Posts Tagged ‘leeds’

Earlier this month I took part in the 31st Abbey Dash.

It was the first time I had run the Dash. However, it is not a race I do particularly well. Last year, I set a personal worst over 10k. This year looked like to be a repeat of previous years: old and wet.

Luckily Jane and Rob were already there when I turned up and Chris and Carley turned up later too. Usually, I am stood around by myself for the hour you have to wait, so it was nice to feel like I had some friends for a short while.

Organisation was improved. They only do one water point (Run For All does two) but they did text me my result this year. There was still stuff to fix, though. They let the sub-60 and sub-70 pens go at the same time. I was at the back of the sub-60 pen, so I was running behind a lot of the sub-70 runners. By the finishing straight, I was literally having to push my way through, and it slowed me down a lot.

Despite my previous bad times, I was hopeful. So far in 2016 I had run my first half marthon, set a personal best at Parkrun and run my first sub-60 over 10k when I managed a 59:59 in the Leeds 10k in July. My faith was rewarded: I brought it home in 56:45 setting a new 10k PB.

What a massive fucking disappointment.

I thought it was going to be really big. But it isn’t. Nor does it have any shops you would ever go in. At least Victoria Quarter has nice things to look at. The shops here are both unjustifiably posh, and yet still boring.

It does have a John Lewis, but what a poorly designed store that is. There are no stairs. How do you build a department store and forget about the stairs? This led to delays in the escalators to the point where they had to have a staff member on one each managing the queue. Meanwhile Elina got stuck in the lift because they were so crammed.

The 2016 pride parade was pretty standard. There were lots of people marching, it took about 30-40 minutes for the whole parade to pass. A few floats, but these were almost all corporate buses. Lots of people marching against the Tories this year, and I don’t think the Tories themselves turned up at all.

The biggest change this year was the amount of people watching. Typically there are only a few people on The Headrow and you can pretty much have a traffic island or road-side bench to yourself. This year there were people lining the whole way and it was difficult to get a spot.

Years ago I remember a bus advertisement that read “bus ads work! You’re reading this aren’t you?” The concept recently re-appeared on a billboard on York Road. The question is: do such adverts work?

My guess would be no, because they are so stupid.

Even if you haven’t heard of availability bias, my guess is that most people can work out that those reading it is a self-selecting group. I was reading the billboard but there is no guarantee that anyone else does. In fact, I could have been past a thousand similar billboards and never noticed them, but you would never know if you had. It’s insulting to our intelligence.

Second, I am not sure that anyone who works in marketing is so bad at their job that they use their gut instinct of driving past a billboard to pick their advertising channels, rather than relying on hard data about the audience and conversation rates of different channels.

Finally, if you are going to use this message on a billboard, at least have someone proof read it. You would be barking mad not to.

After the success of our summer picnic last year, we decided to repeat the same event for this year’s summer social. Kirkstall Abbey once again played host and the weather was once again kind to us.

Around 15 people turned up, along with loads of food. Michael even repeated his guided tour of the Abbey for those who wanted to attend. A good day all round.

The July event of Sunday Assembly Leeds was on the theme of Yorkshire (it being Yorkshire Day the following day). Our speaker for the month, Mary from City of Sanctuary, spoke about the efforts to make Leeds a more inclusive and more welcoming place. The cake selection was also excellent, having had much left overs from the Humanist picnic the day before.

The Assembly Line performed as usual, just as a three piece this month. This left me as the only guitarist, but it could have sounded a bit worse.

The Housemartins – Happy Hour

Kaiser Chiefs – I Predict A Riot

If you work at Sky’s Leeds Dock offices, chances are you will walk in from the city centre. Once you get past the traffic lights on Crown Point bridge you can choose to go left, taking the steps down by the waterside, or go right and take the road round the back of Mumtaz. But which way is fatest?

To find out, I set about recording my walk time from the traffic lights to the post outside of Sky 2. I did six runs in total, trying to mix up the days randomly to get a representative average. Here are the raw times I recorded.

Here is the same data, in seconds, with averages.

Based on the table, we can see that the road seems to be around 9 seconds faster than the steps (211 seconds compared with 220 seconds). However, the typical variation, 8.82 seconds, is almost as high as the difference. Therefore we can only have so much confidence the results are accurate. It also suggests that other factors such as weather and fatigue have as much impact as route selection.

Conclusion

On average, the road route seems to be slightly faster than the steps route. However the difference is small and so it seems a sensible choice to choose the steps instead if you prefer the more scenic route.

Interesting documentary about technology in Leeds. I was already familiar with the history of our tech scene, but it is always nice for a refresher. Many people may be surprised with just how involved we were with the early internet.

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.

Earlier this month we held our AGM at West Yorkshire Humanists. It was a really positive meeting: this year we have significantly increased our membership (more than 20% increase), turned a financial deficit into a surplus and have completed more charity work than ever before.