Archive for the ‘Sport’ Category

Some people are simply brilliant salespeople. They have a gift for persuasion. I have always thought physicists must be some of them. They persuaded grant funders that the only place they could put observatories was in the tropical paradise of Hawaii.

Watching the Olympics, I think even they have been outdone though. Consider the successful pitches that must have been made in order to secure our current line-up of events.

“We are going to train horses to dance.”
“Hmm. Jousting? That’s a sport?”
“No, we just want the dancing included. Maybe a bit of jumping.”

“Well, it’s just hitting each other really.”

“It’s an eight-lap cycle race. But for the first five laps, the cyclists will queue up behind a motorbike.”

“It’s like the long jump, but the athlete will do a hop and a skip beforehand.”

“Well, it’s not quite a javelin and it’s not quite a shot put, but man, will they be able to throw that hammer a long way.”

“Yes, it’s diving. But there will be two of them. Doing exactly the same thing.”

“Exactly, it’s volleyball. Except with a lot of sand, and the women will be in bikinis.”

I’m very much enjoying the Olympics. I have no idea how I managed to fit the rest of life in before it started. However, it is clear that it is lacking some of the most fun sports on the planet. Below, I have highlighted some I think are worth including for Tokyo 2020.

Kabaddi

Kabaddi is a massive sport in South Asia. It’s the national sport of Bangladesh and India loves it too. If you haven’t heard of it, you might think it sounds odd. The idea is to go into your opponents half, tag them and run back, all while holding your breath. So the referee can see you are not taking a breath, players chant “kabaddi” the whole time they are doing it. You can watch some on Sky Sports and England’s women’s team want it included in the Olympics.

Flag football

What would American football look like if it was replaced by a far less dangerous non-contact version? The answer is flag football. All the fun of the NFL without the inevitable season-ending injury.

Wife-carrying

One of the traditional sports of Finland, the rules are now relaxed so you can carry any “wife” as long as they are 17 years old and weigh at least 49 kilograms. The heavier the better because the prize is your wife’s weight in beer. Traditionally the piggyback was the lift of choice but Estonian-style has now become the dominant technique.

Bog snorkelling

It’s like regular snorkelling, but in a bog. The annual championships take place in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales. It is a straight race that you must complete just using the propulsion of your flippers.

Dodgeball

Dodgeball teaches children a lot of important skills. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Despite extensive coverage by ESPN-8 of the American Dodgeball Association of America’s tournaments, dodgeball has not yet managed to make the Olympic roster.

Cheese-rolling

This isn’t really a sport, but would still make a fun show. The rules are simple: someone starts a cheese rolling down a hill and everyone has to chase it. The winner is the first one to the bottom as nobody ever actually catches the cheese. Several people usually end up in hospital though.

Air guitar

Every year the town of Oulu in Finland welcomes music lovers for the air guitar world championships. Each contestant faces two one-minute routes, one of their own music and one chosen by the organisers. They are then scored by a panel of judges on a series of criteria including technical skill and stage presence.

Baking

With Great British Bake Off about to start, the competitive baking season in the UK is literally heating up. Some people would argue it is not a sport. Not so. Whisking a sauce for ten minutes takes incredible arm strength and has Bake Off shows there is a competitive element., thus fulfilling the definition of sport.

At very least, it is more of a sport than wrestling, which enjoys a large section on Sky Sports.

Quidditch

In real life quidditch is far less amazing than it is described in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. But it’s still a fun game to watch. Players are mounted on brooms and the snitch is moved by an impartial player who runs around with it. Since 2009 the sport has even had an international governing body: International Quidditch Association.

Ultimate frisbee

Ultimate is a form of competitive frisbee throwing that in practice is a lot like netball. The score you have to catch the frisbee in the opponent’s end-zone, similar to American football. The game is usually self-refereed with people just being honest when they commit a foul.

I ran my first Run For All Leeds 10k in 2014, achieving a time of 1:06:14. Despite it being a hot day this was faster than both my subsequent Abbey Dash times and remained my personal best 10k race time. This year’s Leeds 10k was also warm (19 degrees) but cloudy (and still cooler than the half marathon!).

I have been running better than ever before in training so I was hoping to knock a significant block off my personal best, and for a stretch target try and run a sub-60 time.

Unfortunately, things were off to a poor start. The 60-minute pacer was right at the front of the green group (athletes predicted to run 60+, I think) so I couldn’t get close to her. By the time I had crossed the starting line she was out of sight. I only saw her at the turnaround point, at which time she was way head of me.

My GPS said that I was running a sub-60 time. However, it kept reporting I was ahead in distance: it would give me my kilometre split before I reached the official marker points and clocked my total 10k distance at 10.26km. When I clocked my final time via GPS I was at 1:00:10. 10 seconds over the hour!

I had given it my all, and come up short.

Run For All usually text you your official time straight however. Mine never arrived, so I faced a nail-biting wait in the pub while waiting for the official times to be posted.

Finally, it arrived.

My time was 0:59:59. The slowest possible time you can run while still being under an hour. But it was under an hour. I had taken 6:15 off my personal best. An incredibly fortunate ending.

I really like the way Run For All run their events. My race pack and race number arrived on time. They have markers at every kilometre, plenty of water, pacers every five minutes and even though my my text never arrived, the results were available online within a few hours.

When you make it to the finals of Euro 2016, you are allocated to one of six groups. The top two teams from each group, after three matches, get a pass into the round of 16. An additional four teams also make it through.

But should we expect to see there? One way to calculate it is to work out how tough each group is. By taking each team’s world rankings and averaging them, we can see how tough each group is.

A lower number represents a tough group and a higher number represents an easier group. This suggests England is in one of the easiest groups: only group A has a lower average world ranking, and this does not factor in the home-field advantage that France has.

We can then compare the team ranking to the average group ranking to see who should find it easiest to quality.

I have shown the top and bottom four here. The other home nations do not find themselves at the bottom of the table, which is positive news too. Having said this, the difficultly of the group makes little difference: all of these teams are in the same order as if you had just taken the world rankings. So how tough your group is, is probably not a factor.

I have considered doing a half marathon on and off for a couple of years. There are lots of good reasons not to do it though: for example it’s really hard, hurts a lot and requires a lot of training. And all you get out of it is the feeling that you have done, which isn’t that amazing, because it’s only half a full marathon.

However, with a less intense flag football season this year, being on a fitness drive, and this being my last chance before a tiny human started cutting into my free time, it seemed like a good year to go for it.

Half marathons are a whole new level from 10ks. 10k is pretty easy. If you run regularly, which I do, you don’t really need to do that much training. When I’m going through a good period, a 5k and a 10k is my weekly programme. Half marathons are a step up. After 10k my knees start to go. I get back pain. Things start to chafe and bladder control is put to the test.

Being on the 8th of May, this meant I was doing most of my training in March and April. If you will remember, April was really cold. I did most of my training in the early morning or evening, in not much above freezing.

Roll on May, and a week before the marathon it suddenly becomes incredibly hot (for Britain) and everyone is scrabbling around for barbecues. Including me. On the day in question, it was 23 degrees. I had done all my training with my leggings on, to help support my knees, so I didn’t want to change it for the day. Which made for a warm experience.

I had put my target time down as 2:15:00, but quickly had to re-evaluate this when I realised I had not factored in all the hills (I run up the canal in training, which is relatively flat). Then again when it suddenly hit 23 degrees. In the end, I ran a 2:28:00. I think I would have been disappointed to slip over 2:30:00, so this was fine. And sure, there were people who ran it in less than half of that time. But how many children did they high-five? I mean, anyone can win the slalom if they don’t go round the flags.

I was so tired by the time I finished. I found a patch of ground in the shade and sat down to take a drink. After a few minutes I got up to go find Elina, only to realise I was going to have to sit down again and eat some snacks from the goodie bag before I was going to be in a position to walk anywhere.

Luckily, once I had regained the use of my legs, my beautiful support crew was there to greet me with more drinks and snacks. We took 17 photos, the one below was the best we could get.

The advantage of living in town is that I could go home, have a quick shower, and then go back out for lunch. As we walked out again I passed a number of other runners who were very confused by my combination of jeans and finisher’s t-shirt. We ended up at Blackhouse, where I highly recommend the t-bone as recovery steak, and the ribeye if your pregnant wife needs a well-done piece of beef.

One thing I like about the Run For All series is how well organised they are. I’ve only run the Leeds 10 and Abbey Dash, so I don’t have a huge range of comparisons, but Run For All seem to do a good job: clearly-marked pacers, easy to access water stations, start on time and you get your result within seconds of crossing the line.

Has this experience inspired me to run a full-length marathon? Dear god no.

The ice hockey world championships are currently taking place in Moscow. No prizes for guessing who the Worfolk household is supporting. Finland won gold in 2011, and took a silver in 2014, but failed to score any medal last year.

To predict our chances, I took the medal data from the past ten years and graphed it.

The competition has been going for almost a hundred years now. In comparison to the early days, it is a pretty open contest. In the first 26 years, Canada took gold in 18 of them. Great Britain also took a gold in 1936! From 1963 onwards, the Soviets were unbeatable. Until 1987, when Sweden took gold, the only other team to beat the Russians were Czechoslovakia: the Soviet Union took the other 18 golds.

Today, Russia remain the dominant force in ice hockey. In the past decade they have taken as many golds as their nearest rivals, Sweden and Canada, put together. They are far from unbeatable though. In three of those years, they failed to bring home a medal. Sad as I am to admit it, Sweden has the edge over Finland at the moment. Though a gold at this year’s event would put them clear ahead.

The “big five”: Russia, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Czech Republic win basically everything. This is a suprise to many people, who assume that because the United States’s NHL is the biggest ice hockey league in the world, their national team must be really good. But they’re not. Two bronzes, and a silver each for Slovakia and Switzerland are the only medals to go elsewhere.

If you run far enough up the Leeds Liverpool Canal, you eventually reach the Rodley Barge pub. How you actually get over the canal to have a pint is less clear. However, it does make a convenient place to stop and turn around. This could well be the furthest I ever run up the canal as I don’t have any plans to do longer distances.

Continuing from my post about running last week, I made it even further up the cancel this time. I actually ran a 2km shorter distance. However, without half of the canal being closed by police causing me a large detour, I was able to go further.

I got as far as Newlay Locks, which is a set of locks by Bramley Fall Park.

Last week, finding myself with a bonus day off, I set off up the canal to see if I could set a new distance record. The furthest I have been is just past the Hollybush Conservation Centre. Hollybush makes a nice 5km landmark, and I’ve been about half a kilometre past this.

Unfortunately, my new effort got off to a rocky start. The police had closed one of the junctions of the canal: the one by Kirkstall Viaduct. This was the only access point for quite a while, so I had to go all the way back to the Armley Gyratory, up Kirkstall Road, and then back down on to the towath at Armley Mills, just to progress 30 metres down the canal.

Eventually I did progress on. It turns out that there isn’t much to see. There is some flat countryside, the train line and river continue to intertwine, and there is a few more locks. That is pretty much it. Peaceful though.

Here is a photo of me looking gormless:

I turned round after that and went home. Then spent my hard-earned calories on Easter Eggs.

Last weekend, I went fishing for the first time. I didn’t go well. I spent most of the time trying to tackle sorted out. Then, just as I had it sorted, the line got horribly tangled, and I had to do it all again. Eventually I got myself sorted. I didn’t catch any fish. Nor did anyone else while we were there though.

It’s not quite as idicic as I had hoped. Possibly because it genuinely isn’t, or possibly because we went to a muddy fishing lake in the middle of March. Hopefully, having at least a small clue as to what I am doing, will improve the experience in future.