6825/19745
Not eating too healthily on this holiday, but no idea what effect it’s having on my weight. I am doing plenty of walking and trying to keep up with exercise. And I managed to go round Cheddar Reservoir three times today. I did it five times during Marathon training, but this might be the second longest reservoir run I’ve done. I always wonder how many more times I will run around the reservoir (though have managed 5 laps this week, which is more than I thought I might do last time I was here), but I suspect that I will never run round it three times in one run again. We’ll see.
I did just shy of 13km in just over 83 minutes. But it was a pretty much level run all the way and so there was basically no elevation to that. It was still good to manage it without my super fit pacemaker though.
There’s a newish graveyard on the Cheddar side of the water. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but only a few years. The people who are buried there must surely include the people who were in their fifties and sixties when I lived here in the 80s. So the run gave me a reminder of the murderous progression of life, even if I was trying to postpone my own demise by doing this.
The sun was hot on the first lap and I wasn’t sure I was even going for the second lap, but it was overcast on lap two and then raining on lap three, which made things easier for the run, but screwed up our day somewhat.
We’d planned to go to the beach but instead had a quick look round the market that had sprung up in the town square and then visited the village museum. It’s in a higgledy-piggledy six hundred year old building and has some eclectic items from over the last few hundred years. Phoebe liked the skellingtons and Ernie became obsessed with a slightly hidden away and creepy mannequin of a shop keeper, which I presume will haunt his dreams.
And the rain doubled down for the weekend so we went for a long lunch and then tried to go to see how cheese is made in the Gorge, but the place was full and about to close and the cheesemaking had come to an end, so we went to see my folks, before taking them back to our Air B n B for dinner. My dad told a story about my brother running him out in a cricket match, even though he’d pulled a muscle (it was staff versus pupils). Dad seemed to think his son should have taken his injury into account, but it seemed reasonable to the rest of us - how would my brother even know that a muscle had been pulled and what would his team mates have said if he’d missed the chance to hit the stumps because it was his dad?) I reminded dad of the time that I had had my eighth birthday party early in Loughborough (as we were about to move house and this would be the last time I’d ever see my school friends). We played cricket and dad was the umpire, but it was not even an official match, just a knockabout where we’d take it in turn to bat. The first ball was bowled to me, the birthday boy, and I got a great connection and smashed it over the heads of my tiny chums and over the head of my dad, who was not fielding. He reached up and caught it and declared that I was out. I protested that he wasn’t even on the fielding team, but he insisted and I had to hand the bat over to (probably) Satish Patel, my best friend.
Dad, the guy who complained about being correctly run out by his son in a competitive match, just because he’d injured himself, claimed not to remember anything about this actual injustice. But then why would he remember? It wasn’t him who had his sporting dreams crushed in front of the friends he was leaving behind. (I thought it would be a good story for Relativity, but note that I already related it in series 3 - damn). I could have been a world class cricketer if it wasn’t for this setback.
And I wonder what psychological scars I will impart to my own kids. Maybe pointing out the creepy shopkeeper to my son will come back to haunt me.
