Chris Worfolk's Blog

Lovely cartoon by Joel Pett.

I recently read Run Less, Run Faster after it was recommended by a friend. It sets out a training programme that emphasises getting rid of “junk milage” and making the runs you do do more effective.

In general it seems to have a lot of good stuff in it, and if I wanted to take my running more seriously, it seems like a great programme to follow. As it is, I will take some ideas from it without taking the whole package.

It seems mostly written for people who run marathons. There is plenty of adjustments for 5km and 10km races and all the tables discuss these values, as well as values for quite slow runners (a lot slower than me even) but even so I feel like it is really for people who dedicate their entire lives to running. I guess that should be obviously from a scheme that advocates five workouts a week. It certainly is not a book targeted as casual runners, or anyone who’s primary purpose is fitness rather than competitive running.

It is filled with jargon. Maybe if you are a serious runner you will understand it all, but a lot of it is lost on me and I have had to look quite a few terms up.

Some of it seems cautious. It talks about speaking to a doctor before beginning a training programme. Perhaps this is good advice if you have health issues, but I am pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of doctors will tell overwhelming majority of people “yes, of course you should exercise!” And as Chris H has pointed out previously, if you are a healthy 20-something year old, you don’t really need to train for a 10km. If you already do regular exercise, you will just be able to do it. Even by accident. Again though, that goes back to whether you just want to run it, or whether you want to run it competitively.

I like the way they mix up the format of the book. Some of it is standard flowing text, other parts are delivered as a question and answer. They also intersperse of all this with letters from people telling them how amazing they are. This I find odd and uncomfortable. I am always suspicious about texts that spend so much time openly stating how good they are rather than offering real content.

Overall, I think if you want to run competitively, this is a great book to read. Otherwise, it probably is not that useful.

Terry Pratchett’s 26th Discworld novel is Thief of Time. It has a mixed cast of characters including The Auditors, Death, Susan Sto Helit and best of all, Lu-Tze.

It definitely is not one of my favourite Discworld novels. While I do like the History Monks, I am not a big fan of the Auditors. I found it dragged a bit which lead to be losing focus and struggling to follow some of it.

When Google had its ten year old birthday party, it was hard to believe that such a name, synonymous with our every day lives, was so young.

You probably do not feel that way about Worfolk 18, my adult publishing arm. But hard as it is to believe, it has now been going ten years! A decade of supporting freedom of expression, fighting censorship and empowering women.

To celebrate we got together in Fab Cafe. Here is a photo. It is very dark for obvious reasons.

For my dad’s birthday we went to Cattle Grid in Leeds. We had ribs.

No, this is not a BuzzFeed article. I had to go through a lot of my photos recently while updating my website and I thought it might be nice to post some of the old ones.

The whole thing might take a while to load. It is broken down into ten separate images, but is still five megabytes in size. In fact, if you are reading this on the homepage you will need to click the “read more” link below to see the full thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been running more recently with the anticipation of completing the Abbey Dash in November. I had drawn up a training programme, in my head, in which I would add half a kilometre each month so that by October I was running the full 10km.

Then, a few weeks ago, I felt pretty good on my run, so I just kept going and suddenly I had done 10km. This has entirely ruined my schedule. Not really sure what to do now.

A few weeks ago I attended the long awaited wedding of my friends Craig and Zoe. They have now been together 7 years, which makes me feel really old as they got together while we were all working at McDonald’s (back in’t day).

It took place at the Woodlands Hotel in Gildersome. I was impressed by how smoothly and professionally the whole thing ran. I didn’t want to take my camera (wouldn’t want to make the official photographer jealous or anything 😛 ), so here are some low quality photos taken on my phone. It doesn’t do them justice.

It is both “hot and traditional”.

A few weeks ago myself and Hugh went on a romantic walk across Ilkley Moor. Also Cara tagged along. Here is a panorama from a stone monument we found. Click for the full size image.