Wide Boys

I had a bit of a dilemma between two 10k runs today. In my newfound role as a race winner... the Long Clawson 10k looked intriguing. The winning time was over 41 minutes last year... but it’s off road, so perhaps it’s a tough cross country course or maybe it's just badly measured. More importantly L enquires about whether there are t-shirts or cakes? There aren’t. Being Long Clawson you’d expect free cheese but that doesn’t appear to be the case either.

Then there’s the Long Bennington 10k which has a t–shirt on offer and is also all road running which should suit me better, I hate off road. It’s also described as flat so it could be PB territory, if I’ve recovered from Friday’s run that is. I’ll just have to content myself with going back to being mid-field. There’s also another thing that might harm my chances of going for a PB, it’s blisteringly hot.

In the end the heat doesn’t bother me that much; oddly it gets to L more than me. I manage a steady if not spectacular pace all the way around, due to my tired legs and come in three minutes slower than my last 10k run but in 15th I think, so not bad.

On the way home I buy some new running shoes with the vouchers I won the other week. The staff check my running style on a treadmill and tell me that I don’t overpronate, contradicting my physio.

I shun my usual Asics and buy some very expensive New Balance shoes, the cost of which nullify the effect of the vouchers but they felt good, so worth a go. They’re a lot lighter than my Asics.

Then back home we chill out a bit and then just as we're getting ready to walk down to the now done-up Willoughby, now renamed the Wollaton, for Sunday Lunch in the sunshine, a couple of wide boys, who are probably gypsies, turn up on my doorstep and offer to cut my trees for me, cheaply.

At first though their idea of cheap isn’t my idea of cheap but once their fee has tumbled to something far cheaper than what I had quoted last year, I let them loose on the job. Big mistake. It soon becomes apparent that they have neither the equipment nor the knowhow to do a decent job. After I have sent them back several times to make a better job of it I lose patience and pay them off purely to get rid of them. Then I find they’d dumped a lot of the cuttings in my garden waste bin after promising to dispose of everything themselves, in some lay-by somewhere no doubt. So I have to haul them back to empty that. Well at least we've got our front tree topped, that needed doing. Even if it isn’t that neat.

By the time we get down the pub, Sunday lunch is finished but we still get an excellent meal and to my surprise good beer. The local Magpie Best is very nice indeed.