Mar 27, 2024 | Family Tree, Legs!, Writing
So, that was March then, marked mainly by the blossoming of my fruit trees.
It has been an odd month. For a start, I haven’t been running at all and withdrew from two events I’d booked onto – no Edinburgh half marathon for me this year. Nor have I been to the gym. My left knee was playing up in late February and I decided to give it a complete rest apart from walking. As of this afternoon that appears to have done the trick (I think it was probably a muscular problem rather than a knee problem,) but time will tell. You might think that has given me plenty of free time to write, but instead I’ve made a start on the long task of putting my accumulated family tree research notes into order. That means systematically editing what I have and identifying the areas where more needs to be done.
My aim is to ensure that I have a solid base of evidence of people and timelines and then to contextualise that within social history using as much as I can determine about my ancestors’ lives as a framework. Predominantly, their lives in C19 and earlier involved coal and ironstone mining, the railways, lace and silk manufacture and agricultural labour. For the most part I have my main family lines back to around 1800 with reasonable certainty and sometimes before that with less clarity.
The last few days have mainly been given over to trying to figure out a mess of C19 illegitimacy and bigamy in Nottingham and Bakewell; there’s nothing like family history to reveal the degree to which we are a mongrel breed – a good thing: diversity is strength.
Researching and editing engages a different part of the brain to writing fiction but also acts as a general refresher for the subconscious. I think we all find that one way to generate ideas about something is to concentrate on something else entirely. My plan was to have some stories out this year, but they may slip into 2025 and I’m comfortable with that.
I have a couple of potential blog posts in the offing about my return to genealogy but I’m letting them simmer for a while.
Dec 3, 2023 | Legs!
With the coming of winter and colder days, I’ve joined a local gym. Part of the reason is to keep my running going in a warmer setting, the other part is to pick up on resistance training as well as cardio.
I haven’t been in a gym in anger since 2011 or thereby but I used to be a regular in the gym at Victoria Quay when I was a civil servant. I had a more complete routine then based on various machines, but in the intervening years I’ve forgotten how to use them properly (and therefore safely). My current routine is based on three things, not including warm up and stretching: half an hour on a rowing machine, a series of bicep curls with hand weights and half an hour on the running machine. This morning that translated to rowing 5.5km and running 5km. I will broaden this out later, but my aim for the moment is just to get into a routine and get comfortable with the machines; running on a treadmill is different to running outdoors because the surface is springier and is moving.
I usually run outside without music – I like the sounds of the birds on my usual route and I like to be able to hear traffic when I’m near a road so as to avoid colliding with it. Indoors, I find headphones and a playlist help drown out the ever-present TV screens in the gym. For the moment, my two playlists are, for the rowing machine, something I put together for an eighties night and, for the treadmill, a list specifically for running at a higher tempo. I’ll probably need to put together a slightly faster one soon as fitness increases and I try to increase my cadence.
One big difference between 2011 and now – Bluetooth earbuds and so no trailing cables to snag.
You’ll find the playlists here if you want to sing along:
Oct 26, 2023 | Legs!
Finished it!
I hadn’t run 10 kilometres since around 2009. The only measured 10k I’d previously run was the Spiggie Loch 10k in Shetland, although I also ran a half marathon in Glasgow in 2009. That was until 9 July this year when I pushed one of my weekend long runs out to 10k and managed it in 1hr 11 minutes and 23 seconds. I ran the same distance or longer 10 more times over the summer then last Sunday ran the Edinburgh Men’s 10k.
I ran it in a personal best recent time of 58 minutes and 4 seconds, beating my 2023 PB by a minute, though not quite as quick as my 49-year-old self managed it. I was so pleased that I didn’t even begrudge those additional 4 seconds – my stretch target for the year was 58 minutes.
It was a cold morning, especially waiting around for the start, but fine once we got going. The fast start down the Mound then round Jeffries Street and down the Royal Mile was balanced by running back up the Royal Mile, after which we followed a relatively flat route to finish inside Murrayfield Stadium.
Shiny Things
It was a good way to round out the year. As we move into late autumn and early winter with dark days and slippery streets, I aim to turn my attention back to swimming rather than running, although I’m happy to pound the pavements on fine days.
I need to keep up the fitness for several reasons – one is simply that I enjoy it. The main reason, though, is that I am entered for a couple of runs in spring 2024: the Kilomathon in April, which also finishes in Murrayfield, and the Edinburgh Half Marathon in May. I’m not especially worried about the Kilomathon, I’ve run that distance on weekends a few times this year; the half marathon is more of a challenge.
I am under no illusions that I’ll trouble the leader boards but it doesn’t matter: I’m not running against anyone else, my main competitor is myself.
I’ve also entered for next year’s Edinburgh Men’s 10k because it was so enjoyable to complete.
Swimming works as both good general fitness training and also good cross-training for running. It’s more expensive though: aside from good running shoes, most of my ‘technical’ gear came from charity shops and the runs themselves carry a marginal cost of zero. Entry to the pool for a half-hour swim costs real ££
Sep 14, 2023 | Goggle-eyes, Legs!, Star Wars, Writing
All quiet here because there hasn’t been much to report. The principal excitement was receiving my Flu and Covid booster vaccinations for the year and, let me tell you, the Pfizer Covid booster packed quite a punch. That was exactly a week ago and the feeling continues to linger a little.
Other odds and ends have included turning several kilos of damsons and plums into jam and looking out of the kitchen window at all the apples and wondering what to do with them. The shed has had a fresh coat of preservative ahead of winter, and we had a good visit to family in East Kilbride.
I continue to run, although I took time out after the vaccinations. I also now need to focus more on running during the day (because the nights are fair drawing in) and looking at clothing choices as the weather changes. I have no problem running at night, btw, except that Edinburgh’s roads and pavements are in such a state that the chances of injury increase markedly when you can’t see where you’re putting your feet.
Hmmm … am I a Star Wars character or a protagonist in my own right?
On the writing front, work continues on the stories that follow up/complete Coyote in the Corner and I really need to motivate myself to get cracking on that.
In the background, I have a side project of a Star Wars story that I’m going to work up into a novella at some point (although I could divorce it from Star Wars and make it a stand-alone novella free of Lucas/Disney copyright restrictions), an urban fantasy novel set in Edinburgh that has been on the back burner for a while, and I’ve had the first inklings of aspects of concluding the Sanctuary sequence of novels.
Above all, I’ve procrastinated by watching assorted stuff on TV. Notably, I’ve warmed a lot more to Ahsoka and, on a whim, rewatched Obi-Wan Kenobi. I originally found the latter disappointing, but it stood up well on a binge rewatch, albeit that it has issues with it’s core story. My earworms from Star Trek’s Subspace Rhapsody haven’t gone away.
On the tech front, all of my laptops are ancient and my habit is to use them until they stop working to get the most value out of them. The one in the shed is a 13-year-old Windows 7 machine that works but takes longer and longer to boot up. Unusually for me, I’m toying with replacing it with a reconditioned Macbook Air to get into the Apple ecosystem. My requirements are fairly minimal – I need a robust and reliable keyboard, I need to be able to load Office Home and Student onto it and I need it to work with Dropbox.
Exciting, eh?
#Ishouldbewriting
Jul 30, 2023 | Legs!, Sugar, Ah Honey Honey
Quiet progress and a bit of a change this month. On the progress front, I started July with my first 10k run since 2009; I finish it with today’s 15k run, although ‘run’ is perhaps too grand a word. I’ve increased my capacity at various distances by a straightforward process of mixing it up and making sure I get appropriate rest days. I’m injury-averse (because they take longer to heal now) so I don’t try any heroics. I try to do 3 shorter runs during the week (usually 6.5km) plus a longer one at the weekend. My aim is to build out the weekend runs by a kilometre or so per week. As I’ve written previously, my general aim is to be at half-marathon fitness long before I run the Edinburgh Half Marathon next May.
Unsurprisingly, my weight has responded to the increased exercise levels and I’m now at my lightest since the mid-eighties. I’m comfortable enough with where I am now and expect that over the next couple of months my body will find its own equilibrium point/range. If I was being picky/vain it would be that I have some excess flab caused by losing so much weight. At my age, skin elasticity decreases. It should go away of its own accord if I give it time.
The hearing aids have arrived and I’m getting used to them. They definitely make a difference and I’m hearing a lot more high-frequency sounds again. It’s a bit weird because everything sounds as if the treble has been turned up – including my own voice. The guidance says it can be anything up to six weeks before the brain gets used to how to process the sound.
Jul 20, 2023 | Global Heating, Legs!, Writing
On my last long weekend run I covered 11k and felt OK at the end of it. My plan for the coming week is to push it out by a further kilometre and thereafter to gradually increase the distance and the time spent running continuously. Looking at progress so far, I’m confident that I’ll manage the Edinburgh half-marathon next May and have entered it. My aim is to be at half-marathon fitness well before it, allowing for inevitable setbacks and for winter.
***
Back in 2017, a visit to Audiology confirmed that I was losing some high-frequency hearing. I went back to Audiology this week for another test that they could match against my records. The loss has indeed spread further down the frequency range and the audiologist asked if I wanted to try hearing aids calibrated to boost the frequencies where I’m having difficulties. I agreed to a trial and I expect the hearing aids to be delivered at some point in the next few weeks.
It is a trial because it isn’t clear whether they will be effective in the situations where I have difficulties. All of this is free at the point of use, of course: NHS.
***
I’ve written here off and on over the years about climate change and how it is the only game in town. This has been known for years. I’ve also written that I expect no mitigating actions to be taken until it is too late – arguably it is already too late. As I write, the impacts in the northern hemisphere are obvious and will only get worse. And it is linked to the other major issues of our time – biodiversity loss and pollution – as well as driving problems with food supply and population movements.
In my collection Coyote in the Corner I had the problem of reducing emissions solved by vampires largely wiping out humans. I’m writing sequel stories now, and one of my problems is that every time I calibrate a story for the latest analyses of climate change, I have to revise it six months later as more analysis comes in of the changes already locked into place – usually to make things worse.
In my teens, stories built around various apocalypses used to be either the very British novels of John Wyndham or set in the far future. It seems odd to watch it happening on the news and encounter so many people, not all of whom are American, still denying what is happening. It has been a feature of the past few years, despite no lesser person that Margaret Thatcher warning of what was coming, that governments have found all sorts of ways to ignore what the science was saying and to water down reports and predictions.
All the time, various optimists have been saying that there was still time to mitigate at least some of the impacts we can expect. All of those optimists ignored the inertia in the system and tacitly put more faith in governments and their willingness to cooperate towards necessary changes than justified. My view has been for a decade or more that the necessary changes will not happen at scale, at pace or in time. Nothing I see now changes my mind on that, and there are no magic hearing aids to distribute to politicians who default to expedient deafness.
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