Stranger Things Have Happened But Not Often

I park my car at my parents’ house and run in to work. It was a reasonable run and my iffy calf seemed to behave itself. I did have one problem though. The building of the rather unnecessary industrial park hear Alvaston has been snarling the traffic up for weeks and it’s a long term project, so there's no prospect of any respite any time soon. This morning though they had also closed the main road, Raynesway, to pedestrians. Apparently that includes runners as well. Flippin’ roadworks, can’t even avoid them when I run. So I had to detour through Alvaston, which must have added a mile or so. Yes I know it's all good extra training but it made me late for work.

As for my time... 9k in 46 minutes. Terrible. Slit my wrists stuff, but I suppose I did waste a lot of time scratching my head, trying to decide which route to go and attempting to negotiate with a yellow coated workman whose only form of communication appeared to be the ‘shrug’, as in ‘of the shoulders’.

So not happy... but happier than my Kilomathon training work colleague who ran the eleven miles home last night and crawled in this morning. Say he’s exhausted and can’t see how he’s going to add another five miles to that. L suggests I tell him to try training for a cycle event at the same time... but I daren’t. I think he would turn violent, if he had the strength.

I apologetically confess to him that I am running again tonight, back to my parents house, although going nowhere near Raynesway this time.

Ah the joys of the Fantasy Football League.

Where you find yourself performing complex mathematical calculations each time some player in a match somewhere crosses a ball.
Where you find yourself supporting teams that you really should hate.
Where you find that you are more bothered about your fantasy team than your 'real' team.
Where you get up early in the morning to update your team selection for the thirty-second time.
Where you spend more time thinking about team selection than work.
Where you wish you put this amount of thought into the rest of your life.

We’re starting a self-help group called Fantasy Football Anonymous. So if you can answer yes to more than two of those statements, let me know and I’ll put the membership forms in the post. Not that you’ll be able to spare the time to actually fill them in as this week some teams play more than once... and one of your players has probably got booked or injured and will not play...

Seriously though, you can’t beat it, great fun. Well I am top of the league at the moment... but that is before tonight’s games. This reminds me, I must update my team selection again.

Derby County are not eligible for the Fantasy League, what with not being in the Premier League, so at least I don’t get a conflict of interest. Tonight’s game though is as close to ‘fantasy’ as you can get. League leaders Newcastle United are in town and like Forest the other week are in the midst of a long unbeaten run. So obviously Derby win 3-0 and thoroughly deserve it. Stranger things have happened but not often.