NaJo Nov 2018.
Created | Updated Oct 28, 2019
1st Nov 2018
I’ve thought to do the NaJo for the last few years, but never actually made it into print. Last year I managed to create the ‘A’ page, but failed at the last moment to produce anything that may be considered to be ‘content’. Nevertheless I thought again this year and decided to make a meaningful effort to produce something… anything. But what? You can already guess that I’m struggling, can’t you.
A couple or three years ago I took up paddling, (That’s in a boat, as opposed to with bare feet and a knotted handkerchief) and it has taken up quite a lot of my spare time. Originally it was to do a long distance race that features prominently in the paddling community’s calendar, but as time went on I gradually learned my shortcomings and that sort of faded away and was stacked at the back of the mind for future reference. I did eventually take up racing kayaks in the national Hasler league. That’s an annual series of races named after ‘Blondie’ Hasler, the commander of operation Francton, better known as the Cockleshell Hero’s raid on shipping during WW2.
Eventually the amount of time spent on training sessions and travelling to events became just too much, especially when the club that I belonged to seconded me to help with the coached sessions twice a week. Something had to give and I’m now taking a sabbatical of undetermined duration away from it all. Perhaps now the garden will get sorted properly and I may even find the time to write a journal.
2nd Nov
In yesterday’s missive I owned how paddling was taking up most of my spare time. That was quite true but it wasn’t the whole story. There was jogging as well. There was a bit of an overlap as I tried to cram both in together during the course of a week but it wasn’t practical and I ended up regularly swapping the main focus of my attentions between the two, giving one the priority over the other. Usually this would be for a couple of months at a time as I became bored with one, changing it for the other. That was all very well but it meant that I never really gave the dedication to either that they both required. The upshot was that a mediocre performance was all that was ever going to result.
In the end I’ve opted to put paddling on the permanent back burner and concentrate on jogging. In the dim and distant past I spent a lot of time running and produced some results that I impressed myself with. Twenty or so years later there is unfortunately absolutely no chance of repeating them. But jogging doesn’t require the peripheral time that paddling does. Loading boats and equipment and clothing onto cars, (twice for each trip), finding and driving miles to a venue that allows a get-in to the water and parking a car just doesn’t cut it in time saving to changing into shoes and shorts and just running out the door.
My ‘running out the door’ now consists of jogging down to the local recreation ground which is large enough for me to have marked off a loop around the perimeter that measures almost exactly a half mile. This is a convenient size in relation to the parkrun distance of 5k meters, or, just over 3 miles. So, I’m currently running around this loop 6 times to a session to cover the distance with a 2 minute rest between loops. Each loop is done at a speed that I couldn’t maintain for the full 5k which overall ends up with an increase in overall speed.
The consequence of all this is that the jogging, having received my undivided attention for a couple of months now, has brought about an improvement in the local parkrun time trials and a personal best in their age related rankings.
Onwards
3rd Nov
Saturday is parkrun day. Parkrun first started in 2004 when a Paul Sinton-Hewitt of the South London running club Ranelagh Harriers, dreamed up a 5000 meter time-trial that was to be open to everyone and free of charge. The inaugural event was held in Bushy Park on the outskirts of Hampton on 2 October 2004. Thirteen runners took part and from that the phenomena that is parkrun began.
To my eternal regret I passed up an opportunity to take part in that original event. Previously I had been a member of Ranelagh and my son mentioned that that ‘they’ were organising an open run in Bushy and did I want to go along. At the time I was more into the longer distances and anything shorter than 5 miles was more like a warm-up than a run. I seem to remember declining with some derogatory comment. Little did I know what it was to become. Some years later I saw a picture of the start of that time-trial and could recognise at least three runners that I knew from earlier days and had run with for Ranelagh in various road and cross country events.
Fast forward to 2015… now retired and looking for some running events that didn’t require silly money to participate, to supplement the paddling training to improve the aerobic efficiency. It was fairly natural then that I’d fall back to running as a natural resource. I found parkrun on my doorstep. Actually, by that time it was practically on everyone’s doorstep having spread around the country and abroad.
Back to today and my participation in parkrun. My runs total 83 as of today. They are split between Bushy Park which is the closest to me and Richmond Park which is only about five miles away. They are both beautiful locations and it’s a real pleasure to get out for a run with others that can provide the competitive element to make you work harder and produce times that would be much more difficult to achieve by yourself.
The two courses provide quite different challenges from each other. Bushy is as flat as a pancake with a semi figure 8 course and the good paths make fast times possible. Richmond is er… undulating. The first mile and well into the second is predominantly downhill. The last mile provides a long uphill gradient that initially saps the strength from the legs. At the end of the gradient a short, sharp uphill rise is hidden as the path turns right around the edge of a copse then suddenly descends as far down as you’ve just come up. At the bottom it rises again in a full blown hill of about a hundred yards, flattens out, then up again to the finish. It’s this point that my heart rate monitor tells me I’m maxing out.
My parkrun this morning was at Richmond which followed the usual format. About a half hour warm up and stretching while edging nearer to the start. Taking on board the race directors last minute instructions and applauding the volunteers and, in today’s case, the couple that are parkrunning this morning and getting married this afternoon. Lining up at the start, then the off. A hard run throughout tailing a runner designated as a pacer for the 26 minute slot. Up today not having quite enough puff to overtake. At last the finish right on the 26 minutes.
I can think of better ways to spend a Saturday morning, but not many.
4th Nov
I first heard about it a year ago or so. That a sculpture artist had planted a horses head in a field nearby. He was apparently a well known artist that had planted a few horses parts in fields around the country. I also vaguely recalled seeing a photo in the news of a horse, several times life size rearing out of the ground. I also recalled Mrs D exclaiming in some little surprise as we drove home one evening during the summer, that she had seen it. It seemed like a good idea to go have a look at it. But where?
Neither of us could recall exactly where that was. Searching the internet produced little information on its location other than it was overlooking the A3 main road near the Oxshott interchange. Looking at the aerial Google map produced nothing. It later turned out that the photographs pre-dated the sculptures installation. Nevertheless checking the map produced a couple of possibilities that looked likely so I took myself off with the dog to give him a walk at the same time.
We parked up at the other side of the village and walked across an area known as Arbrook common. It’s a place I’m familiar with as I’ve jogged around that area and taken part in a 10k race there. The far side of the common backs up against the London bound railway line and the fields I was looking for are on the other side of the A3 at the end of the common. So it meant crossing the rail line, then the common, and then the A3 at the far side. Crossing the rail bridge was easy enough but the main road had to be via an underpass which was partly flooded had to be negotiated around the worst of the mud in the unlit passageway. Coming out on the other side I could see the ground rose in an incline and the path took a sharp turn. On the other side I could see the target of the horse head outlined against the skyline.
The head was about 200 yards away up the incline. The only trouble now preventing a closer look being a substantial wooden fence topped by an electric wire and a herd of cows grazing in the field. As far as I could see there was no way around all this to get a clearer picture. The best I could manage was with the telephoto facility on the camera. I took a couple of pictures, had a chat with a another passing dog walker who wanted to know what it was, then went on around the path that bordered the field.
The upshot was that the path petered out near an access road to the A3. On the other side was a fairly considerable industrial building that closed off any access further around. At that point I gave up and retraced my steps to get back to civilisation. So that was it, I had to make do with the photos I had, which turned out not too badly but lack any real detail. Maybe I’ll go back another time for another try… or maybe not.
5th Nov
Does anyone use a Kindle anymore? A recent report suggests that electronic reader sales is down, year on year by something like 15%. Can it be anything to do with the oft proffered suggestion that readers prefer the ‘feel’ of a real book and they like turning pages. Personally I don’t have that hang-up.
When I first got mine I thought that it was the answer to the eternal storage problem. Once a book is read it has to be kept. Personally I just can’t give a book away let alone throw it away. But it still takes up space. There is now about 200 books on my Kindle which have been read and are all sitting in the same space as one paperback novel. There are also another 25 or so unread books that I’ve obtained when they’ve been recommended to me or I’ve just taken a fancy to. They all sit in the same space on the internal ‘unread bookshelf’ awaiting my attention.
Before I got the Kindle I knew that there were an awful lot of books that I would have liked to read and many that I ‘should’ have read. For the most part I’ve used it to catch up with many of the ‘classics’ that I haven’t touched and some others that I’ve only read the expurgated version. Some of those have been heavy going. I’m also a sucker for Stephen King and have a large part of his output. (Not the Dark Tower books though).
The fact of the matter is that I probably would never have bought or read those books without having the Kindle. Having to stash them all somewhere would have taken up a sizeable library bookcase, the space for which I just cannot spare. As it is there is about the same number of actual books stacked in boxes and old suitcases up in the loft space. Although they are in plastic bags the conditions up there are probably not doing them any favours.
Anyhoo.. it works for me.
I’ve thought to do the NaJo for the last few years, but never actually made it into print. Last year I managed to create the ‘A’ page, but failed at the last moment to produce anything that may be considered to be ‘content’. Nevertheless I thought again this year and decided to make a meaningful effort to produce something… anything. But what? You can already guess that I’m struggling, can’t you.
A couple or three years ago I took up paddling, (That’s in a boat, as opposed to with bare feet and a knotted handkerchief) and it has taken up quite a lot of my spare time. Originally it was to do a long distance race that features prominently in the paddling community’s calendar, but as time went on I gradually learned my shortcomings and that sort of faded away and was stacked at the back of the mind for future reference. I did eventually take up racing kayaks in the national Hasler league. That’s an annual series of races named after ‘Blondie’ Hasler, the commander of operation Francton, better known as the Cockleshell Hero’s raid on shipping during WW2.
Eventually the amount of time spent on training sessions and travelling to events became just too much, especially when the club that I belonged to seconded me to help with the coached sessions twice a week. Something had to give and I’m now taking a sabbatical of undetermined duration away from it all. Perhaps now the garden will get sorted properly and I may even find the time to write a journal.
2nd Nov
In yesterday’s missive I owned how paddling was taking up most of my spare time. That was quite true but it wasn’t the whole story. There was jogging as well. There was a bit of an overlap as I tried to cram both in together during the course of a week but it wasn’t practical and I ended up regularly swapping the main focus of my attentions between the two, giving one the priority over the other. Usually this would be for a couple of months at a time as I became bored with one, changing it for the other. That was all very well but it meant that I never really gave the dedication to either that they both required. The upshot was that a mediocre performance was all that was ever going to result.
In the end I’ve opted to put paddling on the permanent back burner and concentrate on jogging. In the dim and distant past I spent a lot of time running and produced some results that I impressed myself with. Twenty or so years later there is unfortunately absolutely no chance of repeating them. But jogging doesn’t require the peripheral time that paddling does. Loading boats and equipment and clothing onto cars, (twice for each trip), finding and driving miles to a venue that allows a get-in to the water and parking a car just doesn’t cut it in time saving to changing into shoes and shorts and just running out the door.
My ‘running out the door’ now consists of jogging down to the local recreation ground which is large enough for me to have marked off a loop around the perimeter that measures almost exactly a half mile. This is a convenient size in relation to the parkrun distance of 5k meters, or, just over 3 miles. So, I’m currently running around this loop 6 times to a session to cover the distance with a 2 minute rest between loops. Each loop is done at a speed that I couldn’t maintain for the full 5k which overall ends up with an increase in overall speed.
The consequence of all this is that the jogging, having received my undivided attention for a couple of months now, has brought about an improvement in the local parkrun time trials and a personal best in their age related rankings.
Onwards
3rd Nov
Saturday is parkrun day. Parkrun first started in 2004 when a Paul Sinton-Hewitt of the South London running club Ranelagh Harriers, dreamed up a 5000 meter time-trial that was to be open to everyone and free of charge. The inaugural event was held in Bushy Park on the outskirts of Hampton on 2 October 2004. Thirteen runners took part and from that the phenomena that is parkrun began.
To my eternal regret I passed up an opportunity to take part in that original event. Previously I had been a member of Ranelagh and my son mentioned that that ‘they’ were organising an open run in Bushy and did I want to go along. At the time I was more into the longer distances and anything shorter than 5 miles was more like a warm-up than a run. I seem to remember declining with some derogatory comment. Little did I know what it was to become. Some years later I saw a picture of the start of that time-trial and could recognise at least three runners that I knew from earlier days and had run with for Ranelagh in various road and cross country events.
Fast forward to 2015… now retired and looking for some running events that didn’t require silly money to participate, to supplement the paddling training to improve the aerobic efficiency. It was fairly natural then that I’d fall back to running as a natural resource. I found parkrun on my doorstep. Actually, by that time it was practically on everyone’s doorstep having spread around the country and abroad.
Back to today and my participation in parkrun. My runs total 83 as of today. They are split between Bushy Park which is the closest to me and Richmond Park which is only about five miles away. They are both beautiful locations and it’s a real pleasure to get out for a run with others that can provide the competitive element to make you work harder and produce times that would be much more difficult to achieve by yourself.
The two courses provide quite different challenges from each other. Bushy is as flat as a pancake with a semi figure 8 course and the good paths make fast times possible. Richmond is er… undulating. The first mile and well into the second is predominantly downhill. The last mile provides a long uphill gradient that initially saps the strength from the legs. At the end of the gradient a short, sharp uphill rise is hidden as the path turns right around the edge of a copse then suddenly descends as far down as you’ve just come up. At the bottom it rises again in a full blown hill of about a hundred yards, flattens out, then up again to the finish. It’s this point that my heart rate monitor tells me I’m maxing out.
My parkrun this morning was at Richmond which followed the usual format. About a half hour warm up and stretching while edging nearer to the start. Taking on board the race directors last minute instructions and applauding the volunteers and, in today’s case, the couple that are parkrunning this morning and getting married this afternoon. Lining up at the start, then the off. A hard run throughout tailing a runner designated as a pacer for the 26 minute slot. Up today not having quite enough puff to overtake. At last the finish right on the 26 minutes.
I can think of better ways to spend a Saturday morning, but not many.
4th Nov
I first heard about it a year ago or so. That a sculpture artist had planted a horses head in a field nearby. He was apparently a well known artist that had planted a few horses parts in fields around the country. I also vaguely recalled seeing a photo in the news of a horse, several times life size rearing out of the ground. I also recalled Mrs D exclaiming in some little surprise as we drove home one evening during the summer, that she had seen it. It seemed like a good idea to go have a look at it. But where?
Neither of us could recall exactly where that was. Searching the internet produced little information on its location other than it was overlooking the A3 main road near the Oxshott interchange. Looking at the aerial Google map produced nothing. It later turned out that the photographs pre-dated the sculptures installation. Nevertheless checking the map produced a couple of possibilities that looked likely so I took myself off with the dog to give him a walk at the same time.
We parked up at the other side of the village and walked across an area known as Arbrook common. It’s a place I’m familiar with as I’ve jogged around that area and taken part in a 10k race there. The far side of the common backs up against the London bound railway line and the fields I was looking for are on the other side of the A3 at the end of the common. So it meant crossing the rail line, then the common, and then the A3 at the far side. Crossing the rail bridge was easy enough but the main road had to be via an underpass which was partly flooded had to be negotiated around the worst of the mud in the unlit passageway. Coming out on the other side I could see the ground rose in an incline and the path took a sharp turn. On the other side I could see the target of the horse head outlined against the skyline.
The head was about 200 yards away up the incline. The only trouble now preventing a closer look being a substantial wooden fence topped by an electric wire and a herd of cows grazing in the field. As far as I could see there was no way around all this to get a clearer picture. The best I could manage was with the telephoto facility on the camera. I took a couple of pictures, had a chat with a another passing dog walker who wanted to know what it was, then went on around the path that bordered the field.
The upshot was that the path petered out near an access road to the A3. On the other side was a fairly considerable industrial building that closed off any access further around. At that point I gave up and retraced my steps to get back to civilisation. So that was it, I had to make do with the photos I had, which turned out not too badly but lack any real detail. Maybe I’ll go back another time for another try… or maybe not.
5th Nov
Does anyone use a Kindle anymore? A recent report suggests that electronic reader sales is down, year on year by something like 15%. Can it be anything to do with the oft proffered suggestion that readers prefer the ‘feel’ of a real book and they like turning pages. Personally I don’t have that hang-up.
When I first got mine I thought that it was the answer to the eternal storage problem. Once a book is read it has to be kept. Personally I just can’t give a book away let alone throw it away. But it still takes up space. There is now about 200 books on my Kindle which have been read and are all sitting in the same space as one paperback novel. There are also another 25 or so unread books that I’ve obtained when they’ve been recommended to me or I’ve just taken a fancy to. They all sit in the same space on the internal ‘unread bookshelf’ awaiting my attention.
Before I got the Kindle I knew that there were an awful lot of books that I would have liked to read and many that I ‘should’ have read. For the most part I’ve used it to catch up with many of the ‘classics’ that I haven’t touched and some others that I’ve only read the expurgated version. Some of those have been heavy going. I’m also a sucker for Stephen King and have a large part of his output. (Not the Dark Tower books though).
The fact of the matter is that I probably would never have bought or read those books without having the Kindle. Having to stash them all somewhere would have taken up a sizeable library bookcase, the space for which I just cannot spare. As it is there is about the same number of actual books stacked in boxes and old suitcases up in the loft space. Although they are in plastic bags the conditions up there are probably not doing them any favours.
Anyhoo.. it works for me.
