Earlier this month I ran the Abbey Dash for the second time. It was their 30th birthday, making them even older than me. The photo above is me the next day. I did not look like that after the race. I looked more like an shrivelled old man about to have a heart attack.
The weather conditions were not ideal. It rained before the race, leaving us stood around for an hour in the cold and wet. Once the race started (at which point you actually want the rain to cool you down a bit) it backed off.
I was 22 second slower than last year, coming home in 1:07:58. Not brilliant, but I trained harder last year, so to get such a small difference entires de-values all the work I did for the 2014 Dash. It certainly wasn’t the nightmare that my friend Howell had, running a 32:10, over 6% slower than his target time. I’ll give him some tips for next year.
I made the mistake of putting 70 minutes as my expected time which bumped me down to the slowest starting pen. Next year I think I will bump it up as I have never run a 70+.
I am not sure they are quite as well organised as Run For All. There is only one water station and I had to skip that because there was a queue. There was no big banner for the finish line so I did not know when it was time for that very final push until it was almost upon me. I was unable to spot some of the kilometre distance markers either. Finally I did not get my time until more than 24 hours after, whereas Run For All text me in under a minute of finishing (which I was very impressed at, later in the day would have been fine).
Having eaten most of the mango chutney I made a few months ago, I have tired of mango and moved on. The tomato chutney turned out quite well, but my own-recipe apple and blackberry chutney is the real winter, especially with the holidays approaching.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the secret to a really good chutney, is onion. Lots and lots of onion. My next project will be to find a way to replace the onion so that Elina can have some too.
For our wedding we booked Essentials Hair Studio in Camblesforth to come to the venue and do Elina and my mother’s hair. It did not go well. They turned up over an hour late. Not really the start you need to the day.
I received no phone call from them to say they were stuck in traffic. They said they tried to ring the hotel but nobody answered. That is plausible, but does not excuse not ringing me. When we quizzed them on what had happened, one told my father they had been waiting outside the shop for half an hour, the other said they were inside dealing with customers. You would think the time spent sat in traffic would give them time to get their story straight.
Exactly how much traffic you can get stuck in in 11 miles of country lanes, on a Saturday morning, is a whole different debate.
The first time they did Elina’s hair, they had to re-do it because it was incorrect. We know because we have a photo record of it. So did they, so you wonder why they did not use this to begin with. Elina was not happy with it the second time either, but it was close enough and we were late for the ceremony, so it had to do.
We have filed a letter of complaint but have not received any reply.
EDIT: Since posting this, they have refunded us £20.
The River Aire had been really high recently though, and moving at an incredible pace. At least for a river that usually meanders along slowly. I took a video. It is difficult to capture the speed at which it is moving, especially once you put it into YouTube’s landscape player. Here it is anyway:
I have been working my way through Paul Hollywood’s book Pies & Puds. Having done most of the pies, I moved on to part two: puds. Thus invading what has traditionally been Elina’s territory in the kitchen. She can probably keep it to be honest. Desserts are hard work. You have to be exact and everything sticks to everything else, until you want to stick, then it just falls off.
I started doing Parkun early last year. I’m not really sure how much I like it, but I have been pulled back each week by the promise of a free t-shirt. Now, almost two years later, I have said t-shirt!
It was totally worth it. Now on to the 100 club. That’s a black t-shirt…
Many restaurants fail to make a good peppercorn sauce. You are served a watery gravy that looks like it might have been near a peppercorn once, perhaps long ago. I did not have a particularly good recipe myself though so I set out on a quest to come up with a better one.
Looking back now, I realise how dull my life really is. It comes with a good sauce though.
The photo shows a few of the iterations. The one on the right is the final champion.
Back in September I wrote about our trip to Finland and Finland wedding. A lot of the photos I posted were my own though, which meant I missed some of the group shots and wedding photos that I was on the other side of the lens for.
My parents were good enough to send me their photos though, so we’ve now got some photos of the two of us.
On the other hand, it feels like quite a bit actually happens in this book. Which is unusual for a book of this series which can often go for hundreds of pages without much happening. I think i like it this way.
