Category: No run

Posted on

SportsBallShop competition winners

I received a lot of verbal comments from readers about the Sports Ball Shop competition (pictured above) in November/December… in the main from friends professing weakly to have too little time to write a few short sentences on a running theme!

But two people did submit stories and so, by default, they each win a voucher for £40 at either sportsballshop.co.uk, sportsbras.co.uk or etoyszone.co.uk.

And the winners are: Nigel Foster and Clifford Dargonne. Voucher codes will follow from me by email in due course guys… just as soon as Ben sends them through.

Since SportsBallShop offered three vouchers (and I have the casting vote), I have arranged for the third voucher to go to: Warden Park School in Cuckfield, via Dai Thomas who teaches there.

I worked as a Young Enterprise Business Advisor to an excellent team of students at Warden Park last academic year, whilst Dai was kindly instrumental in helping me set up FosterRuns.com in 2007.

A big thank you to everyone at SportsBallShop.co.uk (and especially Shannon and Ben) for their sponsorship!  This kind of initiative really sets these guys apart from their competitors!

Posted on

A Forrest Gump moment?

Mindful that my regular readers might be concerned (or maybe overjoyed!) that I have had a Forrest Gump moment and suddenly forsaken running for some other activity (leaving this blog high and dry), I hasten to report that I’ve merely been continuing to suffer from a bad back.

With luck (and some help from Hanne at Chiropractor House), normal service will be resumed shortly!

Keep on running!

Posted on

Back to Skelton Workshops

Having sported a painful back for about a week, I couldn’t face a repeat run with Mark and Mach 2 yesterday, so I opted instead for a relaxing day in the garden… wasn’t it a beaut?!

Relaxing day in the garden is an oxymoron for me, of course.  I cleared out the tea-house ahead of the autumn, cut wood for the wood burner, pulled some weeds up and generally trimmed back a bit… although this was less energetic compared to emptying and refilling the compost heap, which I did on Saturday!

Also on Saturday, Kim and I took ourselves off to Skelton Workshops for some sculpture tuition. Kim has had a piece of raw stone (a present from Karen) sitting looking at her in the dining room for 18 months and she finally found inspiration and started working on it.

We stood working in the sunny courtyard for an extremely stimulating morning… if you are ever stuck for a present for a loved one, this is a really special idea!  Especially if you go along too… which was what Kim did, as this was my birthday present!

They do courses in sculpture and also in letter cutting and they also have classes for children… what a totally brilliant skill to give a child!  Even a 47 year old one!

My piece has progressed only slightly from its initial rock-like state… can you guess what it is yet?

There’s a way to go with the piece yet but it really is great fun, whilst the camaraderie with the other sculptors makes for a really warm and friendly morning.

Not so warm is the ice-pack that Andy Swan (also at www.andyswan.co.uk) has told me to apply to my back circa 50 times ahead of my forthcoming session with him.  Having suffered for ten days, that one call, allied to ten three-minute applications with five-minutes between (alas, no quite so regular as I’ working in between!), has already made me feel a whole lot better!  Should have known to do that initially!

Meanwhile, back on the the subject of the run I opted to miss yesterday, the Marks apparently decided to go it slow, returning in a lazy 2.32… presumably saving their energy for another chance to make me feel like a slowcoach!  Gits!

Posted on

FosterRuns is FOUR!

Happy Birthday to Foster Runs!  Once again, this post is more a mental note for myself, but you might also find it interesting.

Number of years: FOUR!  I doubt if Dai Thomas expected it to still be going after four years when he helped me start it back in 2007!

Number of posts: 83 (110 in year 3, 102 in year 2, 156 in year 1 – I’ll report the figures this way around below to make it easy to see any progression). There have been less posts as Kim & I have seen fewer films (and I have also got out of the habit of writing about them and other non-running items) and I have been commenting on Management Today and HBR… which you can follow via Disqus.com/David_J_Foster if you’re interested. I’ve also recently started a new ‘blog’ at EnglandGardenGang.org to follow the fortunes (or otherwise) of a micro-movement designed to improve our shared urban areas.

Number of runs: 72 (92, 63, 67) including 12 short ‘day-after’ runs earlier this year as I started to increase my mileage

Mileage: 653 (726, 538, 512)… no marathon training but still quite a bit more that the first two years

Hours spent running: 113 (113, 84, 87)…er, obviously running quite a bit more slowly than last year then!

Average run: 9.4 miles in 1.34 (7.89 in 1.24, 8.14 in 1.20, 8.07 in 1.31). This helps explain the slower pace, more so if I exclude the 12 machine runs of 1 mile which makes the average run 10.7 miles in 1.51.

Average speed: 5.8mph (6.38, 6.05, 6.15) which is not surprising in view of the increased (age and) average distance… in fact 26 (36%) of my runs this year were over 2 hours, whilst 45 (62%) were greater than 10 miles.

Average minutes per mile: 10.4 (9.4, 9.9, 9.65) Slower than a slow thing!

Worst month distance: 31.6 in December 2010 (10.4 May 10, 13.6 Jan 09, 22.3 Feb 08).

Best month distance: 68 miles in Jan 2011 (157 in March 10, 62 Apr 09, 68 Nov 07). This was surprising, but you can see that there is less variance in the months… in fact the average monthly mileage was 52 (against 61, 40 and 44)

Total mileage to date since start of blog: 2432 miles… yikes, imagine if I hadn’t kept running around in cicles!

Time spent running since start of blog: 400 hours (50 eight-hour days)

Visitors according to Clustermaps: 1722 (1479, 1496, 2906 for year 1, the first year being higher as a by-product of my work with Qype.com).  My aim is to increase the number of visitors this year, so please recommend it to anyone you think might find it interesting!

From number of countries: 44 against 38 last year

Generally speaking this has been an even more enjoyable year for me than previous ones, despite (in fact, probably because of) the increased average distance. One reason for this is the absence of races, but I am clearly also becoming a stronger runner.

To those of you who have stopped by at FosterRuns.com to read my inane blabbering’s, thank you and please stick around to join me vicariously on my onward journey!  Even better, come and join me for a run!

To those with whom I have run in this and previous years, it’s been an honour and I sincerely hope that I’ve portrayed you well!  Let’s run some more!

Hey, leave me a piece of birthday cake!

Posted on

Relaxing stops run

It is seldom these days that you will catch me watching the news.  I subscribe to the view of author Nassim Taleb, who says it is ‘full of noise’, in contrast for example to history, which is devoid of it.  One example of this is what journalists do when there is no story to share… rather than saying nothing and going straight to the next programme, they share what they don’t know, or what they know didn’t happen.

Well, today I didn’t run.  And like a journo, rather than stay silent and have you wonder where my post was this weekend, I’m going to tell you about the non-run.

After a busy week I entered the weekend pretty tired out and then had the kind of quiet, relaxing Saturday that you may have come to expect of me…

First I gave the 15-foot hedge at the back of the garden a manicure with a hedge-trimmer.  Then I trimmed back my neighbour’s 20ft Philadelphus where it overhung the tea-house.  Then I cleaned the baked-on residue of the Phily-flowers from the (normally see-through) tea-house-roof.  Then I manicured the other neighbour’s 20ft Laurel where it overhung the fence, followed by trimming a couple of my more normal sized shrubs.  Then I moved on to edge the lawns, then cut both them and the 1 metre-wide border of the green across the road that the council grass-cutter couldn’t be bothered to cut.  One of my elderly neighbours said the guy had done a quarter of the job… harsh, but not far off!  I bagged up all the cuttings from the aforementioned manicuring and… moved on to wash the cars.  To be fair, that just about finished me off last night!

So this morning, whilst I might just have squeezed in a run before the sun broke through and the temperature soared, I decided to have a Sunday off for a change.

Except for having to clean Kim’s car again thanks to the sterling efforts of a seagull to cover it front to back!  A little like a newspaper, it was black and white and read all over.

Posted on

Friday treat

As I was busy working away on Friday, I had a call from Lucas (http://www.lucascookguitar.co.uk/) to say that he was going to chill out at Wakehurst Place for a while and could he pick me up en route?

One of the advantages of being a season ticket holder of ‘Kew at Wakehurst’ is the ability to drop in and have a wander for a while without feeling the need to stay and make the most of the entrance fee.  The place is gorgeous at the moment and we spent a relaxed hour walking and talking.

I even got to continue some of the work I had previously been doing, preparing for a workshop next week, by presenting some of it to Lucas… although his daughter probably thought I was a bit odd!

Thanks Lucas… great tonic ahead of the weekend!

Posted on

Bathing

I awoke feeling particularly groggy yesterday morning and sat nursing first one, then another cup of quadspresso before I could smile enough to go out into the garden.

I had intended to get out for an early run before the heat of the day started to ramp up, but alas, it was already 8am and about 70 degrees, so I voted for a day off.

HA!

I had some tasks, started yesterday or last weekend, to complete before I could sit down and relax.  First on the list was the continuing process of painting the outside walls.  I think that, excluding the back of my neighbours garage, there are ten walls in total (seems like WAY more than that!) and I managed to paint the three largest or most complex last year (and he back of that same garage).  Unfortunately I then had wall insulation so those lovely white walls had 50-calibre bullet holes spread across them all winter.

I had painted the small garage-door wall last weekend and put one cost on the adjacent full height wall.  I had put a first coat on the front door wall on Saturday along with one on the wall that I never see… the back of the garage that only my neighbour has to look at.

So yesterday I second-coated those three walls to effectively finish the front of the house.  Seven down, three to go, but since the sun was now firmly set to BRIGHT and I had the painters version of snow-blindness, I moved to my next tasks… cutting the hedge and then cutting the grass.

Seemingly much, MUCH later in the day, I finally sank into the rare comfort of the recliner on the deck.  The sun was now low in the sky and I had ten or fifteen minutes to go before dinner emerged into the garden.

I lay there, reclining, looking up at wispy wind-blown clouds through polarised sunglasses and for a fleeting moment it was if I was laying in a warm bath, looking at the ceiling and thinking really most pleasant thoughts.

Posted on

Home via the North-West passage

Observant readers will have realised that the East coast to which I have referred in the last few posts is not in the UK.  Geographically it is probably closer to the Eastbourne that Captain Daren has sailed off so comprehensively.

As I boomeranged back to the UK from my time away, I managed to catch up with Kim in Dubai for a few days where, again, I engaged in no running at all.  This time the reason was more practical than sheer laziness… it was 85 degrees outside.

If that doesn’t sound too bad, then I should point out that this was the temperature at night… the days were around 101.  We managed one two-mile evening walk along the beach and one daytime walk of a similar distance where we periodically dived into any buildings with aircon (on both occasions we ended up in need of wringing out) and I kid you not… this is no place to run!

That’s not strictly true.  Christine, one of my LBS buddies who lives there, runs quite frequently… at 4.30 in the morning!  We did see one or two other runners, one of whom was risking more than sunstroke by running in the midday sun in what looked like a tennis dress.  Dubai is positively relaxed for an Arab state, but the showing of knees and shoulders by ladies is still not encouraged and this tennis skirt was skimpier still.

Russell, our excellent host was… well, a truly excellent host.  Where we had discovered the heat, the construction and the ubiquitous sand for ourselves, he showed us the cool, the finished and the green.

Of course, wafting us around in the leathered luxury of his air-conditioned Discovery was always going to frame the city in a different way to our earlier oven-mark-9 bipeding!

So, having not run for around a month, it was purely by chance that I returned to the UK too late to join with the guys in running a relay race along the South Downs yesterday… sorry guys!  To be fair, I did think of them periodically as I dodged the heat of the afternoon sun, although moral wasn’t the support that they apparently had in mind!

I watered the garden in the hope that the the semi-concrete surface would soften sufficiently to soak up some of the rain that had been forecast for last night… if I had known how torrential the rain was going to be I probably wouldn’t have bothered but the fickle weather is just one of the reasons that I’m glad to be home!

Posted on

Heavy weak

Sad to report that it’s my final week up here on the east coast. 

I have done so little exercise whilst eating SO much that I MUST now be heavy (yeah, right!), whilst a litle mental & physical tiredness mixed with more than a little conversational wine has left me feeling weak more than once!

I swung a couple of days off mid-week to drop down to stay with my friends Odette & Mike in their beautiful house and catch up with Morris Miselowski, who is a brilliant speaker on the subject of the future.

Yesterday was the wrap-up day on my project so it was full-on and after a late night it was good to get back down to the local beach for some coffee and fresh air this morning.  That’s the second time I’ve been on a bike in three weeks… the previous time to that being sometime around 20 years ago!

On our return to the house, we jumped in the car and headed off to a local village in the hills for a hearty breakfast and breathtaking view!

Still no running…

Posted on

More no running

I must have got a taste for not running last week as I managed to do a little more no running again this week.  There was unfortunately no cycling this weekend by way of exercise, but I did manage to get an upper body workout… otherwise known as driving a LandRover about 20km along a beach yesterday.

It all started on Saturday night when James, Kerry, Dani and I took off to the local National Park.  It was dark by the time we arrived but these guys really DO have all the gear and camp was set up, complete with a Bolognese bubbling away on the stove, within about half an hour.

Having tucked away a few beers and a HUGE delicious plate of spaghetti, my accommodation was a really smart & luxurious roof tent on the Landie… which was much easier to see the next morning.

After a superb breakfast of freshly-made pancakes, complete with honey, cinnamon, lemon & banana, we were joined by James & Kerry’s friends Tony & Anna (with their son Baz and Tony’s mother Rosie) in their Landie for a drive along soft inland sand tracks to the end of the island, where we had lunch on the beach.

With the tide turned, rising and pushing us up the beach into the softer sand, Tony invited me to drive his Landie back to terra firma.

With all my ice-driving and low traction limit-handling experience, I expected this to be straightforward… it was anything but.  The sand, with its varying textures, ruts and folds, pulls on the tyres in really strange ways and you are constantly fighting the steering wheel.  You also have to keep the wheels spinning quickly in order to get the car to float on the sand, otherwise it bogs down really rapidly.

Quite frankly, it’s HARD work… especially as we had about 20km to cover!  I have a new appreciation for the guys that do the Paris-Dakar race!

Having reached the exit from the beach, beating the tide by only a short time,  we needed to drive 7km back along sand tracks to pick up the trailer and James allowed me to drive both there and back in his Landie for comparison.

Despite being off-road, the trailer is hardly noticeable most of the time except when the going gets really tough.  Here you need to be super quick to slow down for big bumps or super-super quick to change down to keep the momentum going.

Once back on the tarmac, all that was left to do was to drop the trailer off and watch the sun set as we headed for home… 24 super-FUN-packed hours!