Ghosts and grasshoppers

We've been closely examining the local tide timetables recently. The tide goes out a fair way where we are leaving vast areas of sand on which to run. This is a photo of the lighthouse at Talacre at around 4:30 pm on New Year's Eve. It seemed very dark at the time but my phone camera has picked up the available light and come up with a fairly good snap, the lighthouse is no longer operational so that lighted window is more likely to be evidence of the ghost of Raymond, a former lighthouse keeper who is reputed to haunt the building and its vicinity. I did read somewhere that one of those Dulux adverts from many years ago was filmed here with an Old English Sheepdog running around the lighthouse - however the paint is peeling a bit so it was clearly quite some time ago. Here's a young English Shepherd dog sniffing about in the gloom.
Apparently the tide can come in quite quickly so we've always been very careful to time our runs well before the tide is turning, there are parallel channels through the sand bars that fill with fast flowing incoming water - my Strava plot here shows how I had to backtrack several times to avoid getting wet!

Zig-zag beach running!

I recently found out the reason that there are no more giant grasshoppers around - they've all been shot! I thought I'd not seen any for years and it turns out that the last one was bagged by a farmer in Yorkshire on a hot summer's afternoon in the 1980's. I couldn't find a photo of the Yorkshire Grasshopper but here's one from the USA which is a record of their largest catch in the 1930's. It seems that the 'dust bowl' conditions of the Mid West where grazing dried up and farms were abandoned was, in part, due to the predations of these creatures. They didn't even make particularly good eating!

Last one of the day - I'm all out of cartridges!

Virtuality and running!

Can't stop!

Virtual is not what you might call an accurate descriptor by it's very definition. It usually means something along the lines of almost. Hence virtual meetings where technology such as Zoom is allowing people to 'almost' meet each other. Virtual running has also become popular as a means of allowing runners to compete whilst not actually running alongside each other. (Although why we should not be allowed to run together out in the open air but we can 'virtually' rub shoulders with strangers in supermarkets seems bizarre to me.) However I guess we'll have to continue to go along with this for the time being. Realising that my Billy Whizz legs might be losing some of their speed over the long lockdown months I felt I should join the fun.

 

It's a bling thing!

Thanks to some enterprising organisers we've been lucky enough to 'compete' in some 'virtual' events. Vicky and I ran part of a marathon relay and picked up some nice medals as a result. And more recently I clocked 42.51 in a Virtual 10K coming 3rd overall - I did take advantage of the fact that I could choose my own course and I selected a slightly downhill route - so that I could get back home earlier on a cold day (of course). So to get back to the definition of virtual - is a virtual 10K almost a race? It didn't feel like it really, but I did manage to sum up a bit more oomph and adrenalin than I would normally do on a training run so yes it must be doing me good!