Another four-day week that felt longer, and the weather continues to lurch between winter and summer. Perhaps now May is finally out, we can finally cast that clout?
I didn’t do much useful with the bank holiday, other than changing the pads on the rear brake on my bike. I didn’t do a good enough job of backing the callipers off, and ended up giving myself some bonus exercise by cycling five miles each way to work with the brakes binding. Not exactly what I needed, sandwiched in between a 6 mile run for coffee in the morning and club training in the evening!
A few of us from work went to the Maybush for a meal on Wednesday, to meet a new joiner to the team, who’s in Ipswich for a couple of weeks to find his feet before being exiled to Birmingham, where we’re being forced to recruit people now (despite the rest of us being based here), because reasons. Fortunately that was one of the days when the weather cooperated (apart from a couple of spots of rain), and we were able to sit outside by the river.
This week saw the first fixture of the Friday 5 series (five mile road races), in Sudbury. I just about managed to scrape under 35 minutes, but hopefully I can improve on that as the series goes on. It was a reasonable temperature for running, but got a bit chilly standing around afterwards.
For a bit of a change on Sunday I had another go at orienteering, with a score event in Holywells and Landseer parks, which involved visiting as many controls as you could in 45 minutes, in whatever order you wanted. I remembered to start my watch for once, and did a slightly better job of navigating this time, although I did give up on one control after wasting too long looking. My main mistake was to leave my watch on auto-pause, which meant guessing how long I actually had left after adding on stationary time. Oh, and my other mistake was forgetting that the map contained symbols describing the specific control locations (eg by a tree, or on a bridge), which would have simplified the search. I ended up a minute and a half over time, which meant losing two controls’ worth of points, but at least I wasn’t last! Neil and I ran a circuitous route back along the Orwell (after passing the pesky control that neither of us could find, to prove it actually existed!) and through Ravenswood, to tot up a few extra miles.
No mow May (and other months) rumbles on.
