Oops, taken a while to get round to getting these up what with one thing or another. So here’s some photos taken at Dead & Buried back in June 2010 of Grooving in Green (ex Children on Stun)

19/07 – Couple of laps around the rec and over mansfield road for 4 miles

21/07 – Same as monday

22/07 – Moved the long run to thursday as off to the lake district for the weekend. Did Route 11 with a modification to make it to 7.5 miles, took 1:04 which I’m pretty pleased with.

23/07 – Long walk up helvellyn via striding edge and then down over White Side and Raise and down to glenridding. All in all 10 miles. Not very fast, but can certainly feel the effects in muscles. Got to have done something good. And near 5 hours on the feet has to do something useful for fitness

24/07 – Unplanned run around Grizedale woods. All off road in the rain (trainers are still drying out 48 hours later). Didn’t take ay form of GPS and the map disintergrated, But reckon we probably did about 4 miles, a fair amount of which was on varying gradients.

25/07 – walking again. This time a long uphill slog up alongside stickle tarn, a quick stroll up the scree to pavey ark and then a good scramble up Jack’s Rake. Then plenty of wandering downhill.

So not much running, but certainly lots of time on my feet over the weekend. Don’t feel as though anything is aching too much, so now to see if it makes a difference when I start running again this week.

Something (most likely a squirrel) appears to have been eating on top of this wall slab somewhere in Nottingham’s Mapperly park

More playing around with FP4+, again shot at ISO 64 and developed for 125.  Lots of lovely detail in the gritted edges of the slab. And the bokehed highlights at the back look nice as well.

Overall not a bad week,

12/07/2010 – Round the forest rec a couple of times and then up mansfield road and down to work. 3.5 miles.

14/07/2010 -Did Route 2 and then up and over Mansfield Road to work to give a total of 4 miles

16/07/2010 -Pretty much the same as monday.

17/07/2010 – The weekend and a chance for a longer run. Went out along the River Trent and the canal (Route 11). 6.5 miles in 56 minutes, so pretty happy about that. Legs weren’t so happy about then having a 2 hour drive down to Hughenden manor.  Also got a very painful left wrist (felt like being pumped after climbing), think I’d either got my forerunner strap too tight or the extra weight on that arm’s not helping.

Running to work seems to be working atm. Have managed to lighten my bag by making sure on a non running day I carry in t-shirts and stuff for running days.

Next week should be interesting as we’re off the Lake District for the weekend. Don’t think I’m quite ready for fell running yet, so might swap the longer run for a couple of very hilly walks.

Weekly total – 17.5 miles

Nottingham Running Route 11 - River Trent and Nottingham Canal

Starting to get slightly longer on the training runs. And it’s always nice to run around the canal and River of an early morning. This one’s about 6.5 miles according to my Forerunner, and pretty much flat all the way round. Most of it’s away from main roads as well, so it’s pretty quite. Surfaces are all good now they’ve redone the canal tow path, and there’s the grass along the river to give knees and shins a rest.

I start this one from Castle Marina Sainsburys, as it’s somewhere safe to leave the car, and it’s handy if I need to pick anything up afterwards. And I tend to run clockwise, no idea why, but the canal stretches feel uphill if I do it the other way round!

Carved/branded telegraph pole in Nottingham’s Mapperly Park. Guessing BT is for British Telecom, but no idea for the rest. Doesn’t seem to be on every telegraph pole, so guessing it must mean it’s some sort of wiring hub?

Trying to play around with film a bit. So in this case the film (Ilford FP4+ 125) was actually pulled to 64 and then developed as normal (Ilford ID11 1:1 for 11 minutes). Quite liking the tones and detail that’s coming out of it.

Canon EOS 3, Canon EF 50mm f/1.4, Ilford FP4+ @64ISO, scanned on Epson V500

Well, back into it properly now. First week with proper runs all the way through it since many months ago.

To make fitting everything in easier, and to avoid the heat I’ve started running to work 3 days a week. From our flat to the centre of Nottingham is only about 1.2 miles, so I’m having to make the runs a bit longer at the moment. So far this just means running a couple of laps of the forest rec before heading up and over mansfield road to drop into the centre. Plus it means running in with a bag on my back which is interesting. But it’s getting me about 3.5 miles in each time

But then saturday came around and I had a quick 5 mile trot around beeston canal and the River Trent (Route 4). Felt good and consistent all the way round, with a bit of energy left in the legs to speed up over the last mile.

This week’s gone pretty well. Even at 7 in the morning the heat is getting to me.

Week total = ~15.5 miles.

So blogging’s been a little light recently, mainly due to the passing of my father from bowel cancer  a couple of weeks ago.

So in memory I’m going to try and raise some cash for Bowel Cancer UK by running the Leicester Half Marathon. Which means I’m going to have to kick the running back up a notch. Since Febuary it’s been a bit lacklustre for various reasons. But I’m back on it now, trying to follow a decent program to do a sub 2 hour half. Think it’s probably doable.

If anyone fancies giving some money to a good cause then I’ve created a Justgiving page:

TMA’s seem to be coming thick and fast at the moment. Caught on the hop with this one as well, oops. Hadn’t spent as much time on this section as I should have due to a couple of reasons, but as a lot of it was A-Level revision then mostly it’s been learning how the OU wants you to do things for the questions.

Questions 1+2 were pretty straightforward. Question 3 looked interesting, but was all Mathcad, why?, didn’t actually learn any new mathematics and I don’t think there was anything in there that couldn’t have been done with paper and pen. 4 took some thinking about to get the rearrangements right. 5 was right up my alley  (mechanics ftw). 6 looked scary, but following the hints in the question (read them, they do help) and spotting the rearrangements made it tricky by straightforward.

Hopefully I’ve done enough to get things right. Thankfully Wolfram-Alpha is very handy for checking integrals and derivatives so you can go through and check you’re in the right ball park.

Now to head back to MS221 land for more of the same.