It was 20 degrees yesterday which I would call rather hot for the season. Or I would but I seem to have a memory of September always being quite hot. Admittedly, never quite 20 degrees hot but still.

Anyway, a friend and I drove down to Windsor where we joined 5000 people to do the Windsor Half Marathon. I’d like to say that another reason I haven’t been around much is because of the copious amount of training I’ve been doing for this race but that would be a lie and you know it. The truth of it is that I only agreed to do it two weeks ago after someone I know who had entered pulled out and offered me their place. I haven’t run more than about 10k all summer and this was twice as far.

The course, after discussing it with a mate who has run it regularly for the last four or five years (with the exception of this year owing to dodgy knees - such is the downside of pounding out the miles) is quite psychologically challenging. Although it takes place through the very scenic vistas of the Great Park, it’s very hilly. Not just the “here’s a steep hill, let’s run up it” hilly either. There were plenty of long, gradual inclines which, to be perfectly honest, are a nightmare. They’re not quite flat enought to run at normal pace and not quite steep enough to change down a gear. The last mile though, is the worst. You get to the 12 mile marker and it’s downhill from there onto the crowded Long Walk and the final straight to the finish line. Well let me tell you, that road never bloody ends. You can see the finish, you pick up the pace and think to yourself “I can do this, I can get this last mile done quick. Dig deep, dig hard - keep pushing!” But oh no, it’s not that simple. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the bugger doesn’t get any closer. It’s soul destroying. (I would like to take a moment to thank the group of young ladies who started booing me about a half a mile from the finish when I chose to walk for 10 seconds for shaming me into picking up my knees and legging it to the finish.)

Still, considering that this was 4.1 miles further than anything I’ve run in the last 16 years and that I haven’t trained for it, I more or less stuck to my race plan and came in at 1:49:48 (or thereabouts) which is abou 8m 20 per mile - 20 seconds over what I was secretly aiming for.

Next week, the Kings Langley 10k.

UPDATE: According to the official site my time was actually 1:49:28 and I came 1117th out 4558 people. (To give you an idea of the numbers, the 117th placed fella finished in 1:29:55 - so a 1000 people finished within 20 minutes. Something to aim for next year!)

So did you read about the four people who died doing the Great North Run last weekend? Tragic huh? Glibness aside, it was a sad thing to happen. The most amusing thing was listening to people who were discussing it on the train after it had been splashed all over the headlines. There were suddenly loads of experts who knew exactly why it had happened. Not enough training. Too hot. Dehydrated. Too crowded at the start.

Eh?

Too crowded at the start? Ever been in a big race, love, one withe more than, say, 1000 people? It’s always crowded. And hot? Well 18 degrees might be a bit warm for September - especially September Oop North, but it’s hotter than that in the summer and plenty of people still go running then. There were 8 marathons in June alone and 5 in July (including the Picnic, reputedly Britain’s Toughest Marathon).

Still, four deaths in one 13.1 mile race is a bit of a shocker. Only five people have died while doing the London marathon in the 20 years it’s been going. Having said that, my missus saw someone die during the inaugral annual Nike 10km in Richmond Park 4 years ago. And let’s not forget that Douglas Adams died on the treadmill despite being fit and healthy and a regular runner.

The simple truth of it is this. It was One Of Those Things ™. The other simple truth is that running is bad for you. Very bad for you. Don’t listen to the doctors who tell you to go out and get exercise - they don’t know what they’re talking about. Running will damage your joints, strain your muscles, accelerate your heart rate, make you short of breath and make you want to throw up. Stick to drinking instead - that will just make you want to throw up.

RUNNING IS DANGEROUS AND SILLY. STOP IT NOW!

(I’m so going to do that Picnic run next year!)

I’d like to tell you that the last six weeks of hiatus were down to some real life events that distracted me from the pursuit of weblog goodness. I’d like to be able to tell you that I had an existential crisis that was so overwhelming that I packed in my job, left my home and my family and jetted off to cooler climes to find a little green man with pointy ears and a speech impediment who would enlighten me about the mysteries of the universe. I’d even like to tell you that owing to some dubious googling, I managed to hack my way into a top secret US military network deep in the heart of the Cheyenne mountains that housed a prototype A.I. that had decided that all human life should be destroyed and persuaded it to play Tic Tac Toe with me in a desperate attempt to teach it about the futility of Global Thermonuclear War.

But none of that would be true.

The truth, as is usually the case, is rather mundane. Owing to an expiring credit card, the above domain was not renewed and I was too apathetic to do anything about it until yesterday.

My excuse for not visiting anybody else’s weblogs are as above but without the expired credit card reason. Sorry about that.

Mind you, if you’d offered a member’s only area that necessitated a recurring monthly and promised copious amounts of regularly updated nudity, I might have been more incentivized. On the other hand, maybe not.

Anyway, I’m back for now and have put two years worth of 50ps into the meter so the site will be here for a while, even if the content isn’t.