unironedman

There is no particular rhyme nor reason to that headline, other than I was trying build ‘streak’ into it somewhere, as in ‘run streak’. Also, I just had lunch, and you may be surprised to learn that I did indeed have some streaky bacon…

Anyway, all that buffoonery aside, I had a nice run today with Gary, him of ‘Royal Canal Triathlon’ fame. And as I mentioned before, Gary has an excellent blog over here, if you wish to read about canals and running, and indeed, some running alongside a canal.

Oddly enough, a few seconds after I took this pic, you guessed it… a Buzzard took off from the fence a few yards ahead of us. I pointed it out to Gary and he reckoned they were indeed stalking me.

In other exciting run streak news, we busted through the 100k mark with this run (about 104k or so, in 15 days). It’s about 7k on average per run, so we’re not breaking any records here. But it is achieving one positive: it’s getting me out the door. And given me back a little pep in my step. Not actual pep; my knees are not feeling peppy at all, but my demeanour (where it relates to running) could be described as peppy. There are other words too, but this is a family show, and I’m writing well before the nine o’clock watershed.

As part of this overall peppiness, I’ve signed up for the run below.

7th Annual Charlie Curran Memorial Run 2021

Not sure how that will appear in your web browser, but there should be a link there anyway. It’s a virtual run. The idea of virtual runs is, alas, not to sit in a beer garden quaffing ale with your mates and discussing great runs of yore, but to just run on your own (or a few mates) when you should have been partaking in an event with all the trimmings: pre-race hassle for parking, queues for portaloos, panic that you will miss the start, losing your mates in the crowd, having a final pee behind a tree/parked car/down an alleyway, and then jostling, bobbing and weaving your way to a point and pace that pleases you.

This one is for two great charities: Down Syndrome Ireland and the Irish Cancer Society. We have two lovely friends at the moment with cancer, so I will be doing this for them. The run is entirely up to you, in terms of distance, and indeed when you do it. I’ll aim for end of January and at least a half marathon. I will try and rope a few mates into doing it as well, so Gary: expect a text from me shortly 😉

Whilst I’m here, I also want to give a nod to a great blog I follow over here. I’m sending you best wishes from Ireland, and I’ll have you in my mind too, when I am running next year.

The run above made me smile when I viewed it the other day. As you can see from the stats, it’s a pretty standard short saunter up along the canal. Those two little green ‘fangs’ you can see in the elevation chart? They are the canal bridges. It just amused me to think of this quite clever tech strapped to my wrist that’s utilising several of a set of 24 satellites that orbit the planet in a very precise fashion. The signals they send out are picked up by GPS watches like my Garmin Forerunner 910XT which turn all that data into something legible (in this case, the huffings and puffings of a middle-aged man somewhere in Ireland).

And in this case, it shows up the exact moment in time when I passed over two hand-built stone bridges, constructed sometime in 1794 or thereabouts. Gary might be able to set me straight on that.

Also, I have no wish to annoy the birding community by raising the whole ‘gulls, not seagulls’ debate. For the common mortal, this akin to seeing a Rook and saying ‘oh look, there’s a crow…’

I mean, technically, yes. A crow is a corvid, just like a Garmin is a GPS watch or a Venge is a bike (that’s for you, Jim). But in Ireland, at least, there are no crows. As in, the Common Crow, or Carrion Crow. There are Ravens, Rooks, Jackdaws, Magpies, Hooded Crows, Choughs… Dang, I even did a cartoon during the year of 19 ‘crows’ sitting on a wire with the cunning caption of Corvid-19. Yes indeedy. Sharp as a tack!

So the fuss about seagulls is that they don’t exist. This will come as a great surprise to anyone who has tried to eat chips in Howth harbour or perhaps chow down on a burger on Grafton Street. You could well be mugged by a large gull – probably a Herring Gull. But not a seagull. Don’t ever make that mistake with a birder, as they will give you a squinty death stare, and that will rightly be the end of you.

I’m glad we’ve had this little chat about bird stuff. Please continue to call all black bird thingies flying around your skies or poking around in your gardens crows. And all large white missiles whizzing about, stealing small children from cots seagulls. It really won’t trouble me at all. Just be warned. Lifelong birder enmity awaits…

Also, the Buzzards are still out to get me.

And so, we finish with dogs. Here are our two, trying to get some well-earned rest (ha, ha!) on their bed.