4 and a half hours north of Brisbane

Grit the teeth - nearly there!

So back to our exploration of international Parkruns! Not far south of the Tropic of Capricorn is Hervey Bay and the local parkrun is along the seafront very helpfully shaded by trees for most of it's length. Despite the heat and humidity I managed my fastest time for a park run for almost a year - this was Hervey Bay Parkrun number 80 and I was hopeful of beating the V60 previous record of 22 minutes - I did this comfortably and finished in 20.35, however so did the V60 runner 7 seconds in front of me. Will we be here next week to give it another go?

It's easy when you've got a bit of a tug.

Vicky and Lyndall tried the dog walking option - whether or not this improves performance seems to very much depend on the size of the dog. This picture is of Ruby a bit of an all sorts breed of puppy, at 10 months old she's willing but hasn't got much 'pull' yet! We are dog/cat sitting for a few days up here on the coast during the Easter weekend and it's a nice little holiday resort with fish and chips, wonderful beach and, for this week only......Lennon's Bros Circus one of the only travelling circuses left in Australia - how can we not take advantage?
Off to Fraser Island tomorrow - this is the largest sandbank in the world - 120K long from tip to tip. Just reading through the instructions for visitors - are they they being a bit OTT with their safety advice when they say 'running down the sand dunes can cause serious injury or death'! We shall see.

On the Road

Ooh you splashed me!

Leaving Chester behind on a rainy late winter's day, I thought I was going to find somewhat kinder weather in Dubai - not a chance! I encountered torrential rain and chaos. According to Lt Col Khazraj al Khazraji of the Dubai police force there were 514 reported road accidents in the city within 6 hours as Dubai's brief annual downpour paralysed the city. This photo was taken from our hotel cafe as the floodwaters rose. One of our meetings was cancelled as a result of the floods but everything else was fine. Dubai is certainly a multi cultural place - we had Iranian food one night and on the last day Japanese and Thai grub in a Chinese restaurant. Was I right to use the chopsticks?

I'll be in Scotland before ewe!

Back to my rolling coverage of the big bike ride, life is full of curious connections and coincidences - regarding our big LEJOG bike ride, as we started off at Land's End things were very quiet, we were met by some big seagulls in the vast carpark which is clearly there to accommodate all the charabancs full of tourists desperate to see the bottom end of England and buy all the fairly tacky souvenirs. At 8. 30 am in the morning on a wet August day there was hardly anyone around apart from someone picking up yesterday's litter, but we did meet an enthusiastic mother and daughter from somewhere in the midlands - they were clearly well prepared, lots of top gear but looking at doing a steady 18 days of cycling. We met just one other cyclist en route -  a very determined thin fellow on a fast looking bike who dashed past us in mid Wales -  we spotted him a few hours later at Church Stretton about to check in to his B & B. No other end-to- enders until we got to John O'Groats where we checked in to see some anxious relatives waiting for a father and son who were shortly supposed to arrive. And indeed down the hill they sprinted high as a kite (as indeed we must have seemed half an hour earlier!)

All my Trails!

Come on - dig in!

Here's me puffing away towards the end of the Radcliffe 10 mile trail race on Sunday - this took me 78.09 - a tough course as even the winner took just short of an hour to get round. I thought I did quite well and came in 63rd with 200 runners behind me. This was a 'Good Value' race in my book - only £7 to enter with a free buff thrown in - it's that yellow thing wrapped around the top of my head. You'll also see that I was wearing shorts for the first time this year. I must be acclimatising to this from winter weather - just in time for 30 degrees in Australia - eek!

Life is full of curious connections and coincidences - regarding our big LEJOG bike ride, as we started off at Land's End things were very quiet, we were met by some big seagulls in the vast carpark which is clearly there to accommodate all the charabancs full of tourists desperate to see the bottom end of England and buy all the fairly tacky souvenirs. At 8 30 am in the morning on a wet August day there was hardly anyone around apart from someone picking up yesterday's litter, but we did meet an enthusiastic mother and daughter from somewhere in the midlands - they were clearly well prepared, lots of top gear but looking at doing a steady 18 days of cycling. We met just one other cyclist en route -  a very determined thin fellow on a fast looking bike who dashed past us in mid Wales -  we spotted him a few hours later at Church Stretton about to check in to his B & B. No other end-to- enders until we got to John O'Groats where we checked in to see some anxious relatives waiting for a father and son who were shortly supposed to arrive. And indeed down the hill they sprinted high as a kite (as indeed we must have seemed half an hour earlier!)

Rip off Running! How much to enter a trail race?

Note the modest £5 entry fee!

And what a nice race it was too - I galloped round in 55 minutes to find that Chris Wilcox (same age group as me) was already standing at the finish with a big grin on his face. I'd been pushing like mad to finish strongly thinking he was behind me and, most likely, catching me up! Still it was good fun on a cold, wet, windy, muddy course. The friendly guys at Clwydian Range Runners have been successfully organising races round the forest for years, most of them on forest tracks and made up paths and mostly at night (The famous 'Dashes in the Dark'), now the staff at Llandegla centre have marked out a running trail to complement the excellent MTB trails. So this was the grand opening of the route. We paid our £5 fee which included soup and a roll and set off to enjoy a very well organised safe race. I must point out at this stage that the Clwydian Range Runners break even on the race and this is a non-profit making venture. Imagine my disgust on arriving back after the race to find that another group of people (not a running club) have announced a race on the same course in summer with the entry fees starting at £23 (the ad says 'no booking or hidden fees'.) Someone is clearly making a fat profit out of this and they'll no doubt target fitness centres and the like and entrap naive first timers who think they're getting a good deal. Anyway thanks to all the marshalls and timekeepers who stood out in the pouring rain - there's devotion to the sport.

Bad news for the Union of Bridgepainters .

 We took this picture of the Forth Railway bridge when we were just about to cross the Forth Road bridge on our LEJOG cycle ride. This was almost at the end of our longest day - just short of 100 miles! Could not see anyone at work painting it though! Apparently the practice of starting to paint it all over again as soon as it was finished ended fairly recently - it was reported in 2011 that 'A 200-strong team has been applying a triple layer of new glass flake epoxy paint, which is similar to that used in the offshore oil industry. It creates a chemical bond to provide a virtually impenetrable layer to protect the bridge's steel work from the weather.'

Go, go, go.

And here are a few statistics from our wee cycle ride across the UK:
Total Distance - 871.7 miles
Total time on the bike - 78hrs 22mins 12secs
Total Climbed - 49494ft (almost twice up Everest!)
Average pace - 11.1mph
Best days pace - 13.5mph (last day!)
Top Speed reached - 45.1mph (last day)
Furthest Distance in 1 day - 96.7 miles
Total Calories burned - 42267
Not bad for 2 non-cyclists I think

Cranking up again

It's me Martin - just in case I forgot who I was!

OK I think it's time I got this blog powered up again. I guess most people have stopped checking up on me after a six month hiatus but I'll see how things go now. Much of that time was spent at the wonderful Chatterbox English School in Sardinia where I was teaching a lovely class of Year 5 children. Just as busy as schools in the UK though and little time for anything else such as a blog. So after this sabbatical I'm ready to go again and I'll chip in with bit and pieces from the missing six months as I go along. Running has been on the agenda and I did a couple of half marathons in Italy at Assemini and Cagliari (more about those later) and back in the UK in January I ran the Four Villages Half in Helsby followed by the Village Bakery Half at Wrexham (there's a theme there which I've only just noticed!) Times have been remarkably consistent with me coming in in 1.40.42, 1.35.02, 1.35.46 and 1.35.22 respectively. The latter performance earned me a North Wales gold medal in the regional champs and a packet of crumpets.

Nice red bell!

Just before Sardinia Lou and me managed to fit in LEJOG, i.e. the Land's End to John O'Groats bike ride which was a frantic twelve day dash! Because of my sudden plan to go teaching we had to fit this one in quickly - two weeks before we'd intended. I'd done most of my training on this faithful old Dawes Audax  (pictured above). However several hours on slow ups and speedy downs convinced me that my dodgy gears and brakes were not up to it. Rather than spend a few hundred quid on upgrades I thought I should spend a few hundred quid on a new bike, hence the shiny bright red Fuji Tourer you see in the photo below. The very helpful chaps at Evans Cycles fitted some nice mudguards and more robust tyres and I can tell you it was all money well spent - the disc brakes proved themselves on a couple of notable occasions and the 900 miles plus was puncture free.

Not quite so shiny now though!

LEJOG

5th day of the Land's End to John O'Groats cycle ride over and done with - a wet rainy day so we decided to treat ourselves to a cuppa at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire. Cycling has taken up most of our time so we've not been able to access the internet, however I will now try to upload some of the more interesting photos as we go along. I'll start with a bit of a retrospective.

Racing the Dodo

Another early wake up call - buses left at 6.45 for the start and there we were, nearly 300 of us attempting the 25K. The smaller number of 50K'ers had already been running for over an hour starting in the dark. We were a bit luckier as we didn't need head torches. This was a serious race, in fact all of them were including the 10K race which skirted round this rocky peak - our job was, with the help of strategically positioned ropes, to go up and over; this at the end of 4 hours of running through jungle avoiding tree roots on steep uphills and downhills.

What a well organised event though. Aid stations were manned by dozens of volunteers providing water, coke, energy drinks, bananas, energy bars, fruit, raisins, you name it it was there  - and it was all needed. There's one photo of Ricky Lightfoot from Cumbria, who won the 50K comfortably for the second year, having a positive picnic at one stop. Ricky's fairly tall but he's certainly light on his feet.

A new friend!

 So, results then, Vicky was second V60 lady in the 10K - it looks from the picture that she was beaten by the cuddly Dodo but, in fact the first over 60 lady had disappeared - Vicky had obviously run her into the ground. Lyndall paced Vicky for much of the race but once she realised Vicky was going to make it OK, she took off and waltzed through the field to gain an additional sixty places. Lou 329th in 1.46.24, Vicky 392nd in 1.53.33.

Bit of a breeze really!

 Also on the podium - me! I found that I was first placed 96th overall in a time of 4.52 - I've not run (not sure much of it was actually running) for that length of time for years. Astonishing how many locals do this event - the population of Mauritius is about 1.2 million and here were nearly 1200 lunatic mountain runners, mostly from the island but interspersed with a few tourists, mainly from South Africa.

It's nice up here!

And would I run this race again - if you'd asked me after I'd finished I'd have said no but now I'm not so sure. Mauritius is a friendly place with lots to see and we only saw a few of the sights. One of the most impressive in my book was the sight of a White Tailed Tropic Bird Phaethon lepturus gliding over the high forests. They have a wing span of nearly a metre and are about the same length. We tried to get decent photos of them but they move rather swiftly so this is a Googly snap.

And I though I'd better include a photo of Lou in the water with a smile on her face!

Learning to fly!