In the interest of public decency no photos exist of the following....

Having missed out on the Isle of Coll half Marathon on Saturday I announced this am that I would like to see if I could “go the distance”. What a good job that I did the rooms first…Garret and Toby have marked a 10k route out from the house which winds back to Inveraray and then turns along the shore for most of the route ending in Furnace, and then you turn and come back. This in a way is the problem; my poor body had already been pushed to its limits, peeked over the limit edge and run away in fright at what it saw there. There was a point with 3kish to go when I could have given in to the increasingly urgent cries from ankle (L), toes, lungs, groin (think I will stop there) and had a big, big paddy by the side of the track but that would have been embarrassing in front of the dog so I tried to enter a higher plane and slogged on. Garret was meantime offering points of training and advice all along the way as he bounced jauntily and irritatingly from one foot to another effortlessly covering the miles whilst I gasped and panted my way along the route, which I can now appreciate but at the time made me long for a small but sharp knife to sink between his shoulder blades…mind, I would have had to catch him first which would have been a challenge. We arrived back home eventually and I met my friend the gate with cries (well, actually more sobs) of delight and clung onto it for a few minutes in haze of relief, exhaustion and, with quite painfully a very hot head. Garret began to wave something under my nose which when the mists had cleared turned out to be his stopwatch, I know that you are waiting with baited breath… One hour and fifty-three minutes. No wonder I felt as though someone had shaken me up and re-arranged the body parts at random. Of course Lucy needed only a quick lie down and a slurp of water to render her as good as new, jumping around begging for her balloon to be bounced on her nose. For me it took two mugs of water, lots of tea, several Bovril sandwiches and a hot bath, I am still not really feeling up to the balloon on the nose thing.

......and one of faithful Timmy

Five go off on An Adventure to Inveraray

So off the intrepid Five set on their bikes accompanied by their faithful hound Lucy…sorry Timmy. The sturdiest one of them took on her back a haversack packed with stout waterproofs and emergency rations (actually she forgot these but it sounds good) for the journey ahead (which made her back very sweaty but this cannot be mentioned because in Enid Blyton World there is no sweat, or bickering about who goes first for that matter). Timmy went mad with excitement as they headed off towards a new adventure…who knows what they might find? Smugglers? Criminals? Kidnappers? People who are a bit mean to dogs sometimes? It would be nice to report that they had lashings of ginger beer and freshly made home made sandwiches but two out of the five do not like ginger beer and the housekeeper neglected to make the sandwiches being a spendthrift wanton type of person that prefer to buy a picnic from Londis rather than drag it 4 miles on her sweaty back. Anyway enough of this ‘cos the plot kind of falls down when no one wants to be Julian or Dick.

Marshmallow Toasting (a serious buisness indeed)

Catch up time

Yet another sausage sizzle, cannot resist a photo session against such a great backdrop. How lucky are we?! Mind you whilst all under 13s were swimming Aunty Liz was huddled in her fleece nursing a sore arm (but she still enjoyed her sizzled sausages and fried egg)

Latest in the H.P saga

Red hot Chili Peppers (or RHCP as us cool dudes say)

Great night at Hamden Park watching the above along with 44,000 (give or take) other people of varying ages.Did not feel too old which is nice and had the experience of viewing the tourist trade from the other side for once (stayed night in a hotel in Glasgow..how grown up are we!!! Concert and a night away from home, we even got to stay up past 10pm which made some of us, naming no names (Garret) a wee bit overtired at getting up time the next day.)

Oops, a forgotten picture from many weeks ago......

The weekly log of pain resumes

Running club is up and um.....running (sorry) for the Autumn term. We warmed up, we jogged a mile or so and then we raced a mile or so. This latter distance was hotly disputed at the end by those with enough breath to speak and it was decided that it was 1.2 miles at least. This was a time trial to be used at the middle and end of the eight weeks session. With hind sight (slogging along to the 1/2 way turn round point) it would have been better to run really slowly and then look good in October but hey ho.....Check out the times and no doubt the opinion will be that we did indeed do that very thing.4 minute miles they weren't. Plenty of room for improvement. Will publish later times as and when we do them but only if they are better...obviously.

Garret 7.53
Fee 8.48

PS Nice to see Howard and Myrna today for a cuppa...roll on the winter months.

Agonised Thoughts of an aspiring long (well, short actually) distance runner.

Ho Hum (or other such happy sounds) this is nice and the dog is enjoying herself…me too
Ummm Steep hill, ahh well it's good for me, maybe I'll do it at a sprint
And maybe not.....
Could do with some water
Ummm Another steep hill
ipod starting to crackle in one ear
I will have deserved a large Gin and Tonic when I get home
Ahhhh, down hill
Gulp, up again (nice view) Feel sick, forget GnT, just need water
Too hot, Too hot, Too hot
More down hill
Feel really sick now, and a bit lonely on the hills as Lucy potters off into the wild, chases a few deer, sniffs around abit safe in the knowledge that when she returns from these forays I will have progressed about 3 feet.
ipod annoying me a lot now
Why do my knees wobble like that, and why do I do this to myself?
At least the dog is still having fun
Water
Water
Water
Rip ipod from crackling ear; try to find better running music…got Lily Allen…much better..
Long break whilst no tranmittable thoughts pass between my ears except Lily Allen lyrics.
Yippee I can see home at the bottom of the hill
Too fast, Too fast, Too fast! (Not good on down hills, remember?)
Oppps, nearly cannon into small sports car turning at our gate in my haste to achieve the last few hundred yards at a kind of gallopy bouncing type gait.
This last bit set to music...even in my head!

I feel good, I knew that I would....yeahhhh.

Garden on a plate...let your imaginations soar!!!

A small competition held today at the culmination of a week spent by various committed gardening experts examining and judging participating gardens...a truly british convention.......And Rosie got second prize for her Desert Garden (with a frog that was very froglike indeed...only he started life as a lizard but once the legs were on he was most definatly a frog!) Well done Rosie!

Barriers to exercise parts one, two and three (and four)

1.Large lunch of left over home made rolls and coffee…time spent allowing them to slip down.
2.Funny programme on radio.
3.Infuriatingly ideal drying weather necessitating the almost constant filling of both washers, then subsequent emptying onto the washing lines (short things only on the one in the back field else the goats, Tabitha and Poppy might sample them as a little break from the more mundane forms of food that are available to them normally). The laundry basket seems to be under a Sorcerer’s Apprentice type spell as it just keeps refilling itself as soon as a load is removed from its capacious interior.
4.Lastly the discovery that the bike that I last rode before the little darlings were released full time onto the world (well, my world anyway) has been used as some kind of bird toilet. It is well splattered at the front where your hands lightly rest (well, grip frantically and sweatily in a manner destined to weld all fingers to the plastic covering in my case) and to add insult to injury my helmet that I left tidily on the handle bars so that I should not have to spend my usual ten angry minutes stomping round the hut shouting “Where the hell is my helmet, I know I left it here…someone must have moved it” has had the best bits i.e. those that are especially sticky and nicely adherent, reserved for the interior and, a nice touch here, the chin strap.
Right, I am definatly off now, so if you happen to be driving along the A83 between Bridge of Douglas and Furnace in the next hour or so (which I admit is fairly unlikely) and you see a labouring, wheezy figure (if further identification is needed there will be an accompanying cloud of dried bird poo drifting along in my wake) toiling up the hills and screaming down the other side, I am no better going down a hill on a bike than I am on a cantering horse (see " Back in The Saddle June 11th) do me a favour and give me a wide berth.

Home Alone

Yippee….. A free blogging moment in a busy world. We are in a whirl of guests and holidays, books and films with the children deep in the world of Harry Potter. Freya has reached the last book and Toby the 6th. After an abortive attempt to see the film finally yesterday (got to Oban at midday to find the times changed this week, despite the film’s undoubted pulling power we declined to wait until 8.15pm and went to see The Simpsons movie instead. An okay way to spend 90 minutes, some funny one-liners but Harry Potter it was NOT.) So, I am home alone plugging away at household tasks whilst Garret has gone off to the osteopaths with children in tow, a promise of HP at the Clydebank Empire afterward hanging around their necks. Please note the lack of a tantrum on my behalf, I shall be very adult and wait for the DVD….they all owe me BIG time though!!
Just the dogs and me today then and maybe, just maybe some exercise, what a novelty that will be. Managed a 5-mile round run yesterday but spent the first couple of miles with the unnerving feeling that my feet had unaccountable become the size and relative weight of Florence’s from The Magic Roundabout (the 70s TV version not the sacrilegious, atrocious film released a few years ago), this was compounded on the hill by a total body lethargy that began mid calf and spread rapidly upwards like a sort of weary hot flush. The downhill bit at the end was great though. Have just realised that I am subconsciously prolonging this blog, writing about exercise instead of getting out there and doing it…Yeah…Go girl Go. A bit of spare time for a change lets gets those endorphins flowing, you know you want to, OR I could just go get lunch……..