingly real. That’s just the information of the number of course, not the physical bib number – I have to make an otherwise unnecessary extra trip to London in the few days before the event to collect that at the Expo, because capitalism.

I had a more welcome trip to London on Saturday, to see Jim Bob’s 40 years and 40 songs show at the Shepherds Bush Empire. I had been planning to get the train down, but replacement buses would have made that unpleasant. Fortunately some friends who were also going had decided not to stay overnight after all, and they gave me a lift to Stratford from where we got the tube in. Instead of a support act, the gig started with an hour of Mister Spoons playing DJ and strutting around with a variety of props to match the songs (the highlight was him waving an apricot parkrun shirt around and having the crowd enthusiastically yelling “parkrun” at the appropriate points in Parklife). Then a solid nearly three hours of songs from the pre-Carter, Carter and post-Carter years, beginning solo, then bringing on Chris TT on piano, then the full Hood Rats band, and brief appearances from an additional horn section and – much to everyone’s excitement – Fruitbat. As expected, the mosh pit got quite wild, but fortunately for us aging fans there were plenty of slower songs to calm people down between the madness.

Once again, that didn’t exactly make for perfect preparation for a Sunday race, although at least this time it was only 10k (at Little Bromley) instead of 20 miles. I still managed a vaguely respectable time considering, then went home to keep an eye on WhatsApp updates from Cromer letting us know how the friends who were running the Norfolk Marathon were doing.

Well, that “grown up” decision a couple of weeks ago to put this financial year’s Isa allowance in a Vanguard fund instead of cash is off to a flying start! Thanks to the orange buffoon across the Atlantic, I’m already down over 5% compared to just sticking it all under the mattress. Obviously it’s a long term game, but disconcerting nonetheless. Almost tempting to assume this is the low point and throw good money after bad, but I can’t help remembering that BT Sharesave scheme that I could have cashed in at £10 a share but instead watched it drop to under £2 (and also failed to sell when they hit a later peak of around a fiver. I guess what I’m saying is don’t rely on me for financial advice!

We’ve reached the time of year when it’s warm enough to leave the back door open while I’m at home, which is popular with Casper “I still don’t understand the concept of a cat flap” cat. Of course he still comes back in to use his litter tray. Also, Ninja cat has somehow managed to get a nasty gash on his back. He was a bit skittish for a few days, and I didn’t rate my chances of being able to catch him to take him to the vet, but it seems to be healing up OK now and not causing him much distress (he’s back to rolling over on my lap for a tummy rub now, when he’s not out sunning himself in the garden).

I ran to work for a change on Wednesday, instead of cycling, and somehow managed to be showered and at my desk half an hour earlier than usual. Sunday was my last proper long run before London, and a bunch of us combined a route between various local parks with the unofficial definitely-not-a-parkrun that Robin had arranged to remind us all what Ipswich parkrun was like (still no news other than occasional rumours about when or how it will return). It was a nice day for it, there was a decent turnout, and a pleasant 5k was had by all. Obviously it would have been rude not to divert to the Cricketers for a few pints on the run home. With the other normal stuff (club, TTT, parkrun), that took me over 55 miles this week – time to start thinking about tapering!

Only a day late this week, so there’s progress! It’s definitely feeling very spring-like now, with decent temperatures, things starting to grow, and lighter evenings even before the state-mandated mass denial of the correct time of day began on Sunday.

I finally got fed up of being splashed while cooking – technical running tops in particular never seem to recover from spots of fat, and I have quite a few that bear the signs of quickly making some dinner before changing out of them – and ordered a cheap apron from a catering supply company (along with a few other bits and bobs). For some reason they also included one of those chef tops with the button-over front in the delivery, so if I ever feel particularly fancy I can make my dinner wearing that (I should have ordered a hat too!)

This month’s track session on Wednesday evening was another mile challenge. Once again I failed to get under 6 minutes, but at least I wasn’t any slower than the one we did in the Summer. As usual, a few of us headed to the clubhouse (aka The Cricketers) afterwards, for slightly more refreshment than originally planned.

On Thursday I got the train to Colchester to see Beans on Toast at the Arts Centre, with Matt Millership on piano and supported by Evy Frearson and William Crighton. The gig was good, but somewhat spoiled by an inincredibly annoying group of people right behind me talking at maximum volume for most of Beans’s set. As I was leaving I spotted some (possibly all four) of Pet Needs standing at the back.

After parkrun on Saturday I did a little bit of digging for the greenhouse base. I was planning to use my old laser pointer spirit level to find level points at each corner, but it turned out the batteries had leaked inside, and either the leakage or the amount of violence necessary to evict the batteries from their little tube has killed the laser, so now it’s just a normal short spirit level. I also filled both brown bins, having attached the stickers to prove that I’ve paid the new fee to have them empties, and made basically zero dent in the pile of garden waste. I just need to remember to put them out on Tuesday night now!

Slightly against my better judgement, I entered the Colchester (actually Langham) 15 again on Sunday. It’s a nice low-key little tinpot race, but surprisingly hilly! I ran round with Jason, who wasn’t going flat out because he has a marathon in a fortnight, which made for a more enjoyable time than last year when I was on my own with hardly another runner in sight for most of the second lap. Once we got home, those of us from Ipswich showered, transferred to bikes and headed back into town again for another afternoon in the clubhouse. I started with a curry and a pint for £7.45, which you really can’t complain about when the average non-Wetherspoons beer apparently now costs over two thirds of that!

Rather nicely, and completely without planning it, that brought my running mileage for the first quarter of this year (tomorrow will be a rest day) to exactly 500.0 miles. Cue the Proclaimers!

Oh dear, nearly a week late. As long as I hit publish before Sunday, so it’s not a whole week!

I had the week off, and did manage to accomplish some things, albeit not as many as I should have. A year after taking down the chicken run to make room for the greenhouse (which I’ve had in pieces in the carport since 2022) I finally took a chainsaw to the giant laurel hedge (and to a section of trellis that had almost completely fallen over) to actually clear a space. Now all I have to do is prepare a base for the slabs, then hope I can remember how the greenhouse goes back together.

While doing that, I came across a mystery egg. I initially thought it must have somehow survived since I had chickens, then realised it had a face on it. I assume it’s hard-boiled (I certainly wasn’t going to crack it to check) – maybe it got stolen from someone’s Easter egg hunt by a fox?

Of course I’ve now got an even bigger collection of garden waste to get rid of. Ipswich council have just introduced charges for brown bin collection, and I splashed out for two permits (I’ve still got a spare bin from when I used to pay for a second one, but since stopping that I could only put one out at a time). I figure even with two bins a fortnight it’s going to take a while to clear everything (there’s still lots of other overgrown stuff to sort out too).

I also did a bit of fettling on my bike. The rear wheel was a bit wobbly, so I cleaned, regreased and adjusted the bearings. Now it doesn’t wobble, but also doesn’t turn quite as smoothly as it should. Not sure whether that’s the bearings, the brake pads binding, or the chain. I guess a little extra resistance is good exercise anyway!

After getting some free financial planning advice through work last year (which was also a thinly-veiled selling attempt, but I resisted that side of it) I finally acted like some kind of grown-up and put some money into a stocks and shares Isa instead of keeping everything in a variety of Nationwide savings accounts and cash Isas. So if the stock market crashes, you’ll know who to blame. although I think we all know who to actually blame.

In an attempt at healthy snacking, I bought some carrots and apples, then accidentally baked some ginger nuts and ended up snacking on them instead (or at least as well). Oops.

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.