I ran 10 miles today…
Woke up at the absolute crack a dawn today to do a 10 mile run.
I like to go for my long distant runs as soon as I hop out of bed (after a decent stretch). If I hang around any longer, then I run the risk of getting hungry and I’ve never been able to handle being hungry; I always get really shaky and weak.
I’ve become kinda neurotic with the eating and running thing actually… It’s just that I am very prone to getting stitches so I have to wait about 4 to 5 hours after eating, otherwise I am crippled. The less food I have in my belly, the more enjoyable the run… But, this means that at the beginning of a run, I am borderline hungry. It’s a thin line.
Running first thing in the morning is perfect cuz I have nothing in my belly and the run always feels more comfortable. I swear, when I get going I feel like a panther or something! I am now doing longer runs in the build up to the marathon, so lately, my stomach starts rumbling mid way through and this has been making me feel a bit nervous. Well, I have recently discovered the solution to this neurosis… and it comes in the form of these energy gel packs…
They’re just the job. You eat them while you’re running. They keep the edge off the hunger and they’re light enough on my stomach that I don’t get a stitch. The whole thing could be psychological, but I know I’m alright if I have my little gel pack with me.
The run was good today but not great. In the first half an hour, I got a few stones in my shoe. I was too stubborn to stop and take them out. There were about four small ones in my left shoe all rolling about and then embedding themselves in various locations on my foot before moving off again. They niggled at me for most of the run.
Anyway, me and the stones did the run in 1 hour and 35 mins.
That wasn’t too bad. If I keep up that pace then maybe I can run the marathon in 4 hours. That goal is beginning to surface now despite promising myself I wouldn’t set a time goal for the marathon. I told myself I would be happy just to run the 26.2 miles.
I don’t want to go over the 4 hours though.
I will be happy running it in 4 hours or under…
Bring back the Barmbrack!
Does anyone remember Barmbrack!!?
For those of you who don’t know what it is and find yourself in a rare situation where you have the opportunity to eat it, you better read this first or you’ll be at risk of choking to death.
It is a kind of a light traditional Irish Fruitcake that used to make an appearance around Hallowe’en when I was a young wan.
Haven’t seen it around since…
Anyway, it’s a nice tasting cake, nice and light, I normally don’t like fruity loafs but I really like Barmbrack. It’s even nicer with a thick layer of butter on top and a cuppa cha on the side.
Once you bite into it and start enjoying it, you’ll soon be picking at the contents in your mouth, the reason being that you will find all sorts of random objects in the cake. Rings and sticks and hard peas and pieces of clothes…
Each object has a meaning and foretells your future…
If you find the pea in your slice - you’ll never get married…
The stick – you’d be beaten by your husband or if you were a man, you’d beat the wife. This was an ever so subtle way of saying you were going to have an unhappy married life.
The piece of cloth – you’d be skint
The coin – you’d be rich.
The ring meant you would get married that year.
I remember one time, I was eating it and unknownst to myself, the stick was in the particular bit of cake I was chewing. Whatever way I chewed it anyway, it made the stick go vertical and it slotted into one of the nukes and crannies in my bottom back tooth. When the top teeth came down from above in the midst of the chewing, it shafted the stick further into my tooth and I’ll never forget the pain it caused me. I had to yank the stick out from my tooth which caused it to bleed and it kind of put spinters into my gum. I couldn’t chew on that side of my mouth for about a month after…
You’d never get away with having such a cake on the market these days…
Bring back the Barmbrack!
A building gets dressed…
Think about your life in the last twelve months.
Now look at the first twelve months in the life of this building.
What a difference a year makes…
(I won’t bore you with the other 361 photos!)
London’s skyline is ever changing…
Strange thing spotted in the Park…
On a shortcut through the Park yesterday, I stumbled upon this…
Initially I got a fright, but was relieved it wasn’t moving.
Does anyone know what the hell this is all about?
9 mile run, under the belt…
Woke up at the crack a dawn yesterday morning.
This was the immediate sequence of events thereafter…
I ran 9 miles in the local park.
It was the furthest I ever ran and it felt great.
I finished the 9 miles thinking I could easily have ran further… Then I kinda thought that I should have pushed myself more. I did it in 1 hour and 28 mins. It’s not the best time but I am only 4 weeks into my training and I am not very confident with the whole distance thing yet.
I have been doing a 3 mile run 3 times a week, as well as a long run on Saturdays. I have really started pushing myself on the short runs. I am down to 23 mins on the 3 mile run, I have been managing to whittle down the time bit by bit every week. My immediate goal is to run 4 miles in 30 minutes and to sustain that pace for the short runs.
Here, this is my training plan:
I got it off the internet, It’s based on Hal Higdon’s Novice plan. I reformatted it onto an excel spreadsheet and tweaked it to suit. It was an 18 week plan but I had 20 weeks to go, so I added an extra two weeks in there (in red). The plan is designed to increase the recommended 10% in distance each week.
I put it up on the pin board and we tick it off as we go!
I usually run the short runs in the gym. The treadmill is great because you set the pace and the time you want to do it and that’s it, there’s no cheating! It gives my joints a break from running on concrete as well, that’s another plus.
Running outdoors is far more enjoyable though…
4 weeks down and 16 to go!
Chocolate Tasting…
So I was telling you last week that I bought these three Chocolate Bars…
I couldn’t wait to get home and tear the covers off em and ram em down my throat.
I restrained myself though, as these are sophisticated creatures of delight. I knew I had to play it cool with these…
I really had a bit of a pain in my head trying to decide which one to eat first. I pondered over them and fondled each of them one by one. I read their wrappers and took in what they had to say about how they were made, what they were made of and where in the world their innermost beans came from.
I decided by eliminating one from the list. I decided to leave the Mora Mora Bar ’til last, for two reasons;
- It was the most expensive – It cost a whopping £3.21
- It says this on the wrapper:
“Worlds best Chocolate Winner – Silver Award 2007″.
I thought it must be pretty good tasting stuff and best kept for last. I placed it carefully back in the fridge.
So it was a toss up between the other two.
Seeds of Change just seemed to beckon me with it’s pieces of figs, so I went for it.
My God.
My God is all I say.
This is one flippin’ mouthwatering piece of chocolate.
Look at the bits of fig in it:
The whole thing was just perfect. The texture was divine and I didn’t want the consumption of it to end. I wanted more when I had finished, so I moved onto my second conquest.
The Chokolit Dark Orange – Biting Back Bar with the pic of the cute chimp on it. He kinda looks sad… hmmmm… anyway…
This chocolate was just beautiful.
It had the perfect consistency. I’m no professional taster; I can’t go on about the fruit tones and the flowery essence and all that waffle. I’m just a simpleton who knows what I like in a bar of chocolate. I know I like this one. The texture is perfect. It’s got a hint of orange, you’d be a pure eejit to miss that cuz it says it on the wrapper too. It was just another magical experience.
The Mora Mora Bar was consumed on the next evening.
It was a momentous build up…
What an anti-climax.
This was really disappointing.
A glorified Bourneville.
It was hard and plastic-y tasting like Bourneville too.
I wouldn’t recommend it at all.
What a rip off too…
Winning brekkie this morning!
Woke up for a 9am run.
5 miles.
Was hungry after it.
Ate this:
The egg was a bit over-done.
Over the years I have come to be a bit funny with my eggs. They have to be free range and they have to come from happy hens. I used to like them sunny side up but now I have them ‘over easy’. I used to like to see the yolk gush out when you slice through it with a knife, but now i don’t. I like it very soft and gooey in the middle but it mustn’t spill out all over the plate. The yolk mustn’t run past the circumference of the white part of the egg. It mustn’t have that kind of film of see-through goo over the yolk either. That turns me off.
As a result of my fussiness, I never have fried eggs in a restaurant. If I did, I would have to go in and cook it myself and chefs don’t really like people doing that kind of thing.
It was a winning brekkie all the same.
Adventure at Sainsbury’s and mean Irish man…
Went grocery shopping last night, walked down to Sainsbury’s with the trolley, it was a lovely evening for it. The trolley fits really nicely under the Sainsbury’s Shopping trolley too. See the trolley’s there on the right hand side?
They’re the ‘half measure’ trolley’s. Well those are the ones that our shopping trolley fits under. It stores it out of the way so you don’ t have to be carrying it around while you are shopping. Not many people know of this. People watched me store it under there too and you could see that they were well impressed with my finding such a storage space for it.
I went over to the stack of trolley’s anyway, I had a pound coin in my hand.
There was a man putting his back and he was kinda loitering there for longer than it takes.
He turned to me in a gentlemanly manner and said something along the lines of “Here you go… here is a trolley for you” I was feeling a bit dozy and said ”Oh right, so how does this work, I give you the pound and you give me the trolley” and he said “you can give it to me for 50 pence if you like as it’s second hand” I laughed then and he smiled at me, I felt a connection with the man, as he too was Irish.
I looked at him as he walked away across the zebra crossing and out of my life.
I just kind of studied him for a split second, the way you do when you have an interaction with someone for the first time, you kinda take them in, don’t ya? You kinda make a judgement about them based on the way the hold themselves in their skin, their clothes, their walk and their shoes… you can tell a whole lot by someone’s choice of shoes.
I snapped out of that anyway and got on with my grocery shopping. I bought this lot with my money:
What you don’t see clearly in the above picture is my little chocolate collection for the week:
I have turned into a terrible chocolate snob altogether. I spent £9.00 on the chocolate bars in the photograph above. I never tasted any of them before and wanted to try them out.
I finished my shopping anyway and paid for what i bought.
When i tried to return the trolley to the stack I discovered that the pound coin was jammed in there and it wouldn’t let me take it out. I swear to God, i was cursing that man. What a sneak…
When I looked back in hindsight, I remembered that he was attempting to take his coin out of the slot before i came along. Way down deep inside the bowels of my psyche, there was a part of me that twigged it too, but I never kind of allowed that feeling to surface. I guess it was an instinct.
He had a sneaky way about him too and he palmed it off on me, that gammy trolley. He ripped me off… So out of principal, I decided to queue up at Customer Services to get my pound back. I was waiting in line for about twenty minutes. For all of those twenty minutes I was seething. I was thinking evil thoughts about that man and was also thinking how strange it was that i walked into that situation all knowing. There was a part of me that knew exactly what was happening… and that intrigued me.
There was a Greek lady with a moustache in the queue in front of me.
She turned around and we had a brief two way conversation about city life and she said she has been living next door to the same neighbours for twenty five years and she doesn’t know them and in Greece it isn’t like that. The conversation then went into a one-way conversation and I just kept saying “yeah… yeah…. yeah….” but couldn’t tell you what she was saying, she was kinda hard to understand anyway.
I wasn’t in the mood for chit chat. I just wanted my pound back…
Lemon Meringue Pie…
I don’t know where I read it now, but I read it somewhere and it said that training for a marathon is like being pregnant! It takes over your life for several months and everyone gives you advice and tells you how they did it…
Well I don’t know if that’s true but I thought of that analogy when I experienced an overwhelming, almerciful craving after my run tonight and I just can’t shake it off…
My craving was for a slice of this:
A Slice of Lemon Meringue Pie
I still can’t get it out of my mind. My mouth is watering at the thought of it. I haven’t had a slice of it in years…
I remember where and when I had my last slice of it though, it was here:
Good ol’ Patsy’s Corner in the heart of Kinsale Town… and the Lemon Meringue Pie was made with Patsy’s own hands.
I would kill for one of Patsy’s Lemon Meringue Pies now…
She makes the best Lemon Meringue Pie without a doubt…
If anyone knows where you can get good Lemon Meringue Pie in London, please drop me a line…
