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Monday 5 April 2010

Running with stile

It has taken me a lot longer to get back on the site than I imagined. I ran to Peel and back along the old railway track, something that I have never done before. Although I have run and walked over sections, the last time I travelled over the whole length was a steam train about 45 years ago!

Its been very windy today and I could have sworn that I was running into the wind most of the outward journey but obviously not so because it was really difficult on the way back. Add in the mud and the gates to negotiate and I found that the 22 miles was more than I could chew and I was walking towards the end. At least I got back in one piece and I never seem to learn from my mistakes.

A few years ago I put myself out for months when I fell off a gate in Maughold and I got so fed up with opening and shutting the gates at the stiles today I decided to start climbing over them. Big mistake as I fell off luckily with no more than a few bruises and a wounded pride.

I was so knackered afterwards that I was falling asleep whilst I was eating. So I haven't really achieved much although I have been taking some time to review the four videos that I have made in the past couple of days.

Quite apart from the light hearted approach I took to the music, the men's race on Peel Hill comes out a lot better for using a less compressed file format (avi). When I first started using YouTube you were restricted to films of 10 minutes (which is unchanged) and 100MB in size. Now you can make films up to 2gb. This one, even for 3 minutes, was 680MB which took ages to upload and will consume hard disk space quickly but it does make a huge difference to the clarity of the film with the south of the Isle of Man as a backdrop.

The thing I noticed on the Manx Mountain Marathon film at the Black Hut was the shaky film. That was because I was shivering and couldn't hold the video camera still.

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