Sorry blog fans, I’ve been a bit lax with the posts recently. This one’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to over the past few weeks…

First up was a weekend of motorsport and fell running. The last one of these I attempted resulted in a complete failure to even attend the fell running part, so this could be deemed more successful on that front. On the saturday I met James at Oulton Park where he was taking part in a rally. His little Pug was moving so fast I couldn’t actually manage to get a photo of it, so have instead included this mildly interesting video (it’s also an excuse to test my new Vimeo account as well). I was hoping to embed it on this page, but Vimeo seem to want to extract money from me to do that, unfortunately.

After staying overnight at my brother’s house, I ventured out to the Roaches fell race on the Sunday. There I met Greg, and quickly realised that everyone there looked very serious. Sure enough, it turned out that only serious sado-masochists enter this race, and after 18 miles and 1200m of ascent I was pretty knackered. The final mile of ankle deep mud and slurry did nothing to improve my mood, but just as my internal monologue disappeared under a mound of foul language I spotted Greg. He’d finished about ten minutes earlier than me, and had walked back up the course to drag me the final 100m to the finish line; hero. I suffered on the climbs and walked a lot of the route, finishing with a time of 3h 30m, putting me about two-thirds of the way down the field. A bit worse than most of my results of late, but probably a wake-up call that some work is needed on my ascents.

Becs and I had a few days in south Wales towards the end of November – I got rather excited on the way, as we unexpectedly passed and therefore called in to Strata Florida, a cistercian monestary which I had seen on The History of Wales a few days earlier.

We also managed a bit of dolphin-spotting…

… and the dog failed to understand the concept of using his crate on the back seat instead of being shut in the boot…

More recently, I did the Helena Tipping 10km road race in Wrexham with my brother. Last year’s was hard work, and this year was the same. I knew I was going in to it off the back of a cold, but was pleased to keep my target pace up to 8km out of the 10. After that I just had to slow down, and ended up with a final time of 40m 51s against my target of 40m. Still quicker than last year, so I’m reasonably pleased.

I also went to a Hundred Reasons gig in London that was to commemorate ten years since the release of Ideas Above Our Station. I guess that means I’m getting old, but I would recommend that if your name is Ben and you read this blog, you really should listen to that album because I think you’d like it.

That is all; I’ll try to be more punctual in future.