Like many kids, my first injury involved falling off my bike.

And like many kids, it also involved crashing into a car.

However, unlike any other kid, I crashed into a parked car. Even worse I crashed into a parked car while cycling uphill. I can’t even say I lost control, or my brakes failed, or any of the many other reasons an accident could happen. I cycled deliberately into a parked car that I could have easily involved if I’d just looked up.

It was raining. My head was down and I cycling uphill towards our house, which is near the top of a steep road. One minute I was cycling, the next I was face planting onto the rear window of a Ford Fiesta.

I can’t blame my bike, I can’t blame the conditions, I can only blame myself for not looking where I was going. A common cause of accidents as, this week, I managed to do exactly the same thing.

(Though not a Ford Fiesta, this time it was a tree).

There are many ways to have an accident while riding a mountain bike. You could crash while riding downhill through a particularly gnarly black run. You could fall off a cliff while attempting a dangerous Danny MacAskill ridge crossing. Or you could do what I did and ride up a path, get stuck in a rut, see a bush ahead and think, I can just cycle through that.

(Not stop and avoid the bush, oh no, I had to keep going.)

And that’s why Iain TwinBikeRun asked “Why did you ride into that tree, while going uphill, on a clear path, when you could have just stopped?”

And I didn’t have an answer because I was lying on the ground, nursing my elbow and wandering why 30 years after my fist accident I still wasn’t looking where I was going.

The good thing about writing a weekly blog about running is that you can use the search box to find your old race reports.

If you’d asked me when was the last time I’d ran the Alloa Half Marathon I would have guessed 2018 or 19. In fact, it was five years ago, and you can find my report here.

I blame lockdown. After two years of the pandemic, my sense of time is screwy. I discount the two years spent at home and assume everything is two years shorter than it actually is, which is why I’m planning to celebrate my twenty first birthday this year…

I see from my report that I was complaining about the traffic. It’s also the one thing I remembered about the race as I phoned Iain TwinBikeRun to say we should try and get to Alloa for 7:45 (for a 9am start) but he disagreed. The start line had moved from near the town centre to a community campus on the edge of town. He didn’t think the traffic would be as bad as there was a lot more routes to get to the start, including buses from the town centre for those who wanted to park further away.

He was right. It was easy to drive in, find a bus and get to the start. The only queue this year was at the pre-start toilets. But there’s always a queue at the toilets before any race and it’s alway the case that no matter when you join that queue, whether one hour or five minutes before the start, and no matter how many people are in the queue, ten or a hundred, you’ll never reach the front until two mins before the race starts and you’ll come out to find everyone has already left. Alloa was no different.

I also see from my report that I complained about the hills. The change to the start though has improved the route as there’s now a three mile gentle descent and flat before you climb the first hill. The warm up makes the hill feel easier, while there’s another long descent afterwards so you have time to recover before turning west toward Alva.

There’s another long hill around the 11 mile point as you come back to Alloa but while it’s long, it’s not that steep.

Overall, it was a cracking day for a race. Blue skies and no wind and the changes to the route has really improved the whole experience. I was pleased with a time of 1 hour 43 mins, which was faster than my previous time of 1 hours 48 mins and shows that while lockdown may have lost two years, I’ve also gained five minutes. Result.

For six years I worked at the Western Isles Hospital as a porter. I would provide cover whenever I was home from university and I’d generally work full time most weeks on either morning, evening or night shift. 

Night shift was the best and worst. It was the best because I was paid time and half, and if it was the weekend I’d get another half for working a Saturday and another half again for working Sunday. (And if it was a public holiday like Christmas then it would double again – jackpot!).

But there was one night I hated working – the night the clocks went back an hour. At 2am, when the clocks changed, I’d walk round the hospital and move all the clock hands back by one hour to 1pm. And then I’d have to work that hour again… without pay. 

That might sound harsh but, when the clocks jumped forward and 2am became 3am, I would work one hour less and still get paid for an eight hour shift. So, I would try really hard to be available to work at the end of March but to be away at the end of October. 

For that reason, I’ve always like when the clocks go forward. It reminds me of getting paid for doing nothing.

This year, as I’ve worked more from the office than from home, it’s great to get the extra hour of light in the evening so I can run or cycle home without having to wear more lights than a Christmas tree. It’s good to feel the sun on my skin and to start to wear t-shirts rather than a running jacket, hat, gloves and, in Glasgow, oilskins for the days it’s really wet. 

I do however miss the pleasures of night-time running – which mostly involve people leaving their curtains open and getting a good gawk in their living room. But also, the pleasure of running and not seeing where you are going. Night-time running reduces distances as you tend to focus on the light pool around you rather than looking to the end of a street in daylight and seeing everything before you clearly.  (It’s for the same reason muggers hate the clocks going forward, people can now see them.)

The good thing about living in Glasgow though is that the clocks going forward is not a guarantee of daylight – in Scotland it can just as dark at 3pm as midnight when the rain clouds gather so while it’s good to see the change of the seasons, it’s also good to know that we don’t lose nighttime running even in June.