Late again, but not as late as last week. And we’re now in 2024, of course, which as usual is a largely arbitrary line to cross. Normally I ignore all the NYE festivities, go to bed early then get woken by fireworks, but this (last) year I was invited to Dave & Sally’s again for some food, beer and anecdotes from a man who’d met Geoff Capes. It was an enjoyable evening, but meant a bleary-eyed start to get up and out for the bonus parkrun in the morning. To make matters worse, we were doing an unofficial double (now parkrun has stopped the real ones), which meant running to parkrun, then running to Justin’s afterwards for another go at his lockdown “not parkrun” course, then a coffee and a final run home (via the pub). Around 18 miles altogether.
At some point in the weekend I’d managed to pick up a cold (probably not Covid, as I used my last remaining LFT and it came up negative), and my Garmin claimed my training readiness was 1/100 (I’m not sure it ever actually goes down to zero), but I still dragged myself along to Tuesday night training. I basically did nothing for the next three days though, other than some gentle working-from-home. I still have a very annoying cough, which is making it hard to get a good night’s sleep.
At some point in the week I watched Face/Off, for what I thought would be a bit of fun. Turns out I couldn’t remember a single thing about it other than that weird face-stroking thing, and it’s a lot less light-hearted than it had been in my mind. Mainly because in retrospect I was confusing it with all the face mask nonsense in Mission: Impossible.
On Saturday it was back to parkrun again (of course), and by coincidence I finished in exactly the same time as the one on New Year’s Day, which meant that after 292 runs I finally earned the unofficial “groundhog day” award. Holly, who I was running with, went one better though – not only did she get two identical times in New Year week, but she did the same in Christmas week too (I missed out on doing the same by one second). Given that those are the only two weeks of the year with two parkruns, getting that double must be a pretty rare (if utterly pointless) achievement.
Sunday was the county cross-country championships – always a slightly odd event, and much less exclusive than it sounds (in fact not exclusive at all). As we’re at the beginning of marathon training season (though I’m still claiming not to be running one), I got talked into making it into a long run by running the ten miles to the race with Robin and Dave, which made for a fairly long warmup for a 10k race. Unsurprisingly my pace in the race was half a minute a mile slower than last year.
After a long hiatus, I got my unicycle out briefly, and found that I’m neither better nor worse than before. I think I need to take it somewhere where I can go further without having to turn a corner, as that’s the bit that always goes wrong. I did a brief bit of drum practice too, and probably have got worse at that.
Having finished my slow Brooklyn Nine-Nine binge, I’ve gone ridiculously far back in time now, and started on the A-Team boxset (an actual boxset, in an actual box) that I picked up on eBay. It’s still mildly entertaining, though probably not quite as exciting as it was when I watched it on Saturdays at my grandparents’ as a kid in the 80s!
My Elixir port has been accepted into Emily Bache’s Supermarket Pricing refactoring kata, if anyone fancies a change from the Gilded Rose.
By an odd coincidence, I remembered my crossword puzzle geocache the other day, and thought I should probably go and check whether it’s still in place, as I haven’t for quite a while. Then the next day I got a notification that someone had logged finding it, which saved me the trouble. They also said that my crossword “could have come straight out of the Times”, which was nice!