A Chilled Glass Of Pinot

Today I do my 8^th Nottingham Robin Hood Half Marathon, L is doing it too. I’m not sure how many times that is now for her but it’s way more than eight. It’s L’s sister’s second time and we meet her at Nottingham University before getting the tram to the start which involves changing lines at the railway station. Oh, and it’s raining.

Thankfully the weather does improve and the rain largely holds off for the race but soaks us afterwards.

This year the course has been tweaked slightly and the start moved further back but I’m not too sure what this is to accommodate. I line up in the ‘red’ zone as usual, hoping for something around about 1:45. My fastest Nottingham Half was my first one back in 2010 when I ran 1:36:22. This is actually also my overall half marathon PB that I have little or no chance of getting near these days.

I fix my eye on the 1:45 pacer and then off we go. Unfortunately he turns out to be a nutter, setting out way too fast over the hilly first few miles. On my reckoning he is up on his pace by a couple of minutes after three miles when he should probably be slightly down at this point and intending to make it up on the flatter parts of the course.

At the first drinks station somebody hands me a bottle of water and I’m like ‘YES, it’s in  a bottle’. It is so good to finally see the back of the dreaded water pouches.

Despite the breakneck pace set by my pacer I just about cling onto his shirt tails until I start to lose touch as he fleetfootedly, and inexplicably, skips through the congestion caused by the narrow sections in Wollaton Park. It's as if he’s trying to lose his flock. Perhaps he is.

Coming out of Wollaton Park I see Daughter at the 7 mile point and inflict a sweaty hug on her before renewing my pursuit of my pacer before finally giving up the chase a few miles further down the road.

As we get to the last mile the excellent Race Angels, provided by Notts Womens Runners, are on hand to help you get through that final mile but they seem to show no inclination in helping an old man break 1:45. I gather I am not their target audience.

Rumours of them handing out chilled glasses of Pinot as part of the service also appear not to be true. Which is a shame, as it would be one up on the Great North Run Beer Stop.

Then I’m at the 13 mile marker and into the last few hundred metres which is on the grass and was a bit like cross-country running. I slither across the line in 1:47:14. It would have been oh so different if I'd had that Pinot.

Sadly after two years of handing out t-shirt to all finishers the organisers have again reverted to not having one which is very poor. The post-race snacks, in common with other big races, were also very poor.

What is good at Nottingham are the massages. Once again Sheffield Hallam University provide a girl for each leg (or a guy if you prefer). Great North Run take note of that and also that they have a least double the number of massage tables you did for a field about an eighth of the size.

In the evening we go for a night in the Crafty Crow, where we haven’t been for quite a while, but they have no dark cask ales but plenty of Pinot. So we adjourn to the Borlase.

(Sunday 29^th September)

Less Eventful

On the bus today and thankfully a much less eventful trip into work.

Someone has put their first half marathon t-shirt from 2005 on Facebook and L immediately dismisses him as a lightweight. Hers was the Robin Hood Half in 1998 although I don’t think it was even known as the Robin Hood back then and not that she has a t-shirt for it because they’ve only just started giving them out.

I’m more interested in whether he still wears it. I still wear my first half marathon t-shirt which was from Sleaford in 2010.

Tonight I’m out with my old school friends in Derby, hence the bus. After a few drinks in the Brunswick, we head to steak night at the Babington Arms. Only really because the Brunswick doesn’t do food on a Tuesday.

Back home, I am greeted by the dogs complete with flecks of white paint in Doggo’s case. L must have restarted the decorating project. Then I join her in a couple of whiskies which I assume are for medicinal purposes not that my dentist would approve.

(Tuesday 26^th September)

Giving Up The Ghost

A text from L arrives 

'OMG, that was so good' 

Sex? Can't be, I'm not there. Nope, she’s been doing Parkrun tail runner duties at Forest Rec. She’s an odd one sometimes then she’s off to Pilates.

The boys are I are in the centre of Nottingham for the start of Stage 5 of the Women’s Tour. We have a great time. First we barked at ITV4 presenters Ned Boulting and Helen Wyman who were recording their TV intros. Although I think they had to do four takes due to crowd noise... Then we barked at Robin Hood, the police motorbikes, race leader Lizzie Armistead and many more. MD does love his cycling.

Then we head over to my Mum and Dad’s to see the race go through there and to wish my Dad Happy Father’s Day. I’m a little horrified to see that my Dad has let his garden revert to nature due to it being too much for him to look after. This won't be popular with my brother.

Talking of gardening, I head to B&Q and buy some new hedge cutters. Then I finish the hedge which I started cutting last week before the (not so) old cutters gave up the ghost.

Tonight we head to Cineworld to see a film which is most definitely of L’s choice. 

'Me Before You' is an adaptation of the book by Jojo Moyes and it is good to see Moyes also wrote the screenplay. This is so not my type of film and therefore I probably saw things very differently to how its target audience probably did. However, it has to be said that it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be. In fact I quite liked it.

Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke) lives in a village where nothing ever happens and nothing ever happens to her but she is very happy with that level of dullness. She works in the local cafe which somehow enables her whole family to stay afloat financially, so when she loses that job she desperately has to find a new one pronto.

This is when she takes up the offer of a six month contract as nursemaid to a quadriplegic grown up rich kid Will Traynor (Sam Claflin) where she works alongside his personal nurse and therapist Nathan (Stephen Peacocke).

Prior to his life changing accident Will was once a rugged action man (you know skiing off cliffs into fiery pits, that sort of thing) as well as a successful executive who had everything to live for. Now he feels has everything to die for and has become bitter and reclusive, turning away his girlfriend (blonde naturally) who then leaves him for his best friend.

We don’t immediately find out the reason it’s only a six month contract but it’s soon revealed that he’s promised to give his parents that much longer of him before he’s off to Dignitas. His accident has ended the all action life style that defined him and he has no wish to live the rest of his life as someone he isn't. Therefore his parents had not really been looking for a nursemaid more a bit of crumpet who might give him something to live for and change his mind. Enter Louisa.

Unfortunately Louisa, a perpetually silly, perpetually happy girlie girl with an eclectic wardrobe and eyebrows that never sit still is the last thing Will thinks he needs and he’s probably right.

Still, she does her best to put up with him mainly because she needs the job. Eventually though they make a connection, not by Louisa piercing his hard shell but by him piercing hers by getting her to watch a subtitled film, something that was previously several million miles outside her comfort zone. 

Soon they are forming a close bond and she convinces his very rich parents to fund various trips she plans to make him think life is worth living after all. Putting aside the fact she picks things which are not in keeping with the all action life style he craves, either because they both know she can’t recreate it or in the misguided belief that something else might be as good, I’m not sure.

Many will call this a romance, it isn't, or perhaps all that malarkey just went right over my head because a pragmatic male like me can’t really see how she would fall for him in the first place and anyhow, when she did, he was having none of it. As he tells her near the end, if he could have done to her all that he wanted to then it might have been different but he can’t, so it isn’t. This upsets Louisa but she is off message from the start and doesn't realise that while she’s trying to teach him to enjoy life again what is really happening is he is teaching her to be more adventurous with her own life and when he is gone, he hopes his adventurous spirit will live on through her. They may have started out a world apart but both gradually realize that what one once possessed, the other now needs. 

 

A few other things don't add up particularly Louisa's fitness freak boyfriend Patrick (Matthew Lewis), who is portrayed as a bit of an idiot for wanting her support as a runner/triathlete and wanting to take her off to Norway with him for an event. It sounds like the famous Norseman to me, which sounds like exactly the sort of thing a fully mobile Will would have done and the immobile Will would have urged her to go and experience surely but, hey ho. I did end up feeling sorry for the poor guy.

I liked the film mainly because I could relate to Will and totally understood his stance on where he now was. He opted to die and I admired the film (and Jojo Moyes' book of course) for sticking to that and not engineering any miraculous recoveries or an uncharacteristic change of heart on Will’s part.

To quote the film (and Will) ‘You only get one life. It is actually your duty to live it as fully as possible’.

Trust me, it’s not as bad as you might think.

Afterwards we go to cry in our beer in the Room With a Brew although the Beyond Reasonable Stout is far too good to shed tears into. Then I chalk up another dark one up with a Guerrilla night cap in the Organ Grinder.

 

(Saturday 18^th June)

New And Improved?

The ‘new and improved’ Nottingham Half and Full Marathon routes are announced today. Predictably they prove to be neither new nor improved.

Presumably due to the traffic chaos around the QMC hospital last year they have taken the University, which has been a permanent feature of the race, out of the Half route completely to be replaced by out and back loops with 180 degree turns on both Derby Road and Abbey Street. Shoot us all now. So certainly not improved.

The Full is very much old rather than new as they have reintroduced the infamous trip out to Holme Pierrepont instead of the city centre section they had last year. It was the inclusion of the city centre that made the Nottingham Full my target race for this year but I don't fancy that course change much. I shall look at making my marathon début somewhere more exciting.

Many major cities are now introducing or re-introducing marathons but these tend to be entirely separate races and that's really what Nottingham should be doing here rather than trying to organise two events at once and not really excelling at either.

Yay, its Friday. I go for post-work run to top up my testosterone for the weekend. Unfortunately my calf goes tight just at the end of mile seven, which conveniently was as far as I intended going anyway. So I hop onto the bus to prevent any further damage. Back in Wollaton I find L and the boys are loitering on the golf course waiting for me.

(Friday 22^nd April)