Hyde Park Harriers is 20 years old! To celebrate, we had a do at Headingley Stadium. Thank you to Toby and the organising committee for making it happen. And Beth for the anniversary cupcakes!
There is never a bad reason to visit Doncaster. But it is especially nice when you are there to do Sandall Park parkrun. It is two-and-a-bit laps around the park, tarmac and grass, and flat by Yorkshire standards.
This ticks off the snakes challenge for me: Skipton, Selby, Shanganagh, Sport Ireland Campus, St Anne’s, Stormont, SETU Arena, Sligo, Sheffield Castle and Sandall Park.
Every summer, thousands of runners gather in Bramham Park to take part in Endure24: a 24-hour running race where the aim is to do as many 8km laps as you can within the time limit. Participants take part as solos, pairs or teams. I did the virtual Endure24 over COVID but this was my first time at the thing itself.
I turned up on the Friday and met up with Robyn for the shake out run, which is one lap of the course. It was great to catch up and see what the course is like ahead of the race. I then went home and slept in my nice comfortable bed ready for the race starting the next day.
Back to Braham Park on Saturday to meet up with the rest of my team: Grace, Jed and Matt, to take on the race. I wouldn’t describe myself as a big outdoor person (despite all of the triathlon and adventure racing) so camping is a bit out of my comfort zone. Thanks to Matt for lending me a tent.
The race starts at noon and we each did a lap before moving to double laps. The first twelve flew by: we originally were thinking an hour per lap but having the break means you can go faster than you would on a solo ultra. All speed is relative, though, and by the end of lap eight, both Charlotte and Toby had lapped us.
By around 10 o’clock we had all done three laps each and moved onto the night laps. I had said I was going to take on more of the night shift as I wanted to run when it was cooler. It got down to about 12 degrees at night, so still a little on the warm side even in shorts and t-shirt. My mood was up-and-down at night. When I first started I was thinking maybe I’ll do even more night laps after my double but by the end my stomach was complaining and I wanted to get some sleep. So, after Matt did his night lap, we had nobody running for an hour or so. It would have been nice to do the sunrise lap but I just wasn’t up for it at the time.
In the morning, we switched back to single laps and cycled through two each, before crossing the line together.
In total, we managed 25 laps as a team. We set out as a chill team so there was no target, but everyone hit their individual target of getting six laps in (48km, making it an ultra distance) and my extra night lap took us up to 25 as a team, meaning we hit 200km overall.
After the race, we went to the Endure24 pub. The event village has a pub, cafe, several food vans, an ice cream van, a medical and sports massage tent, and some retailers. And a fire pit at night.
There were some brilliant performances to mention. Charlotte completed 23 laps, finishing first lady and second overall. Toby completed 20 laps to complete the 100 miles, and Robyn crushed 10 laps for a total of 80km at her first 24-hour event. Eleanor took second in the female pairs. Well done to everyone who took part, and thank you to my teammates for running with me.
Venla plays drums in a school band and this week, they did their first gig. She did amazing. Her band leader says she has “natural rhythm” which leads me to believe Elina and I may not be her real parents.
We recently said goodbye to Auntie Emily and Auntie Christine. They were both much loved and will be missed. I have fond memories of our family boxing day parties. The physics of how we managed to fit such a large family into a small terraced houses doesn’t really stack up. Maybe it was bigger on the inside. The funerals were very moving and there is a bittersweet nature of saying goodbye, celebrating a life, and reconnecting with family you haven’t seen in a while.
I’m delighted to announce that following school sports day, Venla is now a champion bean bag thrower.
The Castle is a novel by Franz Kafka. It tells of a surveyor known as K. who arrives in a village and finds he was summoned by accident. He finds it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy of the castle’s systems, trying in vein to reach the castle authorities.
I was intrieged to see how Kafka could fill 200,000 words on this, but he does and he does it very well. Unfortunately, the novel was unfinished at the time of Kafka’s death. Usually, I would expect either the editor to add a note at the end or someone else to finish it off. This one just ends mid-sentence without any conclusion.
TOEM is a photo adventure game on the Nintendo Switch. Set in a beautiful black-and-white world, you go around taking photos of different things. It’s very chill. I didn’t get very far into it because it’s a puzzle game and not obvious what you need to take photos of, which still wasn’t chill enough for me. But I might come back to it at some point.
Another fun video game. You play a small yellow man who is sent to the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth. You run around the town helping the locals who keep exclaiming “thank goodness you’re ‘ere” and asking for assistance with a variety of different problems. These typically involve jumping and kicking because these are the only controls.
The game is written in a northern dialect. When you start the game it asks you “A’ tha from Tarn?” You can then select “Dead Reyt” in which case the game continues in Yorkshire, or “Sorry What?” in which case I assume it switches back to English. If you want to play about with the settings you need to pause the game and go to “faffin'”.
I completed it over two evenings. There were some bits where I found myself having to loop back and kick everything to work out what was going on next. But mostly the game seamlessly guides you through where to go and there was very little frustration that I often experience with other games.
The storylines are a good comedic take on northern culture, although the town was perhaps a little more run down and dirty than I would like. The voice acting is excellent.
Dredge is a fishing simulator horror game I played on the Nintendo Switch. You take on a fishing captain whose boat is destroyed. You are loaned a new boat by the local mayor and must fish to earn money and dredge supplies so you can expand your boat and explore the world.
Also it’s somehow a horror game at the same time and at night you begin to panic and hallucinate.
This is probably a great game. But the whole panic thing made it way to stressful. It was always a desperate rush to get back to port before nightfall which made it difficult to explore the world and left me feeling the paranoia the character was experencing. I stuck with it for 4-5 days and then gave up.