Back soon.

My thoughts go to the woman and her running partner who took the entries for me and my mate. I should have been up there this weekend except that my regular team-mate has been quite ill which meant that we deferred our entry for the London Rat Race a few weeks back and, subsequently, he was advised not to do the OMM either. I asked around for a replacement partner and found a woman who was keen to do it and who had a friend who was keen to do it. I deliberated for a while about whether to run with a stranger anyway but eventually decided it would be more fun for her to go with her friend and, also, that, realistically, my current fitness levels were probably not adequate and up to the task. Also, it was easier not to do it.

Turns out, that decision may have been a Good Thing.

The news, of course, is as amusing and ill informed as it always is, focussing on the reactionary “How could they possibly be so irresponsible and let it go ahead?” questioning and highlighting the fact that the local hospital has had one runner admitted with hypothermia. One. A single runner so far. More people than that (By the order of tens if not hundreds) get hypothermia at the Tough Guy event in January. They also referred to it as a “charity run” which automatically associates it with something like the Capital FM Hyde Park 10k race or your average 5k “get people who have never been running out of their armchairs” race that people get sponsored to do. (I don’t mean to sound like I’m denigrating their efforts because I’m not really - it’s just that, well, they’re entirely different) The truth of the matter is that, included in the list of required kit that you must take are a survival bag, a first aid kit, emergency rations and so on. The people taking part in this event aren’t your average 5k runner. These aren’t people who sit there and say “I know! I’ve never run anywhere for years except for the bus so I’ll just go out and spend two days running 30km+ over mountains while carrying all my kit with me.” If you take part then you have a fair idea what the risks might be. Hell, when I took part a couple of years ago, Sir Ranulph Fiennes was one of the competitors in the Elite section. You know; adventurer type bloke. Been to South Pole. Ran 26 marathons in 26 days. Yeah, him. That’s the sort of people this event attracts (and people like me who like the sound of it but are a long way off from running in the Elite class). No idea whether he was doing it this year though.

It’s also worth pointing out that the OMM (and the KIMM as it was previously known) has been running for over 40 years. This was the 41st race in fact. It’s also the first one to be cancelled. I gather, from talking to people and reading the website, that the event has previously been held in horrendous conditions up to, and including, snow (it does occassionally take place in the far flung remote highlands of Scotland). Forty years without a single cancellation or postponement due to weather. Of course they’re going to go ahead if they think they can. The news makes it sound like they didn’t know anything about the weather forecast but as it happens, I got an email just yesterday (obviously still in their entrants database as it was only a couple of weeks ago we passed our entry on) saying that, considering the forecast, they were putting the the Bad Weather courses into effect. These are contingent courses that should be fine if the weather is a tad inclement. They also made a couple of other alterations to accomodate the weather as it was forecast. These are not the actions of people who do not know what they are doing.

Final thoughts: as much as I’m glad that we didn’t end up doing it, part of me wishes that we had because it would be one hell of an adventure.

More final thoughts: the shame that I should have felt at not managing to successfully finish the OMM when we entered a couple of years ago (We got lost. In really heave fog admittedly but we still got lost) was mitigated by learning that the aforementioned Sir Ranulph Fiennes also did not complete the course as he missed a checkpoint. I’ve probably told you that before.

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I do this more often with films (namely the Top 100 films on IMDB at any one point) but, you know, what the hell. I’ll do this as it’s a space filler.
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The answer is, quite obviously, yes. Easily. I mean, you can do it in 48 hours as is evidenced from the plethora of “Make a film in 48 hour” type challenges that some festivals hold. The last time I planned to do one of those, I knocked up a rough first draft of a script in an hour or two but, as is ever the case, the scope and scale of the story evolved into something which would probably require far longer than 24 hours to film (with another 12 hours to edit). Other events intervened to put the kaibosh (sp?) on that though.
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It’s my own fault, really, as I wasn’t paying attention. I also was doing something fairly – but by no means hugely – risky. Let me start at the beginning. Last weekend I got the urge to revisit an old game called SWAT 3 which is a tactical police squad shooter that’s set in real-life LA locations and can be quite entertaining. It’s an old game – released in 2000 or something but I still have the CD so installed it. Next task was to get patches for it which is not as easy as it sounds because a lot of the links to patches and a lot of the fansites which gave comprehensive patch information no longer exist but anyway, I managed to get that done. One problem remained: the game wouldn’t recognise the CD in the drive (which, I reiterate, was a genuine, shop bought, original CD). I was faced with two options: 1) Try to fix it or 2) find a no-cd hack for it (which, for those of you unfamiliar with these things, is a hacked file which allows you to play the game without needing the original CD in the drive).
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It’s nearly 24 hours later and I can’t help but think about the film and wonder if I can squeeze in another screening tonight. Already arranged to go and see it on IMAX with a friend but in the meantime, now I’ve had a day to digest, I think I need to see it again.

I haven’t felt like that about a film for a long time.
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The Dark Knight is fucking awesome. There, I’ve said it. I don’t really need to say anymore because that’s all you need to know and all I can get my head around to tell you. Ah, what the hell - here’s some more (surprisingly spoiler free) thoughts.
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