I haven’t done much training since completing Dramathon but I was confident the little I had done would get me through the race.
Its a long drive to Glentress from my house. Its even longer when Andrew phones the night before the race and asks for a lift from his house. I had to set off 40 minutes earlier than planned so I had time to pick him up.
He claimed he knew the fastest way there but his “shortcut” took us all the way south until we saw a sign saying “Welcome to England” and then all the way back north again.
We took my way back and saved about 40 minutes driving!
Annoyingly, despite signing up for the race in August, there was no record of my entry. I had to quickly find proof on my phone before I was able to start. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t left my phone in the car, a mile away from registration. I had to quickly run back and get the info.
The race was enjoyable. The weather was damp but it was warm enough to run in shorts and t-shirts. The first six miles is mostly up hill. There was some congestion on the climbs but it wasn’t as bad as the last time I did it.
Towards the end I bumped into a fellow glasgow triathlon club member. I said “Only one hill to go – the wee climb at the finish” She replied – “They aren’t doing that this year. The finish has been moved”
I’m glad she mentioned it as I’d have gone the wrong way at the finish if I had not known.
The new finish was flat across a field. Which wasn’t as interesting as the old finish. The last wee climb made the finish line feel sweeter but I’m guessing they aren’t allowed to use the road at the finish line so they had to move it.
Can Will Smith lose 20lbs in 20 weeks? It’s an interesting challenge but not one that is at all relatable because Will Smith is not an ordinary man, or a professional athlete, he is a SUPERSTAR.
And being a superstar means that this challenge comes with a massive ‘but’. Does anyone other than Chris Pratt, Chris Evans or Chris Pine or any other modern action star not called Chris have access to a home gym, swimming pools, trainers and personal psychiatrist to help them achieve their weight loss goal?
I’d have like to see a video where Will Smith joins his local weight watchers and has to make to do with a DVD of Davina McCall for inspiration.
But… if you ignore the fact he is a superstar and everything about this has been through his PR team, it’s quite enjoyable because, well, it’s Will Smith and he’s a superstar for a reason. He knows how to entertain.
I’d planned to swim on Findhorn Beach, but six foot high rollers and a dozen birdwatchers changed my mind. While the fierce waves gave me second thoughts about venturing out into the water, the thought that risking swimming in those conditions would be captured by a dozen twitchers with foot-long zoom lenses ready to take a photo of my imminent demise was more than I could take.
Not that the birdwatchers were that interested in being there. When I saw them gather, I asked one of them. “Are you here to see anything in particular?”
He just shrugged and said “just some boring migrating birds.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed by his disdain for his own hobby or to be saddened by the fact he was standing on a beach in November and didn’t even want to be there.
I did want to be there though having spent the day driving north from Glasgow and looking forward to a quick swim at the end of my journey. After going to the beach, I decided to drive to the south bank of Findhorn instead and swim in the sheltered bay beside the town. I wondered if it would be too public a spot for swimming. I was parking on the ‘Main Street’ and would be changing in front of people’s homes.
I shouldn’t have worried. While I was parking two others arrived to swim too and, when I went down to the water, another was already swimming. I shouldn’t have been worried about whether to swim. Instead I should have been worried about finding a space to swim.
Is is our story of 20 years swimming, biking and running. Every one of our results tells a story, even the races we did not finish.
It is a story about finding the joy in racing whether you come first or last.
It contains stories such as ….
I learnt to swim in the 1980s. My dad taught me using the “do not drown” approach.
He made me stand two metres from a pool wall. I then tried to swim to the wall. If I did not drown, he would increase my swim to three metres from the wall, and then four metres etc.
My fear of drowning meant I quickly learnt to swim. Unfortunately, my Dad only knew the breaststroke so that was all I learnt. He did not see the point in freestyle swimming. His view was “Why do you want to stick your head under the water? There is nothing to see there except people’s feet.”
My school attempted to teach me other strokes but I was not very good at them. I hated the weekly swimming lesson at our local leisure centre. I found the smell of chlorine in the pool overbearing.
I have subsequently discovered chlorine has no smell. The smell in the pool was from chloramines, which build up in pool water when the water is not properly clean. A smelly pool is an unclean pool.
If I had known that, I would have hated swimming even more than I did.
A common sight, in a leisure centre, during this time period was a footbath in the changing rooms. A sign above it would read, “Always dip your feet into the foot-bath before entering the swimming pool.” Supposedly the foot-bath contained chemicals that prevented foot infections like verrucas.
Modern leisure centres do not have footbaths. Therefore, have we discovered a cure for verruca’s? No – we haven’t. What we have found is the cause of verruca’s. It was the foot-bath!
Leisure centres did not clean the foot baths often enough. It was basically a seething cesspit of fungal infection. I got a foot wart. Andrew got a verruca. Everyone in my school class got something. It’s no wonder that I didn’t swim again after leaving school for university as my abiding memory of learning to swim is a verruca, a dirty pool and almost drowning.
Is is our story of 20 years swimming, biking and running. Every one of our results tells a story, even the races we did not finish.
It contains stories such as ….
I always remember the day a yogurt landed on my head.
It was November 1995. I was running along a street in Edinburgh.
I was listening to my Sony mini-disc player. That was state of the art back then. I didn’t have a mobile phone. If I’d wanted to make a call, I’d have carried 10 pence and popped into a telephone box. Now I carry a phone larger than my mini-disc player and my 10p piece combined, and we call this progress?
But, before I could question the benefits of technological evolution and even before I could say: “Is that a Muller yogurt falling from the sky?”, a Muller yogurt had fallen from the sky. It landed on my head leaving a trail of goo across my forehead.
I looked upwards. A man was laughing from a third-floor window. He was holding a spoon. It did not require Poirot to work out he was the prime suspect. As much as I was shocked to have been ‘Muller’d’, I was impressed with his aim. I’m sure I would miss If I tried to throw a non-aerodynamic yoghurt pot at someone from a height of 30 foot.
Thankfully, this incident did not put my off running. Although it did put me off Muller yogurt.
Another time, whilst running, I passed two schoolgirls eating chips. One of them shouted “OH MY GOD! I’m going to marry you!”. Which was a nice offer, but I don’t think she was serious. She didn’t even go down on one knee, she was too busy eating a chip.
Which brings me to the most shocking attack on me. I once got hit by a fish supper. It was whilst I was waiting at a traffic junction. As a car passed me, a fish and chip supper were thrown out of the passenger side window. A passenger shouted “Ha! Ha!” and the car drove off.
Is it a crime to throw a fish and chip supper at a stranger? Yes – probably. But I would argue the biggest crime is to throw a fish and chips supper away without eating all the chips. This was in Scotland. You don’t throw away chips in Scotland, you propose with them.
The book is is our story of 20 years spent swimming, biking and running. Every one of our results tells a story, even the races we did not finish.
It is a story about finding the joy in racing whether you come first or last.
The book contains tales such as ….
To get better we needed to improve – and the fastest way to do that, we thought, was to join a gym.
Andrew and I were both member of the same gym. It was a corporate shed in a posh suburb of Glasgow. The people who went were so rich the car park looked like a Range Rover showroom.
The gym had every facility two ‘world class cyclists’ could possibly need – state of the art gym, state of the art weights and a state-of-the-art pool. Everything was state of the art, except the art – that came from Ikea.
Unfortunately, the only thing we were world class at was our ability to use a jacuzzi.
Some people say there’s nothing better than jumping in a jacuzzi after a hard gym session. They’re wrong. It’s even better if you’ve not used the gym! Why work up a sweat and get tired when you could have spent that time floating in soapy bubbles?
We’d head in and spend ten minutes in the jacuzzi but then we’d get out and get in the other jacuzzi. Yes – this gym was so posh it had two Jacuzzis. At least we got some exercise walking between the two.
We didn’t just use the two Jacuzzis. We’d often get out and head to the pool…and then past the pool to the sauna. The sauna in any Glasgow gym is predominately a male environment. I’ve often thought the main reason women pay so much for a spa is to avoid sauna-ing with men.
This sauna never had any women but it did have three bald men. Sometimes just one of them, sometimes two but often all three. We called them the “Baldy Men Club”
A sauna is quite small so we could hear their conversation. They only had one topic – themselves. Namely, how well they had used the gym before getting to the sauna.
Week after week we’d listen as each tried to out compete each other. “I just did 10K on the running machine in 30 minutes” One would say. Another would reply “Did you bike 20K first? I always bike first and then run”. The third man would try to beat this and add: “Did I mention I bench pressed three time my body weight today and I didn’t even sweat once?”
We talked about the Baldy Men Club and their strange ways until we realized they probably talk about us – “Can you believe how much nonsense they talk? One of them claims he’s done a stage of the Tour De France but the only exercise I’ve seen him do is dry himself with a towel after the jacuzzi!”
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
Alloa Athletic
Nickname: The Wasps
Ground: Recreation Park
Stadium Capacity: 3,100
Song: The Boys In Black & Gold by The Utopians
Just like Albion Rovers, Alloa has used The A-Team theme song when walking onto the pitch – though we think it has missed a trick by not renaming it – just like the French, who renamed The A-Team as the All Risks Agency (L’agence Tous Risque). However, the French didn’t stop there. They also added new lyrics to the music and turned it into a full-blown soft rock song. A-Team leader Colonel ‘Hannibal’ Smith may have loved it “when a plan comes together,” but when the plan involves an iconic 80s TV show and a cheap rip-off Charles Aznavour singing, even he will baulk at the result. So, maybe Alloa is right to just call on the A-Team even if we all know that they should have renamed the song as the AA-Team.
Our favourite song for Alloa’s is ‘The Boys In Black & Gold’ (the team colours) by The Utopians. The band was founded in Leicester in 2007 by frontman Jason Westall and guitarist James Shaw. They didn’t last long, and their Facebook page consists of only a handful of entries. The second last one from 2010 promises “that work has begun on a record which is arguably ‘more important than the New Testament,'” which shows while they may have lacked success, they didn’t lack ambition.
The band toured in January 2008 to support the release of its debut single ‘There’s a Train,’ which gained good reviews and Radio One airplay. ‘The Boys In Black & Gold’ was released as a B-side, and the band was invited to Recreation Park. The club’s website confirms that the song was played before kick-off, halftime, and after the final whistle.
It’s appropriate that the song was a B-Side as, while many clubs are known as perennial runners-up, Alloa Athletic has made a career out of coming second. It holds the record for finishing runners-up in the third tier of Scottish football a record eight times, most recently in 2012/2013 when Alloa clinched promotion to the First Division via a play-off.
Many clubs hate playing Alloa Athletic, not because of a fearsome reputation, but rather because its pitch is artificial turf. However, this had one benefit – in 2010, Alloa was the only club in the country to play football after a cold snap meant every other Scottish game was postponed due to freezing weather conditions.
One of its greatest players was Willie Crilley, affectionately known as “wee Willie Crilley,” “Electric Spark,” and also “The Mighty Atom,” a free scoring striker who played for Alloa in the 1920s and was considered to be one of the best strikers in the league. He still holds the record for the most goals scored by an Alloa player in a single season.
Willie’s nickname was not ironic. At best, he measured 5 foot 3 inches, but some records say he was smaller. He was so small that even the club’s official history recounts an apocryphal story that during one game, he ran with the ball between an opponents’ legs before scoring. He subsequently joined Celtic, but his heart was with Alloa, and he only lasted a few months before returning.
Injury meant his career was, ahem, cut short, and he emigrated to the United States to start a new life. He played for several US clubs but, after marrying a US girl and taking American citizenship, a dream return to Alloa was foiled by immigration. In 1929, Willie had returned to Scotland to re-joining Alloa, but as he was a US citizen, he was deported back to America before playing for the club.
In 1934 he returned to Scotland for a final time to try and re-join his beloved Alloa but time and injuries meant he was not the player he once was, and the club’s directors turned down his offer to play.
If Willie had played today every time, he scored he would have heard ‘Live is Life’, the 1985 hit by Austrian pop group Opus.
‘Live is Life,’ often misconstrued as ‘Life is Life,’ was recorded live at Opus’s 11th-anniversary gig at Oberwart Stadium in Austria. This live version of the tune immediately shot to number one in the Austrian charts, and as 1985 dawned, the hit went global. While Opus is often considered one-hit wonders, they’d started in 1973, and, in Austria, they continued to release hits, including a tune for the Austrian national team for the 1998 World Cup. ‘Viva Austria’ sold thirty thousand copies, although sadly, the Austrian team didn’t fare quite so well after being knocked out in the first round.
‘Live Is Life’ has been adopted by several sports as an anthem, particularly in Europe, and in 1994 Opus released a new version for the World Cup that year, held in Willie’s adopted homeland, the United States.
Does Sir Chris Hoy have to pay to work out in the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome? Does Olympic swimming champion Adam Peaty have to find 20p for a locker when he pops into Uttoxeter Leisure Centre’s Adam Peaty Swimming Pool? Because otherwise what’s the point of having a sport centre named after you if you can’t get in for free?
Whether Sir Chris has to pay or not, he might first ask himself if he really wants to ride the cycling track in the velodrome? I assume after five gold medals and 15 year career racing in velodromes that the answer will probably be “yes, I, Sir Chris Hoy, gold medal winning track cyclist and one of Britain’s greatest Olympians will ride the track!” but, as he now spends more time racing cars, maybe he’s scunnered and doesn’t want to go anywhere near a 45 degree sloping wall?
I know how he feels.
The fear of a 45 degree sloping wall, not the whole being one of the greatest athletes in the world.
I thought it would be great to learn how to ride in the velodrome. It would give an opportunity to ride indoors during winter months and to learn a new skill: dangerous balancing. See also tight rope walking for more examples of dangerous balancing.
In order to start at the velodrome I had to complete four induction courses. You can find more details of them here: Velodrome
However I quickly realised that I didn’t have what it takes to ride in a circle again and again and again.
It wasn’t the steep walls. After the first couple of circuits it felt natural to ride the steep banks. It wasn’t other riders, though having seen one accident – Iain TwinBikeRun describe it here Welcome to the Velodrome (Iain) – I wasn’t keen to see another. It was actually a single thought that stopped me going back. That thought was this: “What if I get a puncture?”
You can’t ride a bike without getting a puncture. It’s as much a part of riding as wobbling and pretending to fall off is a part of tight rope walking.
And there’s nothing you could do if you get a puncture while riding 10 foot up a track.
Now you could say that all life is a risk and that at any moment a bolt of lightning could shatter a peaceful blue sky and strike you dead, which is true. Life is filled with randomness. But that doesn’t mean I need to be standing in the middle of a field waving a long metal stick while shouting “Everyone knows the Good Lord smells!”
Which, in my mind, is the same thing as riding a bike on a velodrome track waiting for the inevitable puncture.
It wasn’t for me.
Maybe it’s for you.
The induction is well run, felt safe and was fun. I’d definitely recommend trying it – but it just wasn’t for me.
Film Friday is a weekly recommendation of one video to watch this weekend.
Roaming in the wild is a low key show where nothing much every happens. It follows two friends as they try to kayak/SUP/ski or walk around beautiful locations in Scotland.
Twin brothers swimming, cycling and running in Scotland 