The variety of the Isle of Man weather

I was pretty happy yesterday morning having completed a very long training session by 10 am in excellent weather conditions on Douglas Promenade. I thought that the wind speed increased a little towards the end but that fits in with a joke within our training group that the wind always gets worse (the reality usually is that you are less well able to deal with it as you tire).

As it was one of the last Saturdays until October that Marie and I will both be free from our cleaning duties at our two holiday properties, I suggested that we made the most of the good weather and she should walk to the top of Snaefell with me in the afternoon when I did my filming of the fell race. I did, however, suggest that she took a warm coat as even on a warm day it can be chilly up there.

I did not expect what we encountered. It was misty, the wind was so strong that we could hardly stand up and I don't know how the runners coped with it.

When I am editing the videos for YouTube, one of the decisions I have to make it whether to leave any of the background sound on when I add the music. Sometimes it can add something to the overall effect; sometimes it can be very repetitive to hear encouragement for the same athletes all the way through.

I had no choice yesterday as the unedited clip above shows. The sound was totally dominated by the wind which even hid the fact that I said "here comes Tom" when in fact it was Simon arriving first. You can also see one of my wobbles as I almost got blown over.

There was a great entry of 50 yesterday presumably influenced by the weather in Peel / Douglas / Ramsey / Port St Mary etc in the morning (everyone competed with each other to tell the other how splendid the weather had been in their part of the Island) rather than the weather forecast, which had predicted what there was.

Please forgive me for not filming everyone at the top of Snaefell - I had to get down to the warmer weather before I passed out! I was only able to get a few pictures on my SLR camera before that stopped working in the damp conditions and I was very relieved when it worked again later in the day.