I realise I’ve not been very interesting but you know – the sun has been out all week. I’ve actually been able to stay warm during daylight hours without wearing a coat and so I’ve been staying outside as much as I can to soak it all up before August 31st rolls around and the sun switch gets turned to the ‘OFF’ position for the next 11 months.
I am also Cameronless at the moment as he is spending 6 weeks visiting his dad in the states and this means I need to make the most of the freedom I have for the next month and half.
On Monday I went round a friends house. She always comes to my house because she knows its a bit of a hassle for me to visit with Cam, I have to leave in time to get home, make his lunch for school and for him to get to bed at a decent time. It’s also not very interesting for him to be dragged around my mates therefore she constantly puts in the effort. So naturally when I’m kidless then I visit her. On Monday I rode the couple of miles to her house on my scooter. Unfortunately just as I went to leave at 22:30 it began to rain. This is where I also discovered that I’d forgotten to switch my tinted visor for the clear one and considering I can’t see bugger all through the tinted one at night I had no choice but to ride with it open. In the rain. Which at 45mph felt like little needles hitting my eyes.
I got soaked through for the first mile and then it stopped and the warm air began to dry me off again. It was at this point something got caught in my right eye. In the pitch blackness of the lonely country road between fields I was not about to stop and try to fish whatever it was out of my eye so when I got home I dumped everything on the floor and ran straight to the mirror. That is where I dug a small moth out of my eye.
On Tuesday I spent an hour at the running club. I really didn’t feel like going but I managed to talk myself round by telling myself that I only needed to put in as much effort as I felt like when I got there and that there will be days where I really REALLY would not feel like going, so save the guilt for those days.
When I turned up we were told we were going to be timed on the track for one mile. Marvellous.. that’s thrown down the gauntlet and all those encouraging words I’d fed myself earlier about taking it easy drifted away as I pounded around the track feeling like an elephant with weighted boots on. It didn’t help that the humidity was mega high and the air was completely teaming with thunderflies which stuck to the sweat all over my arms, neck and face. It was worth it though because I completed the mile in 8:08 which is 2 minutes faster than my usual minute mile.
On Wednesday I cleaned the house up and did all the hoovering. Its the first time I’ve properly cleared up since Cam’s been gone and something was very strange. I straightend up the living room, puffed the cushions and pulled the chair and footstalls into their usual positions, then I walked into the kitchen. When I returned to the living room IT STILL LOOKED EXACTLY THE SAME as it did when I left it. No Wii controllers trailing across the floor, tv cabinet doors were not left open with all the games spilling out, no pens and paper left in the middle of the sofa, no clothes left strewn across the footstall. I nearly opened the front door and shouted for one of the kids on the green to come and mess it all up for me so I could have the normality of clearing it up 3 times rather than just the once. Would you believe it’s now Thursday evening and the room still looks the same.
This evening I met up with the running club again and did a four mile run around a local village. The route comprised of a small section of road followed by hard packed dirt trails through a wheat field, crunchy gravel and grass trails through more fields and through a couple of farms and finishing with the last two miles on a gravel path that followed the river from one village to the next. It was fantastic and although there were times along that run where I felt like I wanted to stop I ended the run having carried a steady pace and feeling like I could do more. If only the same applied to my pushups – which by the way are pants. I’m stuck on a plateau which I can’t seem to progress from. More on that another time.
Tomorrow Wil and I have a day off work and it will be spent collecting a new tent to take bikepacking on a short camping trip this weekend. We are planning to bike out 20-30 miles towards the coast, camp for the night and then bike back the next day. I’m really looking forward to it. Unfortunately it is this trip which has now replaced what would have been our trip to the South Downs. We decided to postpone that for various reasons.
Hope you’re all enjoying the weather… if I hear another person say ‘cor, its a bit close innit’ I’m going to catch the nearest moth and shove it in their eye.