The week got off to a good start when I woke up on Monday to find that I hadn’t plugged my phone in properly and it had gone flat and turned itself off. The real problem though was that once I put it on charge and switched it back on it refused to accept my pin. I eventually had to do a factory reset and reload everything from backup (which was fortunately pretty painless, if annoying). This time I didn’t enable “auto-confirm unlock” (where it unlocks when you enter the final digit, rather than having to press enter) – I’m don’t know for sure that was the root of the bug, but I have my suspicions.
Monday night I finally made it to another GoodGym session (most of them have been on Tuesdays lately), and got to wear my 100 shirt at last. Three of us ran up to the Blue Cross centre and helped them repot a bunch of plants in their reception area. I ignored the advice to bring a head torch, but somehow still ended up running in front and warning the better-prepared people of obstacles in the dark section of path.
Tuesday was our work Christmas meal. We did lazer [sic] tag again, and I was rubbish again, then went to The Forge to eat, and finished up in the Nelson. Fortunately, unlike four years to the day previously, we didn’t witness a fight in the latter. More people than usual made it to closing time, but a few of the younger team members seemed strangely unaware of how the last orders and time bells and drinking-up time work!
Having missed the normal club training night on Tuesday because of the meal, the monthly track session was handily scheduled for Wednesday. It was forecast to be cold, so I switched the spikes on my cross country shoes for short ones to avoid any risk of slipping over, which also provided an excuse to cycle there and back instead of running. Unfortunately the back bend was completely covered in frost, so we ended up running on the infield instead.
I felt like I’d run out of excuses for missing TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten), and turned up with two other hardly souls to run the ten miles in pretty miserable weather. Gripper had twisted his ankle and Neil the vicar had a cold, so for once I was able to keep up, at least for the outward leg. We drifted apart on the way back, with me ending up in the middle, and just under 75 minutes. As usual, I felt wiped out afterwards, and was hoping a rest day on Friday would be enough time to recover for parkrun and the ten pub run on Saturday.
Then I remembered it was also the club social “12 pubs of Christmas” run on Friday night, so no rest day after all. This involved using a slightly flaky app that gave us quiz questions once we reached each pub, and a puzzle to solve to reveal the next one. Our team were last to leave, adopted a three on, one off (nine halves) strategy, and were also the last back. Fortunately time wasn’t a factor in the scoring, and it turned out we’d won.
The weather for parkrun was possibly even worse than it had been on Thursday night, with attendance down by about 50% from the week before. After cycling home in the pouring rain I just about had time to get dry and warm before heading back out for the annual Christmas ten pub run (12.8 miles, three pints, seven halves and a sausage roll).
