So, it comes to that point in the year when I review my reading for the year. Over a hundred books read this year. I said last year that I did not expect to read as many in 2010 as I had in 2009 and then read more. So I’ll not predict higher or lower [...]
I’ve finished running for this year, which was something I could have said ten days ago as well. I decided to take most of December off and start building up my running again next month. I managed 966 miles this year. I have not run enough this year and that is reflected in a disappointing [...]
Last Friday I travelled down for the 5k race organised by Poole Runners. This was the third in the series of six events, which take place once a month from October to March. I ran two of the races in the series last year, with my 5k PB coming in the equivalent race last December. [...]
Another Wednesday and another opportunity to go out orienteering. This time it was to Greenham Common. The weather was reasonable – particularly after the thick fog that had been around for much of Monday and Tuesday – and I managed to finish before the rain came in. The area and courses lent themselves to fast [...]
For the past few years I have been using Kubuntu on the computers I use. When I got a netbook earlier this year I found that the Kubuntu netbook version did not work too well on my machine and I switched to using Ubuntu Netbook Edition instead. Last month the new version of Ubuntu was [...]
A couple of weeks ago I took Wednesday off work to go out orienteering. On getting to the train station I said hello to a friend who was waiting, with some of his family, for a steam train to go past. I nearly walked straight past them in my rush to catch my train. With [...]
In the middle of October I travelled up north. The main reason for the trip was to attend the Compass Sport Cup and Trophy final, with my orienteering club being in the trophy competition, which is for ‘small’ orienteering clubs in the UK. While in the area I decided to also run the Woodbank parkrun [...]
At the beginning of October I went to the Midlands for a weekend. Octavian Droobers, the orienteering club for the Coventry and Warwickshire area, were hosting a park race on the Saturday and an urban race on Sunday around Warwick. I had suffered food poisoning on the Thursday before going away and this meant I [...]
I seem to have got behind in posting to my blog! A while back, in mid-September, I went to London for the Third City of London Orienteering Race. This year the race started near the Tower of London and finished on the south side of the river. My route shows where I went. Generally I [...]
A couple of weekends ago I travelled up to Scotland to watch and compete in the Park World Tour and to watch the Junior Home International (JHI). I flew out of Southampton Airport and this reminded me that flying from the smaller regional airports is a nicer experience than going through a big place like [...]
Having travelled back from the Lake District it was on to the Didcot Urban Race. By the time I got to this event the illness that was threatening on the last day of the Lakes had materialised. There was no way I was going to be able to run, so I decided that I would [...]
I woke up on the morning of this event feeling tired. On reflection I should not have run, as what I took for tiredness was really illness. I struggled to run at a decent speed and this area was very much suited to running quickly. I messed up starting my Garmin properly, so I do [...]
The fourth day saw us going to Caw. The car park was a long way from the comeptition area, so it was again a case of packing a bag and taking it slowly to get there reasonably fresh. I stopped at the finish, which was on the way to the start, and had a banana [...]
At the event on Monday there were signs saying that the third day was definitely on. However, a little while later the third day got postponed to the ‘rest’ day and at some point on Tuesday it then got cancelled. This meant that there were lots of people raring to go on the ‘rest’ day [...]
The conditions for the second day of the Lakes 5 days were much different to the first day. At around the time of the first people starting the rain came. It stopped, briefly, a couple of times, but this day was wet. It was a distinct advantage to start fairly early – just far enough [...]
I visited a friend yesterday and he commented that I had not yet made a post about visiting the lake district and orienteering at the end of August. So, here is the first, in a series of posts, about the trip – with the main reason for the trip being to compete in the Lakes [...]
I decided to take a day off work this week and used it to go to the BAOC summer series event at Sandhurst. At the event there were four courses to choose from – a long and a short in the forest and a long and a short urban race in the military academy grounds. [...]
A couple of weekends ago, I went to the Berkshire Fetch Mile – these events are organised through the Fetcheveryone website. I had had vague thoughts about doing one of the local parkruns before but decided, instead, to have a welcome lie in. I travelled by train to Thatcham and then had a pleasant couple [...]
For the mid summer weekend I travelled to south Wales for a further opportunity to orienteer on sand dunes. This time I got an opportunity to go to Merthyr Mawr, which has the highest individual sand dune in Europe – often referred to as the big dipper. Saturday – Individual Oh dear, this did not [...]
Following on from Winchester was the British Age Class Sprint Orienteering Championships, which took place at HMS Sultan. The elite championships took place early in the year so, while there was a race for the open men category, it was not surprising that the turn out in my category was low. Due to reasons I [...]
I have ended up with a backlog of orienteering events to post about. Since the Tamar Triple I have orienteered six times and I am only now finding time to mention the events. Of course, I will definitely be saying that this backlog has been caused by being busy working and training, and that it [...]
Last weekend I travelled to Cornwall to compete in the Tamar Triple weekend of orienteering events, which took place on Penhale – an area of sand dunes situated to the south of Newquay.
The UK is currently enjoying a heatwave. Over the weekend temperatures climbed to 10C warmer than average for this time of year. It was hot when I set off from home, on Saturday morning, to run up to an orienteering event taking place at the University of Reading – i.e at the place where I [...]
Sunday saw a trip to Hawley for some orienteering. I had been to a wedding the day before, which involved a rather good ‘wedding cake’ made of rounds of cheese and also a rather late bedtime. Consequently, I was not at my best on Sunday and decided to do a shorter course than normal. I [...]
On Sunday I ran the Bracknell Half Marathon. I had, early in the year, made plans to attempt to run a PB at this race. In the last few weeks I decided that I was not in the best of shape and shelved the plans for a future day. I did not think much to [...]
Last Friday I travelled down to Dorset and took part in the first race of Poole Runners Summer Series. This race was two laps of Upton Country Park. The Garmin track of my run shows how close we pass to the Holes Bay part of Poole Harbour. I had a reasonable run. I started slightly [...]
This year the Jan Kjellström (JK) Festival of Orienteering took place, over the Easter Weekend, in Devon and was hosted by the South West Orienteering Association, of which my orienteering club is a member. I was attached to the junior squad and, so, spent part of each day parking cars.
The laptop I have been using as my main machine for a few years now has been struggling – it is four and a half years old – and I decided that it would be best to replace it before it failed. I have been looking at options for a while and I decided that [...]
Last Saturday I went on a Performance Coaching Day, organised by the British Army Orienteering Club. Over twenty members of Wimborne Orienteers, my club, spent the day in a series of orienteering activities. I have had little formal orienteering coaching before and it was good to spend some time concentrating on specific tasks, which should [...]
When writing about the Wokingham Half Marathon I mentioned that I had arrived back in the UK, from Santa Fe, shortly before the race, but I failed to mention why I had been away. At the beginning of February I started a new job, in the Evolutionary Biology Group, which is in the School of [...]
This past weekend I travelled down to Cornwall for the Duchy Marathon. My preparation for this race had been mixed. During January I did a decent amount of training, with some good long runs. The lack of running in February, however, meant that I had effectively had a five week taper. My plan was to [...]
On arriving back into the UK yesterday, after two weeks in Santa Fe, NM, I decided that I would run a half marathon. With the lack of sleep and the hours of travelling, I decided that I would run at an easy pace and then pick up the speed towards the end if I felt [...]
This past weekend I travelled down to Dorset again. The main reason was to meet my nephew, who is nine days old today. However, while down I decided that I would make it to the Poole Runners’ Boscombe 5k. My preparation was not great for this race – I finished my old job on Friday [...]
Last weekend I travelled to the New Forest, to compete for my club in the south central and south west Compass Sport Trophy round at Hampton Ridge – the inter-club competition for small, UK orienteering clubs. (There is a Compass Sport Cup for the larger clubs.) In addition to the orienteering I wanted to extend [...]
A few weeks ago I decided that it would be a good idea to backup all my photos. Currently I have over 4000 photos, which amounts to 6 GB. So the question was what was the best method? This task went on the todo list and I pondered the best way to go about this. [...]
