Its more fun with alcohol

If I had known how many hours I would have spent on the website this weekend I doubt if I would have started!

I only just made it in time for the hill race as I had been busy in the morning cleaning one of our holiday properties. Marie normally cleans the apartment adjoining our house when we have a change of tenant but she has not been well so I took it on.

I intended to film from the same position as last year but I saw Steve Partington there so I moved to plan B. I tried to get enough video "in the can" of the runners going up the path before the sharp turn off (which I achieved) and then trying to get into position to catch them with Tynwald Hill in the background for some stills. I failed hopelessly with this task (I probably had the wrong lens) and I only used two of thirty seven and even one of these was totally out of focus.

The competition was good with Simon Skillicorn running well and, also as usual, being put under pressure from Tom Cringle. But sport has to be a mixture of serious endeavour and fun and so it added to the event to catch Simon (and several others) struggling on the way down. I mentioned beforehand that sometimes I wondered if the effort of producing videos justified the time but this one seemed to be well received - thanks for the feedback.

I vowed not to bother with video at the walks this morning though but after clicking 200 odd times I got out the video for the finish. It was a beautiful morning but there was too much sunshine so I had to take all the film from the same direction which didn't make it too exciting.

David Griffiths reminded me just in time that Keith Gerrard's race was on BBC interactive at 12.20 and I just managed to get home for this at the same time as putting the vegetables on to boil (that's another story).

Great excitement for Keith's race. His achievements are documented elsewhere but, suffice to say, they make an athlete of the year poll a bit meaningless.

But I couldn't resist another challenge for the website and so, when I realised how well he was going to do, I wanted to find a way of adding some of the film to the website. For those of you with Sky+, you will know that you can't record onto the hard disk on the Sky+ player from BBC interactive but it was Marie who came to the rescue. We "pump" the Sky channel around the house and have a very old Video combo in the kitchen and she said "why don't you just put the video on". Job done. Low tech solution!

So after publishing the photos and editing the winter league video this afternoon, I set about playing the video back through an adaptor and onto the hard disk of my PC (I thought I had got away from that when I bought a video with a hard disk). The video editing is not as professional as the BBC but I hope that it allows a few more people to get a little more enjoyment for their licence fees.

I spent five months from April to September without any alcohol and after a poor run in the second round of the cross country I decided it was time to forgo one of life's pleasures again. Last night, however, we were given some free wine from our regular Chinese takeaway. Despite my enjoyment of the run yesterday I was totally frustrated with not being able to train through injury, and so I decided "what the heck" I may as well enjoy a couple (I'm not so good with statistics after all!).

Tonight I prepared about half our Christmas cards and was ready for another glass or two. I've just watched my video from yesterday and it is quite funny watching some of you (apparently) descending to the rhythm of the music. I'm sure that it wasn't that funny before I had the wine. What a great weekend for local athletics.

I have some breathing space before providing some fringe coverage of the MWR although I have quite a few more things planned for the front page before then.