In light of not much running nor blogging...

 In light of not much running nor blogging I thought I'd share some blogs I enjoy that aren't related to running, exercise or healthy eating. I'm going to do it once a month till I run out of interesting blogs that I like to read. Some will have an extensive readership with individual hits into the millions. Most won't. Some you may know already, some you may not.

I hope you will also take part in the monthly sharing of interesting blogs that go beyond the remit of the blog you write.

This month's blog is The Magistrate's Blog. It's written by a long-serving magistrate who sits somewhere in London. He comments on how his area of law is reported in the media and also about the sort of cases he sees. He's erudite, accessible and always very humane,


P.S.
Dear Mr Scientist,
Moves like Jagger will NEVER have a place on my blog.
Much love,
Fifi.

Wake Up

Quite often by the end of the day I'm tired and hungry. I feel lethargic and exhausted and by the time I've taken a train and a bus home and I'm through the door my motivation to go out running is at zero. Sometimes I even tell myself I don't want to run as soon as I wake up.

Ugh.

It's worse now it's dark and cold.

So i had to force myself to go to running club tonight. I had two slices of toast with honey and a mug of coffee and dragged myself out of the door.

A warm up run then 4 x 600 metres efforts later I feel a lot better for it

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I've a question for cookers of unusual food out there: What do I do with soya flour? I bought some to make pancakes but aside from making pancakes every day for the next month I'm not sure how to use the rest of it. Anyone got any ideas?

Yorkshire Coast 10k Recap

On Sunday 30th October I got up, had a pre-race breakfast of two slices of brown bread covered in peanut butter and topped with sliced banana.

After that I sat around for a few hours chilling out before heading to Scarborough Spa Complex on the South Beach. The Complex was busy but well signposted and it was easy to pick up my timing chip.

After that we lined up on the road outside the complex. Looking north along the Marine Drive which snakes around the coast and forms the majority of the race route, I could see Scarborough seafront with its arcades, cafes and fish and chip shops, the harbour, and the ruins of Scarborough Castle perched high on the cliffs. It was sunny but a touch hazy and a naval ship was anchored in the South Bay. It felt good to be out there at 10am on a sunny Sunday morning waiting to start a 10k race.

The race was very flat but I allowed myself to be pulled along at the start by the people around me, something I paid for later on in the race. Running along the seafront was easy but we encountered a slight headwind once we rounded the headland. However it was a gentle breeze. After running along the Marine Drive we headed into a park then back out on to the shore promenade for a few hundred metres before turning around at the Sealife Centre and heading back toward the Spa Complex.

Chip Time: 51:03
Gun Time: 51:37
Garmin Time: 51:04
Split 1: 7:53.8
Split 2: 7:53.5
Split 3: 8:06.0 (This is when I began to pay for starting too fast)
Split 4: 8:13.2
Split 5: 8:08.7
Split 6: 8:25.7
Split 7: (300 m) 2:23.0

So I've got a new PB - frustrating just out of the 50s but I've proved to myself that a sub-50 10k is there for the taking provided I keep training and shift the 5lb that have glued themselves to my hips over the last few weeks.

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So what next? I don't have another 10k planned but I've decided to continue following training plans as if I were.  I'm continuing to go to the running club and have signed up for a winter cross country league. This and parkrun should keep me ticking over throughout the winter.

I've decided to declare a temporary truce on weightloss. I don't discuss this much on my blog but I'm at the high end of a healthy BMI and body fat percentage for my height and would like to lose about a stone by cutting my fat percentage further. I'm not going to try to do this over the holiday period, though, because I've got a couple of birthdays, work parties and weekend away visiting my best friend between here and January which I know will stymie any weightloss. So I'm declaring a temporary truce and I'm going to lose 3lb to get to 10.5 stones then seek to maintain until January. In addition to this I'm tired of constantly dieting and getting nowhere, so I'm going to take control and decide to go nowhere.

So there.

And now I'm going to bed!