Film Friday is a weekly recommendation of one video to watch this weekend.
Mental.
Mental that anyone thought to combine bikes with football.
Mental that anyone plays football with bikes.
If you cannot even imagine how playing football on a bike is even possible then you have to watch this video.
“Can I ask you a question?”
No, I’m not Brad Pitt. I know I look like him but I can assure you that while we might share the same chiseled features and unmistakable look of almighty handsome-ness, I am not him.
Is what I didn’t say because no one has ever asked me that. But I can but hope.
“Yes,” I said.
“What do you think of that t-shirt?” And he pointed at a neon pink t-shirt hanging on a rail at the back of the shop.
I was in a running shop to buy a t-shirt. In fact, I was now at the till having picked up a t-shirt and brought it to the till to pay for it. I had seen the pink t-shirt while browsing but hadn’t tried it on because it was a colour that can only be described with words like “shocking”, “blinding” or “confident in my sexuality”.
I’m not sure what to say so I try and think of something neutral. I say: “I prefer t-shirts with a pattern.”
It’s only when I say it that I realise I’ve handed him a simple blue t-shirt. I now look like a man who says I don’t like running while standing in a running shop buying running gear and talking about running.
The assistant doesn’t notice, instead they ask: “Would you buy it?”
Would I heck. I’d sooner run naked than wear a top that can be seen from the moon. You couldn’t give away a t-shirt like this. They should cut their losses now and just burn it. But I can’t say that. I say: “I’ve already paid for this one.” And I hold up the blue one.
But the assistant won’t take my evasion for an answer. “I know it’s divisive. We just want to know what people think of it?”
And I look at it again and I realise that while I wouldn’t buy it, I would actually wear it as I have a t-shirt which is exactly the same colour – and I worn it many times while out running. The only difference between my t-shirt and this one is that I received my one for free after a race.
And that’s when I realised that you could give it away because runners will accept anything if it’s free. I have race t-shirst I would never have considered buying. Insipid colours. Garish patterns. T-shirts which look like they’d been designed by a dog running through a paint pot. As long as it’s free, runners will keep it, wear it and not give it a second thought.
But ask us to buy it and no thanks!
Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here
Bradford City
Nickname: The Bantams
Ground: Coral Windows Stadium
Stadium Capacity: 25,136
Song: Let’s Get Ready For Wembley
In 2013 Bradford City became the first ever team from the fourth tier of English football to reach a major domestic Wembley cup final – the Football League Cup. On the pitch Bradford lost 5 – 0 to Swansea but off the pitch the Bantams scored with the unofficial song ‘Let’s Get Ready For Wembley’ based on the Ant and Dec classic ‘Let’s Get Ready To Rumble’.
The song was created by Bantam’s Banter, the unofficial Bradford City podcast, which Tom Fletcher and Dom Newton-Collinge record live from the Valley Parade press box. This was the first independent podcast to reach number one in the iTunes charts. The otherwise excellent song and video for ‘Let Get Ready For Wembley’ has one crime against the English language: Wembley is rhymed with tremble-y.
Ant and Dec would be proud – as would York City (see York City for a similar abuse of the English language).
Bradford City’s the only professional football club in England to wear claret and amber. Although Motherwell have the same colours in Scotland it’s thought it ‘borrowed’ them from Bradford. The origin of Bradford City’s colours is less well known but it’s assumed it adopted the same colours of the West Yorkshire Regiment that it first used as changing rooms for the club.
In 1985, 56 spectators died and many more were seriously injured when a fire engulfed a stand at the Valley Parade ground. It was the worst fire disaster in the history of English football. A special recording of the Liverpool FC anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ was recorded to raise money for victims of the fire. It featured Gerry Marsden and Paul McCartney and was recorded under the name “The Crowd”.
Buy the Sound of Football from Amazon.
Film Friday is a weekly recommendation of one video to watch this weekend.
Is this the world’s best FPV drone shot? Nah but its pretty cool.
Film Friday is a weekly recommendation of one video to watch this weekend.
Sometimes you don’t have to see any more than the thumbnail to now what happens next. 3000 squats in a month. 100 a day. What could happen? The photo on the right might give it away…
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.
Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here
Bolton Wanderers
Nickname: The Trotters
Ground: The Reebok Stadium
Stadium Capacity: 28,100
Song: Just Can’t Get Enough
In March 2011, Bolton Wanderers started blasting out ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by Depeche Mode over the speakers every time a goal was scored to try and improve the atmosphere around the stands of The Reebok Stadium.
The club had used a similar trick to improve atmosphere on the club’s return to the Premier League with James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good’.
Owen Coyle, then Bolton manager, explained that the decision was part of Bolton’s efforts to improve the match day experience for fans.
“The important thing is that we try and build an atmosphere, and that it gets better” he told The Bolton News, before he added: “It’s not my personal favourite but it might prove to be if we keep using it because it means we’ve scored goals.”
It’s fair to say that Owen Coyle never became a fan of Depeche Mode. He left the club in 2012 after Bolton was relegated from the Premiership after failing to score enough goals to stay up. Recent years have seen the club fall further and be threatened with winding up due to unpaid debts.
It’s surprising that Bolton’s Reebok Stadium lacks atmosphere, as, according to a survey by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Boltonians are the friendliest people in Britain. This friendliness is not reflected in the stadium design. Rather than walk onto the pitch together, teams emerge from separate tunnels on either side of the halfway line. Also, the away fans are seated in the lower tiers not covered by the Reebok stadium’s roof. Visiting fans are advised to bring waterproofs if it looks like it might rain.
The club is proud of its history. In 1939 every member of the team volunteered to fight the Nazis. In front of a 23,000 strong crowd, the Bolton skipper gave a rousing speech before leading the entire team to sign up at a local Territorial Army hall.
For the next six years, the players faced some of the heaviest fighting of the war in France, North Africa and Italy, while also establishing themselves as a formidable regimental football team. They were even pulled off the front line to play King Farouk’s side in Cairo. Incredibly, after six years of fighting, all but one of the team survived the war.
Before moving to The Reebok Stadium in 1997, the club played for over 100 years at Burnden Park. Its most famous song relates to the older stadium and is sung to the tune of ‘The Blaydon Races’, a famous Geordie folk song (see Newcastle United).
The original is considered to be the unofficial anthem of Tyneside and is frequently sung by supporters of both Newcastle United and Newcastle Falcons rugby club. The song is used by a number of sides (Walsall, Blackburn, Berwick Rangers and Portadown) by changing the geographical references and dialect. The lyrics are changed to suit the club but the tune remains the same.
“Aw went to Blaydon Races, ’twas on the ninth of Joon,
Eiteen hundred an’ sixty-two, on a summer’s efternoon;
Aw tyuk the ‘bus frae Balmbra’s, an’ she wis heavy laden,
Away we went alang Collingwood Street, that’s on the road to Blaydon.“
(Source: trad.)
Buy the Sound of Football from Amazon.
Film Friday is a weekly recommendation of one video to watch this weekend.
I’m not sure if the folk in this video should be applauded for their parkour/climbing skill, or whether they should be locked up for attempting to get out of such a dingy horrible pit.
Make up your own mind…
It is much harder to do than you might think….
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.
Twin brothers swimming, cycling and running in Scotland 