Archive for May, 2026

Track sessions are back in full flow at Hyde Park Harriers, and I was back coaching last week. I also had the pleasure of leading group one on Monday, including loads of people running with the club for the first time.

Two months ago, our kitchen floor collapsed. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about it, but last week, contractors finally came in to sort it out. When they took the floor up to find out what was going on, they found there was an old rotting floor underneath it, and someone had just built a new floor over the top of it.

Stokesley Leisure Centre is a pool-based sprint triathlon based at Stokesley Leisure Centre in Yorkshire, run by Cleveland Triathlon Club. The pool was wide enough and there were only 3-4 of us in each lane with participants starting every three minutes. The bike course is absolutely beautiful: it just enters the North York Moors National Park so you get panoramic views without any hills being involved. The run is a road-based out-and-back. The only thing I was surprised at was they didn’t check bikes in and out of transition, but maybe that’s the joy of living in a town of 6,000 people. Would do this race again.

Mobile phone signal often sucks indoors. Not a single network offers reliable signal in either my home or my office. Many of us have given up, turned on WiFi calling, switched to WhatsApp, and generally concluded that phones don’t work inside buildings anymore.

One of the issues is that as phones “advance”, we use more and more data. More data requires the greater bandwidth available at higher frequency radio waves, and higher frequencies are less good at penetrating buildings. The more data we use, the worse it gets, and this problem is likely to get worse in the future.

It’s also an issue that as we build energy efficient homes and offices. These are designed to reflect heat, which also blocks radio waves, so again, it’s likely to continue getting worse.

There is a solution: in urban areas, we could replace high-powered phone masts with a higher density low-power ones, placing one on each street, or inside large buildings as the Trafford Centre has already done.

But this is expensive. And this is where it intersects with the “efficiency” of the free market.

Right now, the four big network operators – o2, Vodafone, Three, and EE – all maintain their own networks. We’re paying for this through our phone contracts and because each provider only gets a quarter of the market, they can all only afford to build a shitty network that is pretty much as good as their competitor’s network, leaving a lot of people without signal and no better competitor to switch to.

This is unfortunate because building a network to support the entire population costs pretty much the same as building a network to support a quarter: most of the cost is in installing the infrastructure and not per-user utilisation costs, so having four separate networks that do the same thing is almost entirely redundant.

Instead, if we switched to a nationalised network, as we have with the national grid, there would be almost four times as much money to invest in infrastructure and we could have a much more reliable mobile network for potentially the same cost.

Swillington Wilds is a new open water swim and sauna venue in South East Leeds.

You need a membership to swim there. The lake is around 200 metres long and maybe 30 metres wide, so you’re never too far from the bank. They have a changing area and toilets on site. It is muddy underfoot so you don’t have to worry about stepping on stones, though not everyone might like the squelch.

It doesn’t have the same safety culture as the Blue Lagoon. They have someone watching with a throwable flotation device, but they don’t have any paddle boards out on the water or rescue craft. But if you’re a wild swimmer, you’re probably used to jumping in a lake by yourself, and the setup is similar to the open water sessions at Leeds Dock.

Ever since I watched Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, I knew I had to do Wild. And by do, I mean read the book Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed.

It is a memoir in which Strayed recounts her journey hiking 1,800 kilometres of the Pacific Crest Trail. It opens with a heartbreaking recounting of her mother’s death due to lung cancer that itself was a deeply uncomfortable read, both emotionally and from the physical descriptions. But I’m glad I stuck with it as it opens up into a warming tale as Strayed rediscovers herself.

First triathlon of 2026 is in the bag. Tadcaster is a lovely chill race and always a pleasure to take part in. It is part of the HPH club championships, and with only four of us competing, myself and three women, I only had to finish to take the championship lead after one races.

Setup was fine, including a pre-race brownie from the coffee van. I went for a complicated three-shoe setup so that I had one pair from pool to T1, then bike and run shoes. It’s a lot of shoes to bring, but a 600m run from the pool to T1, along multiple roads, so the extra pair of shoes was well worth it.

I felt good in the swim. There were only three of us in our lane and I was the first out, although that probably says more about how accurate my 400m prediction time was. I clocked my swim at just over nine minutes, which isn’t my fastest ever, but consistent with previous efforts but something I thought I was taking quite steady.

It was a beautiful day for cycling. Clear, cool, and no wind. I haven’t done any work in the aero position all year but I got down on the bars for several sections of the course and felt pretty quick. The only slight panic was when the guy in front of me missed the turn back into transition and I had a split-second question about whether it was me that was wrong. But no.

Out onto the run. This felt quite weird because someone started catching me. This isn’t how these things work. People overtake me in the swim and the bike and then I catch people on the run. But with zero overtakes so far, someone was breathing down my neck until the water station. They backed off and then caught me on the trail section at the bridge. Not for too long, though, and I managed to take the place back. Up the steps and across the finish line for a well-earned pork pie.

My overall time was:

1:14:35

My splits are below. It should be noted that in 2021 the river flooded and the run course was changed to a shorter out-and-back on the road, hence why we all have amazing run splits for that year.

New fastest T2 time, and not bad for my first race in the 40-44 age group. Thank you to all of the volunteers and marshals, and to Elina and Venla for keeping me company.