Month: February 2021
‘Race’ Review: Great Run Solo Hallowe’en Challenge 2020
I’ve mentioned before that, pre-pandemic, I was absolutely not a fan of the idea of virtual races. I miss real races a lot, and I’m fervently hoping that I’ll be able to race again later this year, even if it has to be in a COVID-secure manner.
However, I also miss medals, and doing virtual races and challenges means I still get medals during this strange time. Furthermore, it gives me extra running motivation, which can never be underestimated, especially in the colder months.
Since summer 2020, with all Great Run events cancelled or postponed, one of the things the Great Run company has been organising is a series of accumulator challenges, starting with the first Great Run Solo challenge over the summer and then monthly since October 2020. Accumulator challenges involve aiming to run (or sometimes walk / cycle / swim) a particular distance or number of runs over the course of a longer period, rather than all in one go.
October’s Great Run Solo accumulator was Hallowe’en-themed – and I LOVE Hallowe’en, so I thought I might as well give it a go, especially as it meant I would get a Hallowe’en medal at the end!
The option was there to log my runs on the Great Run website, but I found it much easier just to log them on Garmin Connect and Strava as usual and then confirm the total mileage / number of runs on the website at the end of the month. In order to finish the challenge, you had to complete fifteen runs, and if your mileage was over a certain amount then you could download a certificate. There were three levels of certificate to aim for, and I think I managed the middle one. Not bad considering I needed a break after the Virtual London Marathon!
I didn’t bother ordering the t-shirt as I have plenty, but I was really excited for the medal to arrive…
It glows in the dark (or bits of it do, anyway), which will be interesting when I finally finish putting up the medal display on our bedroom wall!
This challenge set the pattern for the Great Run company’s monthly accumulators. I’ve not been doing them every month, but the Hallowe’en one wasn’t the last. More on that next week!
Saturday ’80s Photo: The Patiently Waiting Wardrobe
Like most people, I’ve had no reason to get dressed up for anything over the course of the last year. I’ve been living in a uniform of leggings and jumpers for months and months now.
While this means my ’80s vintage jumper collection is seeing a lot of wear – and that I’ve recently amassed a fairly considerable quantity of brightly coloured modern-day leggings – there are other parts of my wardrobe that must be feeling a bit neglected at the moment. I put all of my jeans in a storage box the other day because I’ve simply not worn them since last March. As for my ’80s vintage dresses… well…
I love these dresses but I’ve probably not worn them since summer 2019. They belong to a world where summer events regularly take place, and at the moment that world might as well be a fantasy.
It’ll come true again some day, though, and the nice thing about wearing vintage is that it doesn’t go out of style (because technically it already has been out of style for decades), so I know that when those summer barbecues and weddings and the like return, this part of my wardrobe will see the light of day again.
The long march out of winter
I am really glad it’s February now.
I don’t usually say that. I normally find February to be a fairly dismal month – there’s still no end in sight to the cold winter weather, and by now I’m a lot more fed up of it than I was at the start of January. It’s also still a long time before anything exciting or fun will happen in the year. Race season normally starts in March at the earliest, Easter break usually isn’t till April, and it’s generally May before the weather gets properly nice and Geth and I start going on all our small summer mini-breaks.
Of course, this year is different in many ways. All the races and gigs and trips we’ve got booked for the spring and summer – all holdovers from the cancelled year that was 2020 – are still up in the air. As ever with this pandemic, massive amounts of conflicting information and predictions are flying around, and it’s just not possible to make plans. I’ll be delighted if things are normal enough by the summer that I can sit or stand at a concert with thousands of other people, but I can’t see it happening. Races might be a different matter, as it’s easier to make them COVID-secure, but I still don’t see the ones I’ve got booked for late spring going ahead.
Then there’s the weather. What kept me fairly cheerful through lockdown 1 last spring – other than the novelty of it – was the fact that we were having the most glorious spring we’d had for years, and every day I was able to go out and run in the warm sunshine, with beautiful cherry-blossom trees everywhere I went. Lockdown 3, in contrast, has been BLEAK. The weather has been constant ice, snow and sleet, meaning that I’ve had to alternate between tedious treadmill runs and grim, slippery, wet runs outside (neither of which are conducive to speed training in the slightest).
As such, while I don’t expect things to change much in February – the weather, certainly, is showing no signs of becoming less awful – it does mean that we’re one month closer to warmer weather, and hopefully looser restrictions, even if things won’t quite return to normal this year in the way that we would like.
On a day-to-day basis, things are trucking on. I’ve had a fairly steady trickle of day job work over the last couple of weeks, and having my new daily schedule has meant that I’ve also been able to fit in a decent amount of time on my own projects. I’ve also been enjoying my evening downtime and making a lot of progress in my videogames. I’m nearly finished with Bravely Second, which should mean I’ll have a couple of weeks’ break from the series to make some more progress on Final Fantasy I before Bravely Default II comes out (already pre-ordered!). Following BDII I may then spend a bit of time playing non-JRPGs as there are quite a lot on my to-play list. I did this last summer (many happy hours spent on the armchair in the living room playing adventure games on the big screen) and am keen to repeat the experience.
There’s also another Adventuron jam coming up this month, so that will doubtless be a fun project for my spare hours!
On the whole, I’m not short of ways to spend my time. I just wish this particular chapter of life didn’t feel so endless at the moment.
This week’s earworm playlists:
Saturday
Nintendo 3DS eShop – ‘Main Theme’
Duran Duran – ‘Five Years’
Soft Cell – ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’
Sunday
The Bangles – ‘Hazy Shade Of Winter’
Duran Duran – ‘Save A Prayer’
Monday
Revo – ‘Fighting To The End’
The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar – ‘Pray For Me’
Chuck Berry – ‘You Never Can Tell’
Ed Sheeran – ‘Don’t’
Men Without Hats – ‘Safety Dance’
Soft Cell – ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’
Tuesday
Men Without Hats – ‘Safety Dance’
Nintendo 3DS eShop – ‘Main Theme’
Soft Cell – ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’
Bob Marley & The Wailers – ‘Three Little Birds’
Wednesday
Bob Marley & The Wailers – ‘Three Little Birds’
Queen – ‘Flash’
Sebastian Gampl and Tommy Reeve – ‘Under Control’
Thursday
Yuzo Koshiro – ‘Labyrinth I: Emerald Grove’
Bob Marley & The Wailers – ‘Three Little Birds’
Beyoncé – ‘If I Were A Boy’
Elton John – ‘Step Into Christmas’
Men Without Hats – ‘Safety Dance’
Blondie – ‘One Way Or Another’
Friday
The Bangles – ‘Hazy Shade Of Winter’
Phone Box Thursday: The Wrong Phone Box #4: Doctor Who, ‘The War Machines’ (1966)
It’s the final phone box from ‘The War Machines’!
This box features fairly prominently in episode four, as it’s right next to the location where the Doctor and his allies are setting a trap for a War Machine.
The Doctor Who Locations entry places this phone box in Cornwall Gardens Walk – which I could have figured out for myself in this instance seeing as the street signs are displayed fairly prominently in the episode!
Here’s the Street View image: 51°49’66.6″N, 0°18’89.6″W. The phone box is gone – there must have been thousands of K2 boxes in London originally as there are still lots in existence even after so many were removed! However, the distinctive garage door on the left is still intact, as is the lamppost behind which the phone box originally stood.
A rare sighting of the Doctor in front of a non-police phone box!
We’ll move onto a new Doctor Who story next week.
Event Review: Marian Keyes in conversation with Laura Jane Williams, Words Weekend 2019, 7th December 2019
It’s the last event review from 2019. So from this point on I will only be a year behind with the reviews!
I booked to see this Marian Keyes talk at the Sage Gateshead as soon as I heard about it. I’ve always enjoyed Marian’s appearances on Strictly: It Takes Two, but I wasn’t familiar with her work. However, when I was newly sober at the start of 2019 and exploring a lot of quit lit (sobriety-related books), I kept coming across recommendations for her novels, and was interested to find out that Marian is many years sober herself. As such, I thought it would be good to go along to the Sage and hear her story!
Marian is a lively speaker and talked a lot about her early life, sobriety and how she started writing her books. This was obviously of interest to me as a sober writer, but Geth really enjoyed the talk too – it was warm and funny and very relatable.
I was surprised not to have heard about Words Weekend up until that point – despite being on Sage Gateshead’s mailing list since shortly after I moved to Newcastle in 2015! However, it turns out that it was a brand new festival, and one that moves around, as it was scheduled to take place in Salford in 2020. Hopefully they’ll be able to get going again once the pandemic is over.
Meanwhile, I’ve now got a few of Marian’s books on my to-read list. Rachel’s Holiday looks like a good place to start!
2019 Pizzas #26: Chicago Town Tomato Stuffed Crust Takeaway Loaded Cheese
If I could digress with regards to a 2021 pizza for a minute: recently I have been enjoying Chicago Town Deep Pan Four Cheese mini pizzas for brunch, as I am intermittent fasting again. I break my fast at 2pm and a mini pizza feels like a nice substantial thing to eat at that point. It has the same delicious tomato sauce as this 2019 example, which was a much larger pizza with a few more bells and whistles.
This pizza didn’t come with any vegetable toppings, so I put peppers on before it went in the oven, like I often do with plainer margherita-type styles.
What was great about this one was that the delicious tomato sauce is contained in the stuffed crust as well as in the topping! I usually find cheese stuffed crust to be a bit heavy, and so this was a much nicer alternative.
I’m not eating that many large oven pizzas at the moment (need to get rid of that lockdown weight first!) but I will probably go hunting for this pizza again at some point.