I realised that I hadn’t taken any time off since the beginning of the leave year in April, so I booked off the second half of this week – that uses up half of the five days I carried over from last year, which I suppose is a start. As usual I had a vague notion of getting all sorts of useful stuff done, but all I really ended up doing was cutting back the foliage on the back of the house (and the brambles on the patio that were in the way).
I thought about staying up to watch the election results come in (having gone to bed too early to see the iconic ‘Portillo moment’ in 1997), but realised that there would be a really boring stretch until around 3am, and also that there was no way I’d be able to put up with watching the coverage on any of the TV channels. I ended up just watching the exit poll announcement, and switching off when Laura Kuenssberg came on. I woke up at around 4am for long enough to check my phone and ensure I wasn’t in for a 2016-style shock. Nice to be rid of our embarrassment of a Tory MP at last, and a surprise to see Suffolk Coastal go red too.
The Friday 5 season came to an end with Great Bentley this week. It’s normally a warm one, but looked like it could feature heavy rain this year, with quite a downpour as we set off to drive down there. Fortunately it cleared to just a bit of drizzle for the race. It ended up being my quickest of the series, but still slower than last year. It occurred to me that the last time I competed under a Labour government (having been far too lazy during the Blair/Brown years) was probably a junior school sports day obstacle race, when Callaghan was in Downing Street!
After a gentle parkrun on Saturday, it was straight back to racing on Sunday, with the annual Ekiden relay event. This sees nearly 200 teams (we’d entered 11 from FRR), each running a marathon distance split into six legs of 7.2, 5, 10, 5, 10 and 5 km. It’s always a great social event, with loads of club gazebos lining the middle part of the 2.5km lap with everyone who’s not currently running supporting those that are. It looked like the weather was going to be wet, but as it turned out it was – apart from a couple of heavy showers – largely a warm sunny day as it seems to be every year. I ran leg B (5k) for the club’s male supervets (over 50) team, and we managed second place in our age category (with me being the slowest component of our overall time!). We were soundly beaten by our over 40 team this year though, having managed to go slightly quicker than them in 2023. After a bit of recovery I then did a 10k leg for one of the two social teams that we’d entered as the coffee runners, which unsurprisingly I ran even slower. We got completely soaked by another downpour while cycling home, and eschewed the traditional pub stop, but a few of us did head back into town for a curry after drying off and resting for a bit.
