Posts Tagged ‘leeds’

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).

This tree is not supposed to be underwater.

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 had feared the worst for Atheist Society this year; I thought it might be the end. However, I was wrong! Armed with new president Liam at the helm, and Josh providing plenty of support as usual too, at least 20 people turned off to the pub quiz to start the year off, which Strawberry Fields played host to once again.

It was wonderful to see so many new and engaged members and I wish them the best of luck for the year ahead.

This is a photo of workmen putting up Christmas lights. I took this photo a month ago! In September! The Sky internal quiz a few days later was “have you started your Christmas shopping yet?” Apparently 26% of people had. Who has time when there are Halloween costumes to work out?

In an attempt to get people using Leeds Dock, they are now running a free water taxi from just outside the Armouries to just below the station. Nobody is actually using it yet so we had the boat to ourselves.

It has bee ages since I have done a sliding puzzle, but thanks to the days when I was forced to use Windows Vista, which included a little puzzle on the sidebar, I was able to re-arrange Henry VIII’s face.

Earlier this month I competed in the Leeds City Toastmasters 2015 humorous speech contest. Even though it was only club level I was quite nervous. Perhaps because it was at club level, which is not a level I want to go out at. Mostly though because I has not competed in a speech contest in 18 months due to my year as Area Governor.

Lukcily I managed to take victory with my speech “Hell in High Heels”. I will be posting the video after the whole contest is over.

Recently Richard Dawkins spoke at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. He is flogging his new book, My Life in Science, which is a second book of memoirs. It was ably chaired by my friend Chris Hassall, who made a natural choice as a biology lecturer at the University of Leeds.

The format was a 20-30 minute conversation in which Dawkins told a few anecdotes and read a few things out. Some of them very funny, though Elina felt the obscurity of the subject made them less enjoyable. The second half was Q&A which eventually drifted off religion but was mostly a bit dull.

Overall, the event was enjoyable though it could have been a lot better. Some of it was a bit boring and Dawkins actually taking about something interesting rather than re-hashing anecdotes and answering unimaginative questions would have been a lot better.

For this year’s Humanist summer social we held a picnic at Kirkstall Abbey. We got lucky with the weather, enjoying a wonderful sunny day.

Someone should definitely start this group.

That someone will not be me given the number of groups I already run, but I would definitely come along to some meetings out of curiosity.

In the final section of The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency John Seymour talks about starting local groups to work on self-sufficiency projects. This could be doing small things like brewing beer or baking bread, or maybe a foraging club.

It sounds like he speaks from experience. Phrases along the lines of “doing all the organising” and “not being an instant success” sound to me like a fellow group organiser! And that is before the pendants have bemoaned being self-sufficient in a group.

Anyway, hopefully, you will have searched for a group, found my blog and been inspired to start such a group. If so, ignore that last paragraph and get going!