Ditto

Having been a zombie yesterday, despite a lovely mountain walk with Robbie, with reference to the previous post I did regret having two early morning weekend runs preceded by two very late nights.

But I'm about to go there again.

I've spent most of the evening preparing the third of this year's special Parish Walk features (published later tomorrow I hope) and, for a bit of variety, added a few Greeba Fell Race photos to the MA website front page.

I've just remembered that I promised to write a letter and get it in the post tonight so I'll have to do that at 5.30 when I get up. I've got several early morning ahead of me this week, not all for training.

I'm going to pay for this

An evening out and I'm later than ever updating the website.

My long run is only a few hours away and I am going to regret being so late.

But it was worth it just to spend a few minutes with Gordie Brew, the longest serving club chairman in the British Isles with more than 30 years in charge.

I used to go and watch Michael United as a child, sometimes as their only supporter, when Gordie played in goals. I used to see the players troop out of the Mitre before the match but didn't know the full story. Like the time Gordie had to get one his team mates to kick the ball over the hedge so that he could also go over the hedge for more than to get the ball back!

The wrong side of midnight again

This seems to have been a habit this week but I seem to have been very late updating the website.

There are five clubs on the Isle of Man and the Isle of Man Veteran Athletes Club organise the least events but three of them have been launched in the past few days. And although there of fewer of them, they are all long distance models requiring hundreds of man hours to organise and hundreds of miles to train for.

So I thought they were worthy of the front page treatment to help get them kick started.

And one of my excuses for being late tonight was that I entered of the aforesaid events - I'll have my camera with me for the End to End Walk.

Not listening to my body

A couple of hours ago I didn't think I had much chance of achieving this evening's goals for the website. I am pleased to say that I put my endurance experience to good effect and finished both.

The first is there to see and I am delighted to profile Kevin Deakes. I love almost all forms of athletes but of course the things that you can relate to best are those that you are doing yourself. I am an over 50 long distance runner and I thought I had set some half decent marks in the past four years but Kevin came along out of the blue to set the Manx record. I respect that.

At the other end of the age range, the Isle of Man sent a team to the North West Counties Sportshall athletics at the weekend and today I received a 100 or so photos from Trevor Christian, taken by Kerry Mackey. I've uploaded these to a website album and these will be available to view sometime tomorrow morning (well, its actually this morning now).

My day started at 5.30 and I was running by 6 am, the first time this winter I have done one of my early starts. But I didn't go as far as planned as I am still pretty unfit and when I started to slow I listened to my body and stopped half way.

If I had listened to my body tonight I would have gone to bed a few hours ago and not completed the things that we enjoy sharing.

The website will only ever be a means to an end and the day ends for me with a reflection that I am not sure I have allowed myself before but all four of our family ran today. Marie managed to jog a couple of miles for the first time for some time, Robbie continued his latest obsession of running a mile twice day at the NSC and Ben tells me that he is finally over a knee injury and ran the same distance as me in Hull today - five miles.

Oh *hit, I have just remembered my promise to have a shave today. My computer may be thrown out the window tomorrow morning!

New website records

I've just been looking at the website stats to see that the average number of visitors for the 30 day ending yesterday was 280 compared to 224 last year and 226 the year before.

402 was the highest on 2 January and exactly half that number (but still a lot more than used to visit on a quiet day) hit the site last Saturday.

By popular demand

Going backwards

I've just answered a few of my recent emails but I am working backwards so there is a long way to go.

Diversity is the word.

Life before email and websites

I'm in trouble again for being too late on my computer and the number of un-replied emails has gone up dramatically today. There used to be time for getting outside and doing things....like borrowing a kids bike for Laa Columb Killey in 1985.

The joys of archiving

My London Marathon training ground to a halt again this weekend after training every day since 27 December. On Friday afternoon I finally had a tooth extracted that  has been troubling me since the last London Marathon and I wanted to avoid the problem that the island's most famous sportsman encountered after dental treatment.

So my volume of scanning old photographs has increased, although most of them are personal rather than sporting.

But this morning a stumbled upon a CD of photos that I think was from 2000. It was taken on my last camera before I went digital and there are a batch of photos from a cross country race. I think it is at Poulson Park in Castletown. Somebody else must have used my camera as I am on one of the photos. The only one I remember is of Andy Fox that I have used in the past - perhaps I gave the prints away of Steve Partington, Keith Callister, Chris Quine, Tony Rowley etc.

Anyway for now, here is one of Gianni Epifani.

All of these photos will eventually appear on a new photo website I am setting up which has been  using  most of the bandwidth on our internet connection.

YouTube classic

I was just about to read something meaningful, thought I was clicking on a shortcut to my YouTube channel when I hit a bookmark to one of my all time favourites. If you've got three minutes of spare time this will make you laugh.

The Cannells

I've been doing three things at once tonight but I've managed to scan a couple of hundred of my old family photos as I try to convert them to digital format before discarding the hard copies, as I did with my athletics collection a few years ago.

But I have found a few athletics ones among them (my idea of a family day out!) and this one was interesting to me.

Not only does it show John Cannell about to win the End to End Walk for the first time but it also includes the late Geoff Cannell reporting for Manx Radio.

Cleaning up

After a great year our holiday cottage has been empty for 10 weeks, the longest since we bought it in 1999 I think. But we've taken a two month booking at short notice and I had to finish the cleaning I started 10 weeks ago ready for someone to move it tomorrow.

So I have been away from my computer for most of tonight and the first priority was to deal with yet another booking for the summer. We had started a little slower than normal and when we took a booking late on Thursday evening I said we needed a booking a day for the next week to transform things. I should have put a bet on it. That is exactly what has happened!

Just been blogging on the PW site too. 212 entries there now.

Inbox out of time

I have had a lot of emails from all sorts of places recently but I needed to get a few other things done before I get back to them.

Just completed the piece on the Western AC 30th anniversary. Some people look more than 20 years younger 20 years ago!

Website is the winner

A year ago I spent two days at the Autosport show with Robbie at the NEC in Birmingham. And when I say two days, I mean going in as soon as the show opens and not leaving until they kick you out - as is demonstrated when Robbie was photographed with an F1 Maclaren when the rest of the crowds had gone home!

Although I'm sorry that Robbie wasn't able to make it this year, although I have a reasonable interest in motor sport, I was happier taking in the winter league walk, running a silly number of miles and working on the next big website project.

Azores time

I noticed some time ago (no pun intended) that the clock on the forum has been an hour out since the clocks went back at the end of October.

the setting was correct at GMT so I have had to fiddle it by setting it to Azores time to get it right. Trouble is, I might need to re-set it again at the end of March.

Sorry I missed the winner

I tried not to take too much video of the Up & Running Winter League Walks today to reduce the editing time - and it worked. I have just published a four minute video.

But I did intend to film the winner! The lap scoring was a massive job for the officials today with such a big field and we didn't realise that it was the winner finishing. Sorry.

27 days to get a card from Devon

We received a Christmas card from Chris and Fi Maddocks (above) yesterday posted on 16 December.

It wouldn't be so bad but Chris is a postman....and also the British record holder for the 50km walk. I reckon he could have walked all the way from Devon quicker than it took the Royal Mail to deliver it!

I've often tried to persuade the five times Olympic walker to try the Parish Walk but he has found another pretty unconvincing excuse this year - and its not delivering a letter to the Isle of Man!

2 each

This  has been been posted to the wrong blog but who cares! A chance for others to catch up on the Parish Walk!


There are now 37 previous finishers entered with 75 finishes between them:

	First entered	Number of finishes	PB
John Cannell	1962	8	15:59:33
Jock Waddington	2004	6	15:18:06
David Whorrall	1997	6	22:46:47
Billy McCoubrey	2003	5	21:16:25
Richard Spenceley	2007	4	16:51:34
Simon Starkey	1996	3	18:29:46
Jeff Black	1974	3	21:36:03
Oliver Browne	2009	2	19:49:23
Tony Dugdale	2007	2	20:26:45
Robbie Breadner	2002	2	20:26:45
Bob Corrin	2006	2	20:34:44
Angela Martin	2005	2	20:38:35
Paul Morgans	1996	2	20:50:49
Chris Moore	2009	2	21:57:00
Carol Mccoubrey	2000	2	22:55:31
Paul Wheeldon	2009	2	23:15:55
Amanda Dougherty	2007	2	23:23:47
Dave Mackey	2007	1	18:03:17
David Walker	2010	1	18:54:29
Carl Senogles	2008	1	20:16:30
Karen Lawrie	1996	1	21:41:47
Keith Green	1999	1	21:50:35
Fred Baker	2002	1	21:56:04
Gustav Rober	2008	1	21:57:00
Janette Morgan	2010	1	21:57:23
Nigel Maddocks	2009	1	22:16:56
Kuba Szymanski	2004	1	22:33:39
Jane Wolstencroft	2003	1	22:53:45
Lynn Mccoubrey	2007	1	22:55:31
Geraldine Cannon	2009	1	22:56:10
Anne Dooley	2009	1	23:00:25
Nicholas Bradley	2007	1	23:02:43
James Betteridge	2007	1	23:27:30
Charlie Turner	2006	1	23:28:45
Jim Caley	2004	1	23:51:23
Richard Hird	2003	1	22:57:23
Philip Knop	2002	1	21:54:55

Manx Harriers Open meeting entries open

So I have updated the front page links. Get your entry in now - don't leave it too late.

I've also been through the 4 videos from the Lancs Cross Country adding descriptions and tags - and moving the location from the default in the USA to Blackburn!

All done

I've got the final film published at the second attempt. Some good shots from David.

I've got a very fast internet connection tonight (about 13.5Mps) and yet I can only play the film back very slowly so it must be at the YouTube end.

I am about an hour late for what I have to do next!

Third video

I've been working on and off on the third cross country video this morning.

I made it shorter than the second (just the senior women) and tried one of the two songs that I used last night but it failed. Hopefully the second one will work and and it will be online soon. If I don't get a chance to embed it try the YouTube link on the right of the home page.

Final word

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=murraylambden#p/u/0/nlXXQG9uHUk

The original music still seems to play by linking rather than embedding!

Audio disabled

Its the first time for a while but YouTube have disabled the audio from the film I have just published. The problem is there were two tracks and I don't know which one is the offending one not permitted for copyright reasons. I haven't got time to publish over and over on a trial and error basis and so I have used one of YouTube's royalty free replacements.

Its one of the reasons that I often go for a single audio track so that it is easy to replace if the music is not in the permitted category.

Letters to the paper

I seem to have been here before - I'm within a few minutes of the time last night when I was uploading video of the Lancashire Cross Country. Number 2 is on its way now.

I would have been sooner only my favourite uncle called to see us just when I was about to start. Its fairly safe to say that he is my favourite as I only have I but he is a great guy and everything stops when he calls.

"Did you see my letter in the paper?" was one of his questions. Despite being an avid newspaper reader I had missed it and quickly went to retrieve the Examiner from the recycling bin where I had put it just a few minutes earlier. My embarrassment increased when I discovered that it had been published on the reverse side of something I had cut out.

Eventually I was able to read his views on wind powered energy - or at least where the windmills may be sited.

I also discovered that he had been watching the new year's day fell race and, although he did not confirm it, I suspect I know where that anonymous donation came from.

The video is 70% uploaded now.

Kenyon Crowe, (right) our visitor tonight with brother John and sister Gwelda (the writer's mum) in the last photo taken together in 2002.

First Lancs Cross Country video

I've just produced the first video using  David's film and it is just whizzing its way to California or wherever.

I can't retire without finishing 28th

I've been quite sad about not attending to the Lancashire Championships tomorrow.

I went on the first trip in 1993 and, with the exception of the following two years, I have been every year since. I made two of those trips as a spectator (once with crutches) and on another occasion I only made it to the first corner due to an injury. I therefore have 12 finishes (the same as Gianni Epifani) but three less than the great Andy Fox, who has been the organiser throughout this long period.

I have finished 25th, 26th, 27th, 29th, 30th (twice) and 31st but unless I did in 1997 when I can't find my position, I have never finished 28th. So I'll have to go back next year and try!

Santa dash

I hope that all the Santas still retained their enthusiasm for the race today, as Manx Radio stated in advance of them appearing!

Marie took one of my cameras to work with her today in the hope of popping out to see the runners during her lunch break. So, ho ho ho - I might have some photos tonight.

Fireman's callout

I'm running a little late tonight after going to watch the Ramsey Fireman's runs. For only the second time in the history of the event there was a call out when the event was scheduled at which the fireman help to marshal. Northern AC were forced to delay the start.

I have a short video in production now - hopefully it will be online in about 20 minutes.

I think there were 37 in the long run and 25 in the short. I don't have any results but I believe that the winner was 8 minutes ahead!

Was I the first to train in 2011?

Although we didn't go out on New Year's Eve, I still stayed up until nearly 1.30 on New Years Day and so five hours sleep was not a lot to set off on a 12 mile run around the Marine Drive, the Promenades and Summerhill at   7 am.

Did anyone else start their 2011 training any earlier? I met Mark Clague running in the opposite direction at 8.15 - for those that know Mark they will guess where he was! "At least someone else is mad" was his shout to me!

There were several times during the night when I was tempted to switch off my alarm. But running around the Marine Drive at daybreak in 2011 reminds me that we still leave in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Come on Paul

Whilst I was sitting on the grass by the river yesterday, taking photos and video, I couldn't get over the fact that everyone seemed to be supporting Paul.

There were  actually 8 Pauls in the race - twice as many as any other name!

 Cawley
 Clarke
 Jackson
 Killey
 Kneen
 Sheard
 Sykes
 Trees

Happy New Year

My natural inclination is to say that I am going to do bigger and better things on the website this year - my desire is not too!

But if that was a New Year's resolution then it didn't last long. I came straight back from the fell race and just about finished off the photos and videos by the time our friends arrived at 7.30 only to start tinkering again after they left at 10. First job this morning....and so.

In due course I will probably comment on about half of the things I have been meaning to write about over the past couple of weeks, forget the other half and then spend loads of time on things I have not even thought about yet!