It's a mud mud mud mud world

My eldest decided we should try to find the wettest, muddiest parts when we went for a walk yesterday. We did pretty well as you can see from the photo.

Then today, Dave came round to test out his road shoes on similar terraine. To be fair, it wasn't that he thought his road shoes were the best bet, but his fell shoes had been hurting and he was up for a run. He's normally a bit lower down the field than I am but he's going well at the moment and I'm not training enough to maintain any kind of fitness.

So, to hinder him slightly I decided to go for the muddiest route possible. This worked well on the slimy grass sections and in the slurry pits that had gathered around the field gates. However, on the rocky tracks he was away. That small spec in the distance is Dave on the deceptive rising track from Three Shires Head.

In future I either need to train more, or persuade him to run barefoot. That way I could also keep up on the stony tracks.

A river runs through it

Continuing my run of film-titled blog entries, I thought this might be fitting for the run up through Back Forest towards Hangingstone. As you can see the 'path' looks more like a stream. This is actually its usual state, but it's a bit worse than normal so worked well for the photos. I was running pretty slowly for this one, as I was still a bit worried that I wasn't over my illness. It was nice to be out, and I don't think I overdid it.
My mate Foz was visiting and walked the same route in the opposite direction. He also took the dog, as Max enjoys walks (even at Foz' fast pace) more than runs (even at my slow pace).

48 hours

That's how long I was ill after a gentle lunchtime swim on Wednesday. It was a shame as I was starting to get the hang of things. My breathing was OK, my stroke length was OK (when I concentrated on it). Then I was hit by the urge to stop after about 30 lengths and a splitting headache. This turned into a sickness feeling which didn't any better when I was back at work. So I went home to bed fearing swine flu. Luckily I was only out of it for about 2 days. I guess I was fighting off a virus and the swim gave it some assistance.

Mrs doubts fire

We were over visiting my parents (and doing Shepherd's Skyline - see previous post). It was the Myrtle Park bonfire and fireworks display on Saturday night, but Mrs Noel wasn't keen on keeping the kids up that late. Do you see where I'm going with this tenuous film title link?

Anyway, instead we had a small fire in my parents' garden which was great.

The day after, I went for a very pleasant run in St Ives park (a park in Bingley, West Yorkshire - nowhere near St Ives). Here I saw another two deer. Maybe roe deer (??) but definitely wild this time. Although the deer managed to elude my expert wildlife photography, I did manage to capture an image of this wood elf sheltering in the beard of a forest spirit. Feel free to correct me on this.

Mrs Noel does Shepherd's Skyline

Mrs Noel has been building up her expectations of winning something at every race. This is because she has had a run of about 8 races where this has been proved true. However, we were in no doubt that Shepherd's Skyline was a race where she was unlikely to win anything.

It had been very wet the days before the race and it was predictably cold and windswept as the runners set off. Mrs Noel was a bit nervous about doing a race of this length. I know it's not a long race (only 6 miles), but Mrs Noel doesn't really do races above about 5 miles. She also does no long slow runs in training, so has never build up her stamina. We're two peas in a pod in this respect.

In the end Mrs Noel finished 13th out of 76 lady runners, and was third LV40. She's slowly warming to the idea of doing a bit more stamina work, so watch out for next year!

3 miles, 2 stags and a lake

Another lunchtime run today. I was out for 30 minutes, which I guess is about 3 or 3.5 miles. It's building up slowly after my start-of-autumn blues.

There were two big stags with full pointy antlers in the middle of the path. When I was in Scotland I was really pleased to see red deer from about half a mile away through binoculars. Today I had to run round them in the path and was less pleased to see them.

This disparity is because they are not wild and are kept in Tatton Park just like the sheep are. This makes me think they're less good to see, which is a bit weird. Surely they should either be nice to see or not. It's funny how perceptions can play with our sense of aesthetics to such an extent.

I've just noticed, I'd added the lake in the title. This was a poor attempt to make a 4 weddings and a funeral style title. There was actually no reason to include it other than I also ran past the lake.

Note to self: Run with camera. Stags would be great for blog photos.

P.S. Mrs Noel has just suggested I plan future runs (and blog entries about them) around other film titles. I'll have a go...

Yet more swimming revelations

After my 'pretend to be superman' revelation a few months ago, I've been doing very little swimming. This has mainly been due to running a lot, but I haven't got that excuse any more. So... back to the pool for me.

I went once last week and was mainly rubbish, then I went yesterday. One thing I notice when swimming is that I get very bad trapped wind for a few hours after swimming. At first I thought this was probably a reaction to using muscles I wasn't used to. However, after a bit of trawling through swimming forums for similar complaints, I'm convinced it's because I'm overbreathing. Instead of just taking in enough air on every third stroke, I am gulping down to much air too quickly. It can't all go into my lungs, so the excess goes into my stomach. Hence trapped wind.

Yesterday I remembered something my total immersion swimming instructor said: "If you breath out enough, you won't need to worry about breathing in, it will just happen." So I tried this, and it worked. Instead of going huh [breathe out] arrrrhh [breath in] every time I stick my face out of the water. I now just go [huh] and forget about breathing in. Obviously, I must be breathing in enough, since I don't go blue and sink to the bottom and die. I also get less tired, which is great.

Having said that, you must be reading this and imagining me like some sort of half-decent swimmer. Just to put it into perspective, there was a lady in the lane next to me doing bad front crawl (even I could tell this). Her arms were dragging the water while they were coming over, and her stroke length was quite short. Despite this, she kept going and looked like she was doing a lot of lengths over the lunchtime period. On one of my lengths (in a set of 8) we were swimming next to each other and it became clear she was faster than I was.

I think I need a few more revelations, and a lot more hard work before I can pretend to be a proper swimmer. I'm idly thinking about an olympic distance triathlon next year, so that can be my training goal. Luckily, I can only get better.