Decent photo

Every year I produce a couple of calendars. One is for my mother-in-law and it features photos of family and friends over the previous 12 months and the other, with a print run of single figures, is of some of my best local scenes. I used one of Photobox's 2 for the price of 1 offers last week to get past this stress point a little earlier than normal but I was short of good Manx scenes from the past year.

Among my collection of cameras in my bag yesterday at the Manx Mountain Marathon was my second ever digital camera, my HP945 of 2004 vintage. Its the best I've had for long range shots and I put it to good use, not for the runners but for my 2014 calendar. The above (double click for detail) will be in.

London Marathon Guide

I wonder if I achieved a record in the time it has taken to receive the London Marathon guide and putting it in the recycling bin? The London Marathon is a wonderful event but for those that have done it so many times a single letter setting out the information might be useful.

You're in; you'll hear from us again in March. You must register ExCel between Wednesday and Saturday before the event; go our website for everything else. At least they don't tell you not to print the email unless you really need to - they send you 148 pages of print and half a dozen "drop outs" instead!

Second video uploading

The second video of the Manx Mountain Marathon was cut shorter than I expected so I changed the soundtrack from what I had intended last night. Its uploading now.

I've enjoyed today but (although not as long as some people's day) I am glad that I've got to the end of the three long distance events in four weeks. It has been very time consuming to cover the End to End Mountain Bike race, the End to End Walk and the Manx Mountain Marathon.

Thanks to Richie

Ace race organiser Richie Stevenson has just texted the top three in both classes which I have just published.

I shouldn't be laughing

I was gutted for Nigel Armstrong in the Manx Mountain Marathon today. He was in second place when he took a tumble and the photo above is how his day ended - with five stitches and a rescue from the Civil Defence.

The reason I had to laugh was that he just brought his photos around on an SD card and he followed me up the stairs so that I could copy them. I then followed him down the stairs and to his parent's car - I've known 90 year olds with more mobility - and I wasn't much better.

As always, Nigel is capable of putting things in perspective and he left with a smile, especially when he witnessed a rare event - his team leading a football match!

Recharging batteries

Bit of a long day today to ensure that I get tomorrow off to take photos of the Manx Mountain Marathon. Did an hour of cottage cleaning on the way to the day job and finished it off tonight. I saw Simon Skillicorn running just after 7.30 and again at 5.30 so a long day for him too.

We've been chilling out at home over a bottle of wine later tonight and listening to a wide variety of music. Something completely different for the soundtrack on North Barrule tomorrow, and I mean different.

Only just remembered to charge the full set of batteries up for all the cameras to avoid the problem I had at the End to End Mountain Bike Challenge.

Kate Bush has just been dropped from the second soundtrack tomorrow. Nice rocky one to balance the first choice.

Having a laugh with the dentist

Yesterday morning I hadn't quite decided what I was going to do on the manxathletics.com website when Cheryl Pryke emailed me with the news of the Cross Country announcement. It fitted in well to publicise the three year sponsorship by Microgaming.

I had a little more time today because I was due at the dentist, just around the corner from our house at 9 am, so I would be later leaving the house than normal. I ended up doing something non website related and so didn't update the site (or blog).

Not much fun at the dentist as I have to go back next week for another appointment. But I still had a laugh with the dentist, the other one. Nigel Armstrong took me to the Stewart Francis concert tonight very funny.

Nigel shouldn't be laughing as much next time I see him. I'm hoping to be on the top of North Barrule on my own for the Manx Mountain Marathon on Saturday and then back out with Robbie later on the day.

Bodywork outlasts working body

I learned to drive when I was about 13 at the front of our family house in Kirk Michael. At the same age I entered my first out of school athletics event (other than country sports) covering 8 miles in the TT Relay Walk.  Reflecting on my 42 years of competition whilst on holiday recently I realised just how much my driving during those years had mirrored my athletics.

Father's company car (Triumph 1300) gets some extra mileage from a 15 year old driver

I passed my driving test within three months of my 16^th birthday (you could and still can learn to drive at 16 in the Isle of Man) and I am not proud of some of the reckless things I did behind the wheel of my parent’s car soon after. I was also reckless in sport entering long distance events and walking 39.5 miles when I was 17 and worse, damaging my back doing unsupervised weightlifting at school.

During my student days I always assumed that a car would be available to me when I returned home (I could buy a car later) and without any long term plans as an athlete I entered which ever races I felt like always assuming that I  would plan and train when I chose to.

The family Hillman Superminx is used to used as a taxi with a 19 year old driver at the TT relay walk 

I bought my first car in 1979 and it looked much better on the outside than it was under the bonnet. What looked to a high performance car drained my bank account with repair bills and with a mortgage to pay the following year the car soon went.  I just about turned my body into a high performing athlete for a year or two before the rust under the surface emerged as the intensive training exposed the back injury incurred at school.

"Go faster" headlights on the only car I have ever owned (Vauxhall Chevette) driven by my friends during the 1980 Peel to Douglas Walk 

So, only four years after I started serious training and bought a car I had retired and was hitching lifts. I met my wife (who had a car) and we vowed that we would manage with one between us.  As the training miles shrunk (mainly running around Nobles Park) the car driving was also restricted with child seats being added.

By the time we bought a new car, the mileage was low as I was working in Douglas and my training miles were also at their lowest as I worked silly hours in the office and did silly things on committees when out of the office. My running mileage faded even further.

There was a rare divergence between car and body in 1995 when I decided to run a one off marathon at London and although the car was going fine my body gave up. Marathons are addictive and I have been trying to get one right ever since.

In 1999 we finally got a second car. For a long time the car was only being used two or three times a week which is why it lasted so long.  I was just recovering from a stress fracture and so my running was also low again and this extended my running career.

Both cars are in Marie's name - our first new one (Vauxhall Astra) lasted 11 years. The second hand Clio appeared in 1999 and has outlasted the driver!

By 2007 the first bits of rust were showing on the car just as my breathing began to fade and I developed exercise induced asthma. Soon after I started using the car every day when I began working in the south of the island. Soon after I started running every day in a “make or break effort” to overcome my breathing problems.

Every year I ignored the signs that said the car couldn’t last for ever.  Training daily for the first time for 25 years brought my best age related running performances and for a time the pains were ignored. My body made more and more strange noises and clicks and grinding became the norm but like the car it rarely failed completely.

The car has started to misfire but the body has given up first.

The weekend after the “No Rest for the Wicked” series I got a sharp pain around my hips. Instead of taking myself off the road or at least pulling into a garage I continued on my way to the Amsterdam and London Marathons. The twinges I have been getting in my knee for the last four years were coming hourly instead of daily.

When I went on holiday I was in pain from knee and hips after driving for more than 45 minutes. Like most runners I thought it couldn’t be the cause of my knee and hip pains because I was fine when I was training it was only afterwards that the pain came.

Sometimes you remember that a car has a reverse gear too. I took a few steps back, After running every day since the London Marathon and only missing 10 days in 17 months, I saw the light.

There is to be no Amsterdam Marathon; there is to be no London Marathon; there will be no more long runs. Although I have been getting medical advice it’s me who has to decide that the time has come to move off the road. I’ve been off it for 15 days now.  I’m not looking for or expecting fixes.

Borderline - a new Toyota Avensis on the English/Scottish border in 2003. Its still on the road despite a near write off a couple of years ago. 

Only a few carefully run cars go right around the clock; only a few carefully run bodies manage to go longer than 40 years.

There are off course a few classic cars that are taken out of the garage to make occasional short runs. That is my aim from now.

Final call from Eammon

Jon Wild fourth on the road with Robbie Callister close behind.

Simon Briggs and Noel Ash were next with Michael Bonney passing as we spoke.

Another phone call from Eammon

(subject to official confirmation), Steven Harvey is second and Dave Walker third.

Janice Quirk (fourth overall) returns to win the women's race

End to End almost at an end

Just had a call from Eammon Harkin who lives at, and is providing a feeding station at, the Howe.

Mike Readshaw is all on his way and looks to heading for a finish time of about 7 hours.

Only part of End to End

For the past four years I have made it to Bride (or close to it on one occasion) to take photos and video of the End to End Walk and the year before that the first stop was Lhen.

I'm pleased to be taking Robbie with me today for the first time for a while which means that I will be a little later (probably Ballaugh Cronk area) but its just as well as I am not used to seeing this part of the day.

 

Just been uploading photos from Graham Crowe's 60th birthday party. Although they are password protected I thought I would put at least one in the public domain - Graham modelling some old clothes etc and he put on his cricket cap. Very nice!

Who?

I was probably the only person in the audience at Ainsley Harriott's demonstration who had never watched one of his shows and there I was on the front row.

Beautiful weather for the Isle of Man Food and Drink Festival and loads of photos here including someone who took part in the End to End Mountain Bike Challenge, someone who is walking in the End to End Walk tomorrow and someone who is running in the Manx Mountain Marathon on Saturday (but not with his baby on his back)!.

Photos here:

http://isleofman.in/manxfood

An oops moment

I managed one of my today up sessions at lunchtime today when I remove recent features and put them onto a separate page. I'm never sure whether it is worth keeping everything but I do my best.

I discovered that as I had published a little promo for the Veterans Handicap race over my breakfast cereal this morning I had said that it was less than four months away. Well that was true - but it is also less than four weeks away!

Back to the 60s again

Apologies to anyone waiting for an email reply during the past few days.

I put in a 14 hour day yesterday when I had cottage cleaning after the day job. Tonight it was completing a tax return for an elderly person. An extra task tonight was seeking out some old photos for a 60s night on Saturday. Here is one of them:

Which one is 60 next week?

And the tax return for the old person was not me - that was Tuesday night!

True run race to find Newcastle stadium

One of Brendan Foster's most used terms over the last 30 years has been his description of a "true run race". To paraphrase him, if a race is tactical then its not always the best runner who wins, never mind that tactics are part of racing.

A true run race appears to be an "eyeballs out" race. In fairness to him, he was wonderful to watch when he used to try and split the fields with his surges of pace.

Great to see that the Great North Run don't employ pace makers. I found time to watch the Great North Run live on BBC tv for the first time for a while on Sunday and a better finish you could not have had.

Brendan, and Steve Cram, always manage to get in plenty of plugs for what you think of as their home stadium.

I had a walk around Gateshead Stadium in 2009 when I spent three nights in Newcastle just before I went down to the London Marathon. It was interesting to note that on a Thursday morning usage of the international stadium was no greater than at our National Sports Centre.

To me, what was even more interesting, was to find that there had also been an athletics stadium on the other side of the River Tyne. Does anyone remember the City Stadium? Its in the top photo and there is barely a trace of the cinder track of what was once intended to be a mixed use stadium with a banked track around the outside for cycling.

I found a description here:

http://www.runtrackdir.com/details.asp?track=newcastle-ci

Google maps shows it up well to:

I did of course pop along to the other stadium in Newcastle.

Streets of London

Ralph McTell is best known for the above song and it often rears its head around London Marathon time for obvious reasons. I've just been listening to another Ralph McTell song in an attempt to unwind after a frustrating night on my computer when I only achieved about half the tasks I set myself. The video below is one of McTell's song "The Hiring Fair" performed by one of my favourite bands, Fairport Convention, and recorded by my brother Mike when we went to see Fairport together in Birmingham in March.



The streets of Roubaix were the place to be for our hardy endurance walkers at the weekend. I keep trying to imagine what it must be like to keep going for 28 hours let alone walking 144 miles as Vinny Lynch did. I picked up from Steve Partington (on the forum) just what a great record the winner had too. 11 sub 4 hour 50km performances yet he wasn't streets ahead of Vinny.

Thanks to four times Jock Waddington for supplying all of the information and photos from the trip to France.

Results speak for themselves

I wish it was as easy to extract the results for the London Marathon as it is for the Great North Run (or any of the other Great Run events). By using the "advanced search" facility and inputting "IM" in the address code it is simple to extract a list.

There was a little formatting to do to publish the results on the website but that was about all. I had to do it twice though as when I went out yesterday afternoon the results must only have been part processed and I realised that there were more names to add so I went back to the start again this morning. 

The Great North Run results were available so quickly, and the leading local residents were so similar to last year, that at first I thought I had the 2011 results instead of this year. 

Thanks to Michael George for posting the link for the Roubaix 28 hour walk times on the forum. I didn't find it until after the race which was probably just as well as I wouldn't have been able to leave it alone. This was another relatively simple cut and paste exercise once I found them and I didn't attempt to change the French wording!

Meanwhile it was a big day for the junior race walkers who maintained their high standards in the English Schools Championships and the results were quickly posted by Paul Jackson on the Manx Harriers website.

I am not even going to attempt to say how good all of these performances were. I'll let the results speak for themselves. But others can speak for them too by posting comment on the forum.

More Mo

The Lambden cameras were out in London again this week - well it was her maiden name anyway!

My sister Margaid was amongst the massive crowd that turned out to cheer the Olympic and Paralympic athletes and she got quite close and personal to some of them.

Her full set of photos are here: http://isleofman.in/olympicparade

Manx Mountain of emails Marathon

I've been tackling some of my backlog of emails tonight and several of them concerned the Manx Mountain Marathon.

It gave me an idea to publish one of my oldies collection from when I competed in the event between 1976 and 1979. Nearly all the photos, understandably considering they were taken by my family, were of me and so I went for one I took myself in 1980 of the Boundary Harriers team.

1976 was the most memorable of my runs because, although I had done several long distance walks by that time, I had never run more than 8 miles in my life. I still hadn't when I got to the finish but I made it in 6:15:15. In 1977, aged 20, I finished in 5:43:33 thinking I might be the fastest Manxman but Ian Callister, who started two hours later in the elite class, took that honours in 5:29;58. The course has varied since then so to make a comparison with the top guys of that era I'll record that Mike Short won in 4:26:39 from Joss Naylor in 4:31:48.
 
I was elevated to the elite section in 1978 but dropped out at St Johns in freezing conditions. I can't find what time I did in 1979.

Until now I had never looked at my photos from the different years at the same time but it is now amusing to see that I ran in the same North Staffs Poly sweatshirt each year and on each of my three finishes had added my school track suit bottoms before the finish. The photos below progress from 1976 onwards (the 1978 one is at Injebreck).

Crediting the sponsors

I have just been through the remaining fixtures listed on the site to review the the sponsors who are credited. In one case a club has confirmed a sponsor; in another case it is a case of last year's sponsor not being involved this year. If you know of any others that should be added or corrected please let me know in good time - I have been continuously asking for this information.

Also, if it is more appropriate for me to link to a different page on any of the club websites then I am happy to change them, The object is for people, particularly people new to the sport, to select an event and to find out everything they can about an event - and to feel that they will be welcome.

Virgin on the hype

I was one of Richard Branson's first customer's back in 1970 when he launched the Virgin mail order record business. I'd just started my first paid job (a weekend and school holiday milk round starting before 6 am at the age of 13) and I was an avid reader of NME (New Musical Express). A couple of mail order businesses starting discounting record prices which was music to my ears.

When he started his first shop one of my school friends dangled the Virgin bag over his desk at school to make a statement - or perhaps an invitation to change his status! I'm still hoping to advertise the Virgin name by wearing it on my chest in the London Marathon next year but where has all the fizz gone.

Do you remember when Richard Branson launched Virgin Cola? It was going to rival Coke and Pepsi if you believed all the hot air. It went completely flat a couple of years ago when Asda, the last supermarket to stock it, removed it from its shelves with as much fanfare as the removal of the chief executive's blog on the Steam Packet website.

My heart's been bleeding for Sir Richard in the last couple of weeks.

According to him. the reason why Virgin Trains should have been awarded the West Coast Rail Franchise was because when he first bid nobody believed his business plan was realistic yet he achieved it (and was rewarded with millions of pounds of dividends that he was able to pay himself out of the compensation that Network Rail paid Virgin  for failing to deliver a track that was not good enough to run his trains at full belt).

And the reason why he thinks that First Group should not get the franchise? Because nobody believes that they can deliver their business plan to grow the rail business even further. I love irony as much I much as I loved that John Kongos album that was delivered by the postman.

I suspect the other rail operators will outlive Virgin trains by concentrating on running railways rather than spinning stories. Like the time the Virgin train driver was a hero after a derailment - he was actually powerless to do anything after the train lost the tracks.

And the other virgin record mail order company outlived Virgin but not by long. How many people remember that Comet began selling discounted records through NME and Sounds? The business was sold for £2 last year - not much more than I paid for my first mail order record from them.

Tagging

One project I have been ignoring during the summer months was my aim to face tag as many photos as possible using Google Picasa. The work I have done in the past does sometimes pay dividends. I have just been looking for a photo of Kevin Loundes (who went under 70 minutes for the half marathon for the first time on Sunday). I found a suitable one but he was also flagged in this one. Can you see him?

Battery power lacking

I've just suspended publishing of the photos from the End to End Mountain Bike Challenge so that I can use the bandwidth to upload a video of the same event.

I've already got 1,046 of the 2,000 photos uploaded so there is plenty to keep people going.

Not quite as much video as usual I'm afraid. We only got back from our holiday last night and son Ben, who has been home for a few weeks whilst gaining further experience at Nobles Hospital, was out on the town. We had arranged that we would go out to the mountain bike race together this morning so I left him a note telling him what time I was leaving knowing that I would be fast asleep by the time he got in.

I even charged his camera battery for him.

I took two video cameras with me and was confident that they were fully charged. Marie was to use one but the battery ran out before the first rider even reached her. I gave her the second one but that too ran out in her hands. I must stress that it was my fault not hers!

So I had much less video to use than normal so apologies to riders (and families) who like to see the whole field. But at least it has given me more time for another job I am trying to do today.

The video should be available at about 19.15.

I wish they would shut up

We would actually have a much more pleasant journey if they stopped making announcements!

I'm going to be out taking photos and video of the End to End Mountain Bike Challenge as usual tomorrow. As part of the preparation I have added links to coverage from previous years but I can't upload it at the moment - I suspect that the Steam Packet's wi-fi blocks certain connections.

Our current view

In the premium lounge of the Manannan after another hot day with stops at Clun, Market Drayton and Stoke.

House swap

We had some interesting company last night - I managed to sneak a photo of Mrs Brown when she and her family shared the room a room with us!

The only trouble was there were 12,000 other people at the National Indoor Arena with us too. The same number attended on four other nights this week.

We expected to be able to turn up on the day but suddenly realised on Monday that three out of four had sold out. The only ones remaining were premium seats including a pre-show dinner and drinks. Glad that we bought them.

Funny as it was, I couldn't help but think that more people attended these shows than probably did for all the athletic events at the same venue in the last five years. Comedy is a funny old thing

I've never known such a safety announcement as last night before the show. "I'll tell you what steps to take if there is fire - "f***ing big ones".

Do and don't do for today

Don't - go for a run in Birmingham at my normal 7 o'clock time. If I couldn't find my way from a show to the hotel then I will be in trouble if I get lost running before breakfast.

Do - have a cooked breakfast if you've paid for it!

Do - go with Marie to the Ludlow food festival when it was one of the parts of our holiday that we had planned.

Don't - eat hog roast and cakes and wash it down with a glass of wine if you are thinking of going for a run later in the day.

Do - if you have to run in 24 degree September sunshine after indulging in the above, knock off the pace, think of the hard run tomorrow. and enjoy 20 minutes in beautiful Herefordshire countryside without seeing a soul.

Don't - eat an enormous portion of fish and chips to round the day off with football!

Primark at the front door

I'm just back online after a break of more than 28 hours. We went to Birmingham yesterday and decided to stay the night. It was a holiday within a holiday really.

We didn't want to incur too much additional cost and so stayed at the Britannia. Its a real case of you get what you pay for. I stayed at their hotel in Docklands for the Olympics and one reviewer said that it was probably a good hotel in the 80s. One reviewer of the Birimgham version said it was probably a good hotel in the 60s. Big room though and it was clean. And Primark was next door.

The only only internet availability was in the public areas and I didn't have time to sit there as we were in the shops yesterday afternoon, out last night and straight off for another fun day today. So I took a risk of not checking my emails.

Now I remember why I always take my laptop with me. Including all the spoof applications to join the forum, there was just over 100 emails although the number I need to reply to barely reach double figures.

Wonderful weather here.

Parishes and counties

For the second time during my travels, I updated the manxathletics.com hompage using the homepage from the parishwalk.com site in error. As far as I know, the wrong page was only displayed for a few minutes each time.

Even Richard Gerrard and Vinny Lynch would need a car to get around as many counties as we have done in the past week. Below are photos from the three county towns of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire respectively (Worcester, Hereford and Shrewsbury). Shrewsbury, which we visited yesterday was definitely our favour although in fairness the weather has improved during each visit.

Its another glorious day today and we are about to explore the countryside on foot again. Two parishes but only one county.

Tractor jam

Fantastic weather here today. My knowledge of English history is improving every day. Wigmore, three miles from where we are staying, and where we walked from this morning was once the effective capital of England and Wales when Roger Mortimer ruled the country before Edward III, whose mother Mortimer was having an affair with, sentenced him to death for treason. The village (bottom photo) shows little signs that it was once the centre of British power.

After lunch near Clun we had our pudding / afternoon tea in the delightful village of Clun. Sitting outside a cafe in the high street it made me realise just what a low profile agriculture now has in the Isle of Man compared to some parts of the UK. Tractor after tractor sped up and down the main street. 

Rights of way

I've spent too long tonight in the kitchen of our holiday cottage with two good friends - internet radio and bottles of beer! I've also been writing to one of my best friends and as usual ignoring the best of all.

We had a great walk earlier this evening even if the rights of way are a bit hard to follow around here - a cutting through a corm field. No wonder the sheep look worried about our approach.

Lambdens below par

We spent an enjoyable few hours with my brother Mike and three generations of his family today but surprisingly I didn't take any photos. Par for Mike and I is about 100 photos an hour!

Too busy playing with the grandchildren and eating Doreen's food. We did meet Mike and Doreen on Friday too so at least I took a photo of Marie and Doreen outside a lovely cafe where we had lunch.

As we were eating some of the free range hens actually wandered into the cafe. That was nearly as good as last Saturday. The cottage owners provide a welcome pack including six free range eggs - had we arrived when most people do in mid afternoon we would only have received five. They had to wait for another one to arrive before our late arrival!

We seem to have spent an awful lot of time eating and drinking this week. Just before we continued at lunchtime today I received an email from Michael George - the winner of the Guernsey Church to Church Walk. I had forgotten it was on but not forgotten about the high standard of Michael's recent achievements.

Still on track

Yesterday morning we took a train ride from Bucknell, which is about three miles from where we are staying, across the Welsh border to Llandidrod Wells. The two stations were among the 2,363 railway stations, representing 55% of the total, which were recommended for closure by Dr Richard Beeching in his report "The Reshaping of British Railways" published on 27 March 1963.

They both form part of the Heart of Wales line which was part of the 5,000 miles of track Dr Beeching thought should be closed. Amazingly they remain open at great cost to the UK taxpayer because of the social benefits that the line is considered to bring (or if you take the cynical Wikipedia view because the line crosses a number of marginal contsituencies).

Its easy, as I often do, to look back nostalgically about trains passing so many small villages but, apart from where the writer of the report did not have the benefit of hindsight and did not know that certain towns were going to grow in the way that they did, he took a realistic approach. According to a magazine on the subject that I am reading, 50% of the stations produced just 2% of the railway's income and a third of the 17,830 miles of track carried just 1% of the passengers.

Short of banning the cars that most people preferred to use, the railways had to focus on what they did best which was to carry people between large cities and also to carry large freight instead of parcels and small loads.

Two years after Dr Beechings' report my father was appointed general manager of the Isle of Man Railway Company and a few months later the railways were closed and the company's future switched to their bus subsidiary, Isle of Man Road Services.

Although trains were to reappear on the Douglas to Peel line two years later for a final two year stint (operated by a group of enthusiasts without a totally unrealistic business plan) there is no doubt that they saved the Manx railways for eventually the Manx taxpayer bailed out operations on the Douglas to Port Erin line at a cost per mile greater than any other railway in the British Isles.

As I write, the Douglas to Peel line is being used for the Isle of Man Bank Peel to Douglas run. Like a car driver who wants the railways to survive without paying for them, I am an athlete who wants to enjoy his holiday but doesn't want to miss the action at home. I wish I was in the race.