running, reading, nonsense.
Hunstanton and Heacham are the coastal towns of my youth. Would I recommend them as a holiday destination to some strapping young couple, looking for adventure and sensual excitement? No, absolutely not. But both towns, like so many British coastal towns, serve up a very specific kind of laid back leisure. My family had rented… Continue reading Running the Coast of My Youth
Image by Matt Seymour, from Unsplash.com The North Midlands Cross Country league is sort of the premier event for endurance runners at my athletics club, but I’ve never actually been involved before. The combination of recurring lockdowns and my previous job consistently eating up my Saturdays has prevented me from ever being able to turn… Continue reading MUD
Fresh from my trip to the Peak District, I had a feeling that I would enjoy my first half marathon. The word enjoy, as always with running, is relative. In running terms it means a type II kind of pleasure - that ‘oh that was fun’ kind of feeling, not a ‘oh this is fun’… Continue reading The Debut
The first sign that not all was right was when the first mile arrived before the first mile should have arrived. GPS is an unreliable friend at best however, so I disregarded this and trundled on. When the 4 mile sign drifted past as the watch stuck 3.25 miles I thought perhaps, yes, something has… Continue reading Not 10 Miles
It is a relatively small, but notably unique and remarkably challenging, rise in the Peak District, just outside the sleepy village of East Sterndale. The clouds were low, but they didn’t obscure the view so much as to make it all the more dramatic; crowning every hill top, farmhouse, and tumulus, in eerie grey wreaths.… Continue reading Alone on Parkhouse Hill
I firmly believe that most of the time during training your body should feel good. You do not have to be smashing it all of the time to make progress. Space and time to recover is just as important as the sessions themselves and, a lot of the time, you want to be going into… Continue reading The Well, The Water.
Is running therapy? Or is therapy, therapy? Exercise (and in particular running, I find) is good for clearing the head, for keeping an even keel, and staying generally healthy. Perhaps then, running on a regular basis will keep you mentally well but, then again, maybe it won’t. The brain is far too complicated to be… Continue reading A Sheringham Circular (and, what we don’t know we need).
I don’t listen to a lot of audiobooks, but as I continue to step up the volume of books that I read I am finding Audible to be a useful and, more importantly, fun way to sneak an extra book into my roster. Towards the end of last year I read The Handmaids Tale this… Continue reading The Dutch House
This is a book about living hard. About trying. About how trying sometimes isn’t enough. In this his novel from 2014 author Smith Henderson pulls no punches as he paints a portrait of America as a hive of contradictions. In it he explores concepts of freedom and of anarchy and of social responsibility. It is… Continue reading Fourth of July Creek
There are all manner of Best of 2019 and Best of the Decade lists to sift through to find out what has been missed, and that’s how I came to read Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier. Getting to art through the medium of someone else telling you that is Very Good creates unfairly high… Continue reading Night Boat to Tangier
run into words 